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Timing
What are the timing strategies for Math and Verbal?
- RonPurewal
- Students
- Posts: 19744
- Joined: Tue Aug 14, 2007 8:23 am
the following are ROUGH guidelines for verbal; feel free to adapt them to your strengths and weaknesses. for instance, if you are an unusually fast reader, you should lower the time estimate for reading comp, and so on.
SC: about 1:00 for short sentences; about 1:30 for long sentences
CR: about 2:00 for easier passages; about 2:30 for harder ones (perhaps 2:45 for passages that are unusually long)
RC: about 3:00 to read a short passage; about 4:00 to read a long passage; about 0:30 to answer main-idea problems; about 1:15-1:30 to answer detail-oriented questions
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for quant, there are 37 questions in 75 minutes, which translates more or less perfectly to ~2:00 per question. this doesn't mean that you should give up on questions after exactly two minutes have passed - you are, after all, going to be spending less than two minutes on some questions - but it means that you should be wrapping things up and getting ready to guess/answer after the 2:00 mark.
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for either of these timing guidelines, one crucial thing is for you to be able to INTERNALIZE THE STOPWATCH, meaning that you should develop a good sense of what 1:00, 1:30, 2:00, etc. FEELS like, WITHOUT having to look at the timer. you should NOT look at the stopwatch on every problem, as doing so will only distract you and/or rattle your nerves.
you should plan to check the timing guidelines every 10-15 minutes. if you're enrolled in our course, we have an entire lab (online lab #5) dedicated to this exact topic.
SC: about 1:00 for short sentences; about 1:30 for long sentences
CR: about 2:00 for easier passages; about 2:30 for harder ones (perhaps 2:45 for passages that are unusually long)
RC: about 3:00 to read a short passage; about 4:00 to read a long passage; about 0:30 to answer main-idea problems; about 1:15-1:30 to answer detail-oriented questions
--
for quant, there are 37 questions in 75 minutes, which translates more or less perfectly to ~2:00 per question. this doesn't mean that you should give up on questions after exactly two minutes have passed - you are, after all, going to be spending less than two minutes on some questions - but it means that you should be wrapping things up and getting ready to guess/answer after the 2:00 mark.
--
for either of these timing guidelines, one crucial thing is for you to be able to INTERNALIZE THE STOPWATCH, meaning that you should develop a good sense of what 1:00, 1:30, 2:00, etc. FEELS like, WITHOUT having to look at the timer. you should NOT look at the stopwatch on every problem, as doing so will only distract you and/or rattle your nerves.
you should plan to check the timing guidelines every 10-15 minutes. if you're enrolled in our course, we have an entire lab (online lab #5) dedicated to this exact topic.
2 posts Page 1 of 1