Pacing - Verbal Section

[anusuthakaran]

Hi ,
I have taken three CATs now from Manhattan Review. My scores have been constantly dipping. 680 - 660 -650.
The Quant section score ranges from 49-51 whereas verbal from 26-30.
I am certain that pacing is the issue in the verbal section. There have been about 4-5 consecutive errors towards the end of the section in all the tests. I am able to solve these questions when they are not timed. Is there any strategy that you suggest ?

[StaceyKoprince]

Excellent job on the quant.

Everybody has to guess on some questions during this test - they can always throw something harder at you. Most people have to guess on 4-7 questions in one section.

If you're running out of time towards the end, that's because you're spending too much time earlier on, right? Go look at the reports and question lists - where are you spending too much time? How is your performance on those problems? (Most people discover that their performance dips when they spend too much time on a problem.) Why did you spend so much extra time on these ones? How can you stop yourself from spending so much time the next time? Could you actually solve those problems more quickly? Or do you need to let some of them go?

The solution is NOT to get so good that you never have to guess - as I said, the test can always just give you something harder. The solution is to selectively identify the ones that are just too hard for you, make an educated guess within the acceptable timeframe, and move on. This allows you to (a) choose to guess on the hardest ones rather than be forced to guess on the later ones, some of which you can do, and (b) spread those guesses out on the test rather than have to guess on multiple problems in a row. (The worst thing for our score is to have multiple problems wrong in a row.)

So don't think of your goal as "how do I get so good that I don't have to guess?" Instaed, think of your goal as "how do I rapidly identify the few questions that are just too hard, and how to I make an educated guess and move on within the time limit?"

Finally, keep repeating to yourself: the test is not asking whether I can answer this question. The test is asking whether I can answer this question in the acceptable timeframe. If I can only answer it in 4 minutes, then I can't actually answer the question in the expected / accepted timeframe!

[anusuthakaran]

Thanks Stacey ! Will definitely work on your pointers.

I was under the impression that the earlier questions on the test carried more weightage than the later ones. Hence, I was allocating more time to the first
10-12 questions. Do you concur with this thought ?

Regards,
Anu.

[RonPurewal]

Thanks Stacey ! Will definitely work on your pointers.

I was under the impression that the earlier questions on the test carried more weightage than the later ones. Hence, I was allocating more time to the first
10-12 questions. Do you concur with this thought ?

Regards,
Anu.

i'm not stacey, but:
no.
no.
and, no.

DO NOT ALLOCATE MORE TIME TO EARLY QUESTIONS.
ever.

here are at least three good reasons.

1, certain of our company's instructors, including stacey, were directly told by gmac's head of exam development, at a gmat summit in october 2007, that the earlier questions are NOT more important than the later ones.

that should be enough all by itself, but here are two more reasons.

2, your own results bear out the notion that placing emphasis on early questions is a Bad Thing.
you have seen that emphasizing the early questions (as you do) costs you a tangible number of points, in terms of missing the later questions. it's up to you to take this knowledge and generalize it into the notion that emphasizing the early questions is bad.

3, there's also a psychological cost to emphasizing the early problems. specifically, if you spend more time on the early problems, then you are going to be in a time hole for the ENTIRE duration of the exam.
not only will this cost you problems (as mentioned in point #2), but, perhaps even more importantly, it will STRESS YOU OUT for the duration of the entire test.
this stress probably doesn't play a big role in practice tests, because practice tests are, well, practice.
you should always realize that the stress factor, which for most people is nonexistent in practice, will play a HUGE role on test day. if you put yourself behind in time from the very beginning, then the stress factor will damage, and may even destroy, your score.

[anusuthakaran]

Thanks Ron !

Ever since i read about it, I have been able to save a lot of time using the Split-n-Resplit Strategy on SC qns . Its definitely a great tool. Have dropped the idea of 'more time for early qns' TOTALLY.
Is there any strategy that can speed up CR qns ?

[StaceyKoprince]

Totally agree with Ron, 100%. CR and RC are always going to take longer than SC, naturally, because there's more stuff to read. You can, however, speed up your reading / processing by training yourself how to recognize what is likely to be important and what is likely to be unimportant, and you do that by (a) using the techniques described in the book, and (b) analyzing your work on a problem after you've done it. Literally - go back and say to yourself, "Now that I understand how this works, and now that I know what the right answer is, what in the problem was useful, and what was just extraneous? Is there any way I could've recognized what was likely to be useful vs. extraneous based on the way the information was presented? (The answer to this is yes, but you have to do the hard work to figure out how to recognize the difference - some of this is discussed in the book, too, but I think it's important to do even more work on this yourself.)

Your ultimate goal with the above exercise is to be able to concentrate on the most important stuff as you're reading through the argument the first time. The conclusion (if there is one) is obviously very important. Details in the premises that could have a direct impact on the conclusion, or that bound the conclusion in some way (eg, red-haired women, not all women) are also likely to be important.

And, at the other end, it's also important to study the answer choices. Typically, if you understand the argument, you'll be able to eliminate 2-3 choices without too much thought, but then things get much harder. We've all had a lot of experience with narrowing down to 2 and then not knowing which to pick, right? So actually study what makes tempting answers so tempting (but why they're wrong anyway), and what makes it so tempting to eliminate a right answer (and why it's actually right!). How do they trap us? If you can learn how they do it, you're much less likely to fall into the traps! Again, this stuff is discussed in the book, but you'll also have to do the analysis yourself on individual answer choices in order to really learn how to recognize tempting wrong answers and non-tempting right answers.