“Many a true word is said in jest.”—I don’t know, but I heard it from my mother.
It’s a funny thing—folks get good at doing OG problems at their desks. Then they take a practice CAT, with the clock on the monitor running down, like sands in the hourglass. Suddenly they are seized by amphetamine psychosis. Like NFL rookies, the big adjustment is to the speed of the game. When you’re taking the test, if you can’t do it* in two to three minutes, you can’t do it.* However, timing problems are an effect, not a cause. People have timing problems because their math foundation sucks. People have timing problems because they don’t get a good rephrasing. People have timing problems because they don’t compare SC choices vertically. People have timing problems because they don’t have the discipline to guess. And so on. All of these problems are fixable. Like most GMAT issues, timing problems are the result of either a poor foundation or bad behavior.
Take foundation work. . .please—that’s a joke from your grandparents’ day. When I say 7 times 13, you say 91. Think of it as a rap. When you see .625, you say 5/8. Woot. All seriousness aside, people waste 30 seconds a question in the quant because they don’t know their times tables or squares or the fractional decimal percentage equivalencies. Or their algebra isn’t smooth and silky. Think about how much time that uses up during the section. How do you fix that? “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” “Practice, practice, practice.” That’s a New York joke—LA classes hate it. You have to want it enough to do the work that you need to do. That amount varies, person to person.
I’ve written a lot – and you’ve read a lot – about timing already, but I want to address something that I’ve been hearing lately from students… particularly those who have been studying for a while and are really struggling to make progress on practice tests.
