Time management

This chapter covers one of the most overlooked parts of GRE prep: time management. Time management can feel like a broad topic, but it’s really a collection of specific skills you can practice.

Any time you save on the exam can be used to answer other questions. Any time you waste is time you can’t spend elsewhere. So on every question, you’re balancing two things:

• The benefit of spending more time on the current problem
• The cost of taking time away from problems you haven’t seen yet

Keep in mind that there may be very simple questions later in the section that you could answer quickly - if you leave yourself enough time to read them. That means two things:

• Don’t sink too much time into extremely difficult questions.
• Don’t linger on easy questions just because they feel comfortable.

Below are several time management strategies you should develop. As you work through timed practice sets, ask yourself whether you’re using each skill consistently.

Skills of time management

Develop an internal clock

An internal clock helps you notice when you’re spending too long on a problem without constantly checking the timer. You build this skill by doing many timed practice sets and full-length exams.

On average, you should aim for about:

• 1 minute 45 seconds per question in Quant
• 1 minute 30 seconds per question in Verbal

You don’t need to solve every question in exactly that time, but you should be able to feel when you’re going well beyond the average. When that happens, make an active decision:

• Guess and move on, or
• Push a little further only if you’ve made real progress and you believe you’re close to the answer

Recognize the strategy quickly

Instead of jumping straight into calculations, pause briefly and ask: What’s the fastest strategy for this problem? The goal is to choose an efficient approach before you start working.

Look through the following easy-difficulty Quant questions and practice quickly deciding which of these five strategies fits each one:

Plug and play
Using the answers
Simplify and compare
Min and max extremes
Detect the misleading question (Choose D)

1.
Movie A is 30 minutes shorter than Movie B. The total runtime between the two movies is 280 minutes. How long is Movie A?
a. 30
b. 50
c. 100
d. 125
e. 150

2.
QA: The height of a quadrilateral with an area of $88$
QB: The base of a quadrilateral with an area of $88$

3.
$x$ is a prime number between $42$ and $50$
QA: $x$
QB: $43$

4.
$x>-1$
QA: $x^2-x^3$
QB: $x^3-x^2$

5.
$x>3$
y $>3$
QA: $(x^3-y)/5$
QB: $(3x^2-y)/5$

Guess when you are stuck

If you’re not making progress and you’re approaching 3 minutes on a single question, guess and move on. You can always flag the question and return later.

It’s important to guess now because you don’t know whether you’ll have time to come back. Leaving it blank guarantees no points.

For Quant Comparison questions, the best default guess is answer choice D. This isn’t because D is most common. It’s because if you can’t determine a relationship after trying, the reason may be that the relationship truly cannot be determined.

Use the calculator when necessary

Some materials suggest using the calculator as little as possible. It’s true that you should simplify expressions before doing final arithmetic, rather than typing everything directly into the calculator.

But that doesn’t mean you should avoid the calculator entirely. In the right situations, the calculator can save time because:

• You avoid routine arithmetic by hand
• You reduce the chance of small calculation errors that force you to restart

Memorize shortcuts

The last (and most important) time management skill is memorizing shortcuts. Many GRE questions can be solved in more than one way. Often, one method is much longer than the other, and the test writers are checking whether you know the quicker approach.

Here is a list of tools that let you solve many GRE questions much faster. This is not a list of all the equations you need for the exam. Instead, it’s a list of shortcuts that can often prevent you from needing longer equation-based solutions.

Diagonals

Diagonal of a square: