Time Management Strategy for Success on the GRE

Success on the GRE has a lot to do with time management. You may know the material very well. You may know how to answer every question. But the exam is timed. If it takes you on average 25% too long to answer each question, your GRE score will suffer greatly.


Background:

The GRE quant and verbal sections (there are two of each) are what is called computer adaptive. But they are adaptive by section, not within sections. So if you do well on one section, the next section is harder overall. But within a section, questions don’t become harder or easier based on how you answer. This is critically important from the perspective of time management because it means that you can skip around questions within a section, leaving a question blank and returning to it later.

• Verbal sections are 20 questions in 30 minutes. That’s 90 seconds for each question.
• Quantitative sections are 20 questions in 35 minutes. An average of 105 seconds per question.

There is no penalty for a wrong answer, so you should answer every question, leaving time at the end to simply guess if you have to (of course, you should use process of elimination first!).

Let’s begin by noting that you must answer questions with “measured confidence”, following a painfully simple but obviously important overall timing strategy of taking more time on difficult question and less time on easier ones. Just remember, at all times, that this must be your time management strategy.

Depending on the section, you have 90 or 105 seconds, on average, to answer each question. However, some will be harder than others. You cannot waste time on easier questions, re-working one more time to move you mentally from being 90% confident you have it right to 95% confident. If you are pretty confident you have the right answer in 30 seconds, but you decide to spend another minute to be sure, you’ve likely made a bad decision.

“Measured confidence” means you trust yourself. You know you’ve prepared, and you know that to score well, you need to save your time and mental energy for the trickier problems. You answer the question, and you move on with confidence.


1. Answer the questions you know and come back for the ones you don’t.

Don’t fall into the trap of answering the questions in order. You should not answer every question in order. Instead, you should work through the exam, answering (with measured confidence, see tip #1) all of the questions you are pretty sure you know. Then, come back to the questions you need to think through.

However, this doesn’t mean you should immediately skip questions that simply appear challenging. It might be a difficult question, but you might have a clear vision for how to solve it. Attempt each one by seeing whether you can figure out an approach for it. If after about 30 seconds you still haven’t made progress, mark the question and proceed to the next one.


2. Boost your efficiency on Medium and Hard Questions.

Step two of your strategy applies to those questions that you didn’t answer immediately as part of step one. And yet, you are not lost or totally stumped. How can you work through more difficult problems and get to the correct answer efficiently?

• GRE is not a math test.
  Quite obviously, the quantitative section requires you to know and perform math. But that doesn’t mean it’s a math test. It’s a test of critical thinking and logic using a lot of math. Your objective is to arrive at the correct answer to each question. This means that you can back solve. You can plug in numbers. You can apply whatever strategy is necessary to answer the question. If your bias is to start doing math to get to the right answer on most question in the quant section, you’ll spend more time on many questions than you need to, and you will flat out have trouble answering many of them.
  
  For example, you can generally plug in answers for multiple-choice questions. If using algebra to solve the problem seems complicated, you can plug in each answer choice one at a time to see which one solves the problem. The fastest way to answer the question correctly will be to start with answer choice C, or whatever the middle value is. If this answer choice doesn’t work, you can then determine whether to work your way up (with higher values) or down (with lower values). This approach can save you a lot of time on GRE quant.
  
  
• Use your old friend process of elimination liberally.
  Sure, this is a general test-taking strategy, not necessarily specific to time management. But when you quickly ignore options that can’t be right, you both increase the chances of getting the right answer and you save time.
  
  Examples of this strategy in action in the Verbal section could be vocabulary words you know that simply don’t make sense in the sentence. Or, it could be statements that actually contradict the facts in the passage. On Quant, there are almost always 2, or even 3, answers that obviously don’t work given the equation used in the problem. Most GRE multiple-choice questions have five answer choices. By applying the process of elimination, you can go from a 20% to as high as a 50% chance of success on a problem you really don’t know how to solve.
  
  Getting comfortable quickly adopting the process of elimination strategy instead of fighting through mentally to get to the 100% correct answer is what makes this a timing tip, and not just a general test taking tip.
  
  
• Get comfortable being a quitter, and a guesser, as an element of becoming a better time manager on the GRE.
  Nobody wants to be a quitter. But you also don’t to win a battle to lose a war. And if you are taking the GRE, you are probably a motivated and somewhat competitive person. But if you are entering minute three of your battle with a tough GRE question, you need to consider the situation from a broad perspective. Look at the situation from two extremes. If this is your very last question and you have 4 minutes left in the exam. Obviously, dig deep and try to work that problem from different angles until you crack it. There is no reason to give up and guess for another 3 minutes.
  
  But if it’s the very first problem? And you thought, at first, your approach would surely work? Be careful not to get caught up in trying to crack a problem when you are operating under time pressure.
  
  The right thing to do may be to quit on the problem, use process of elimination if you can, and in the worst case, simply guess. When should you quit and move towards guessing? In your mind, you might consider that there are four level of difficulty on GRE problems. In the table below, we use the Verbal section.
  
  

  Time Spent per Question in Verbal
  Difficulty Level	Questions	Total Seconds to Solve	Avg. Seconds to Solve
  Easy	6	240	40
  Average	6	480	80
  Hard	6	720	120
  Really Hard	2	360	180
  Total	20	1,800	90

  
  
  Roughly, even for a really hard problem, you can only take 3 minutes. So, if you have grappled with a problem for three minutes, it may be time to quit, use the process of elimination, and guess. Now, this is an art, not a science. The key recommendation here is to get mentally comfortable moving on, not to always give up after 3 minutes. If you are just about to crack it after 3 minutes and 10 seconds, don’t give up then! But if you know you are still just churning mentally, NOT just about to crack the problem, that’s when you must have the mental discipline to give up. You don’t have time to churn through it any longer.
  
  
• Finally, in the spirit of saving time on questions you should be able to get right, here are two additional things to keep in mind. One is for Quant, and the other is for Verbal.
  
  
  1. Use the calculator sparingly.
     It seems like the calculator should be your friend, because it avoids errors. But it takes time to use the clunky on-screen calculator. As a general rule, overuse of the calculator leads to lower quant scores because you spend more time on problems than you need to. Algebra problems with variables and inequalities are often far easier to solve without a calculator. If you encounter decimals or square roots, it might be useful. But even then, strong mental math skills will almost always be more useful than usage of the calculator. Only use the calculator if you can’t imagine solving the problem without it.
     
     How much time can you save by reducing your use of the on-screen calculator? It’s probably not more than 2 minutes across the entire Quant section. But 2 minutes could give you enough time to attack one additional problem instead of simply guessing.
     
     
  2. Don’t spend a lot of time on vocabulary questions. You need to treat them as no more than “average” difficulty level questions.
     GRE questions that are in large part a matter of understanding vocabulary, like text completion or sentence equivalence, must be answered far faster than reading comprehension questions. A reading comprehension question requires reading and unpacking a whole passage. There are typically multiple mental steps to go through. Don’t fall into the trap of spending too much time on vocab questions. Try to spend a minute or less on any questions that is effectively a vocabulary question.

3. Get comfortable using the countdown clock!

You can’t manage what you don’t measure, and to implement some of the above ideas, you’ll need to be able to keep track of time relative to how many questions you have remaining. If the clock in the upper right hand corner says you have 17.5 minutes remaining, roughly how many questions should you have completed? Ten. If you have only finished five, you might be in trouble. But you might also be in trouble if you’ve only answered the ten easiest questions.

You do not want to drive yourself crazy looking at the clock and categorizing question as easy, medium, hard, really hard, etc. At the same time, developing an intuition around how many of what type of question you’ve completed, and jotting down notes to keep track, can be an effective time management strategy. The table shown above suggests that you can spend 40% of your time on the 60% of questions that are easy or average. But if you want the time to work through the really hard problems, you should try to spend even less time on these easier problems.

So, depending on the section, you should answer five questions, roughly, every 8 minutes. When you are doing practice tests, and then again on the real GRE of course, make a habit of using the clock to track your progress in this way. If after 8 minutes you are behind, you know to speed up just a bit to get back on track.
You can also use this clock to keep track of your time on an individual problem. As you look at what you perceive to be a hard problem, glance at the clock. If you get stuck and are about to start attacking the problem from a different angle, glance at the clock again. Are you already 180 seconds in? It’s probably time to guess and move on.


Bottom Line and One Final Tip

Success on the GRE is almost always in large part about time management. Two test-takers might have very similar skill levels. But the one with a little more confidence and better time management skills may end up with a substantially higher score. When the stress starts to build, if you begin second guessing yourself, and you spend too much time on easier problems, you can get yourself into trouble.

And, you can’t fully practice your time management strategies and build time management skills without taking real GRE practice exams. The stress and pressures of the clock is hard to replicate without simply sitting down and doing real practice exams.

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