1d. GMAT Pacing Strategies for the CAT

    One Mean CAT

     To quote ETS, the makers of the GMAT, "Time management is key." Your timing skills could add or subtract 100 points from your score. Timing skills are important because the CAT has unusual pacing constraints:

• DOUBLE PENALTY- for any unfinished questions at the end of each section when time expires. The penalty for unfinished questions is severe (worse than getting a question wrong). You should pace yourself to make sure that you finish all the questions in the allotted time.
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• NO DOUBLE CHECKING- All answers are final. If you finish a section early, you cannot go back to double check your earlier answers. For example, if you hurry and finish your section with 20 minutes left, you are stuck at the end of the test with 20 extra minutes.
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• NO SKIPPING- When you hit a tough question or get a mental block, you cannot skip the question without entering an answer. Instead, you have to trudge through it, guess, and hope you don't waste too much time.
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• GO FASTER AND FASTER- The value of each question decreases as the section progresses. The first few questions will determine most of your score, so you have to start slowly and carefully and then accelerate as the test progresses.

Tame that CAT

...  The proper pacing to the GMAT is difficult to learn. You have to accelerate as the test progresses, you have to finish the test on time, and you can't get bogged down on questions. The CAT is engineered so that the early questions count much more than the later questions (we can't emphasize this enough). The result is that you should start off slowly to get the early questions right and then speed through the less important later questions. The last few questions are virtually valueless. The problem is that the natural human reaction is to go quickly at the beginning (when you are nervous) and miss the most valuable questions.

      Lower scorers should spend more time on the important early questions to get at least a few of them right. Higher scorers should balance their time to get as many questions right as possible. Also, adjust yourself to spend slightly less time on the Sentence Corrections and Quantitative Comparison questions and more time on the Reading Comprehension questions.

How to take control of your pacing

      The problem with the above strategies (which are the standard approaches taught by GMAT prep companies) is that they are very hard to apply. For example, if you are on question 10 with 47 minutes left, are you on pace to finish the test?
      GMAT students complained that they had trouble learning the right pacing and that they wasted their practice tests trying to master the GMAT CAT's complicated pacing strategies. Faced with these complaints, we developed the Test Pacer pace-training system and built it into our 5 GMAT CAT practice tests. The Pacer tells you what question you should be on so that you finish the test on time. Like a training wheel, the more you practice with the Pacer, the stronger your sense of timing will become.

>> Continue to More Strategies for the CAT (page 5 of 5 of chapter 1)

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