questions timing

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  Daniel.Sieradzki Member Sage ⭐

  June 2017 edited June 2017 2301 karma

  Hi @GabrielMarquez,

  Very good question. The answer is that it depends on the question. Every section has some easy questions that you should only spend about 40-45 seconds on and some brutal curve-breaker questions that can take over 2 minutes. The key is to do the easy questions quickly (and accurately) so that you can bank time to take on the hard questions. If you want an average time per question on LR, you want to spend about 1:10 on a question. This means you would take about 30 minutes and have 5 minutes left over at the end to review hard questions. However, the reality is that you want to do the easy questions in less than 1:10 and hopefully the curve-breaker questions in about 1:30.

  For the other sections it also depends. For RC and LG, you want to put time up front on the passage (RC) or diagram (LR), so that the questions go very fast. With a solid understanding of each paragraph or a very good diagram with inferences, some questions will take as little as 10-15 seconds. This will give you the extra time you need to correctly answer the curve-breaker questions, which take considerably more time.
• ASPIRING T14 Member

  June 2017 33 karma

  Daniel.Sieradzki.> @"Daniel.Sieradzki" Thank you for your advice.It was quite helpful. What about finishing the tough questions first and then going for the easy ones? Is this approach OK?
• Daniel.Sieradzki Member Sage ⭐

  June 2017 edited June 2017 2301 karma

  @GabrielMarquez I have also heard of that strategy. I would recommend against it.

  First of all, it is hard to know where the hard questions even are before reading them. While the difficulty of a section does tend to increase as you proceed through the section, it is not exactly a perfectly linear progression. Sometimes question 8 will be a 5-star difficulty question (very hard) and questions 24 and 25 will be 2-star difficulty questions (relatively easy). Usually, questions 17-23 are the very hard questions. However, that is not always the case.

  Even if you knew where the hard questions were, I would still not recommend doing them first. You need to build up confidence and bank time. By doing questions 1-6 (easy questions), you build that confidence and bank time, which allows you to have the time and positive state of mind needed to tackle those very hard questions later in the test.

  While I understand the reasoning behind the strategy you mentioned (having maximum mental energy for the hard questions), I still believe it is frustrating, demoralizing, and overly time-consuming to tackle the hard questions first, which was my experience when I tried the strategy. You might want to try the strategy on a PT retake (I would not waste a new test on it). However, I do not think it is a good strategy for high-level performance.