GMAT Verbal Reasoning: The Time Management Technique Worth Your Time

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By Harry Duthie

When I talk with students about GMAT verbal reasoning timing, a consistent pattern tends to emerge.

Reading speed is almost always the first thing they bring up. It’s an obvious place to start, and most students are already convinced it’s the problem. And to be fair, improving your reading over time can help—especially if you read broadly outside your GMAT prep. Our articles on fiction and nonfiction go into more detail on this, because it does truly support your verbal score.

The reality, however, is that by the time most adults sit down to study for the GMAT, their reading speed is largely fixed. It’s not something you can meaningfully change in the short term.

More importantly, it’s not the speed that matters.

Timing Problems Are Usually Efficiency Problems

What I actually find when working with students is that they’re losing time not because they read slowly, but because they read too quickly.

Due to the perceived time pressure of the GMAT, especially on the verbal reasoning section, students move through the passages at a breakneck pace. By doing this, they don’t truly understand the passage. They then spend a disproportionate amount of time actually selecting their answer choices, trying to compensate for what they missed. They bounce back and forth, re-read sections of the passage, and second-guess themselves. This behaviour seems to be a time management problem, but in reality, it’s a reading comprehension problem.

When I get students to slow down and spend more time understanding the passage upfront, a good chunk of the timing problem tends to resolve itself. The question feels more answerable, the answer choices are easier to navigate, and the whole process becomes more efficient. It seems counterintuitive at first, but over time, this habit helps get students the verbal score results they’re aiming for.

Average Time Per Question Can Be Misleading

Here’s something I see students fixate on all the time: average time per question. It’s a natural thing to calculate, and it’s easy to track. It can also be a misleading statistic.

When measuring performance, the focus shouldn’t just be on the average; variance is also vital. Most students keep a good pace throughout most of the section, and then lose huge chunks of time on a few outliers. These are the questions that can devour four to five minutes each, while every other question was more reasonable.

These are the questions that do real damage to both your time management and your section score. When you analyze your report by looking at your average time per question, that average smooths out all those outliers, making it appear like a timing problem doesn’t exist.

Where Did The Time Go?

There’s a consistent pattern that emerges in a student’s behavior in these outlier questions. They’ll work through the question, narrow it down to two answer choices, and then get stuck. They’ll reread, stare, go back to the passage, reread the answer choices again, stare some more, maybe reread the answer choices AGAIN — and just like that, two to three minutes will evaporate. Eventually, they’ll click an answer choice, which is more likely to be a guess made out of exhaustion, rather than conviction.

This process feels productive (I’m close to the answer, I can get this one), but in my experience, it usually isn’t. By the time a student has been stuck between two answer choices for 20 to 30 seconds without making progress, they’ve already extracted most of what they’re going to extract from the question. The additional time doesn’t generate new insight, it generates pressure to get it right.

Interestingly, when I ask students what they would have chosen if I’d forced them to pick their answer after 30 seconds of being stuck, they almost always would have picked the same answer they eventually chose. The extra two (or more) minutes didn’t change the outcome.

What’s The Magic Time Management Technique for GMAT Verbal Reasoning?

The most effective “time management skill” for verbal isn’t a pacing strategy or arbitrary benchmarks to hit. It’s simply learning to recognize when you’re stuck and how to get out cleanly.

When you’ve been hovering between two answer choices for 30 seconds and not making progress, that’s your signal that you’re stuck. Choose the one you prefer and move on. If you can do this consistently across three or four questions in a section, you’ll recover anywhere between four and eight minutes. That’s a meaningful amount of time on a 45-minute section.

Having this time back means you feel less pressure. Less pressure means you can read more carefully. Reading more carefully means fewer questions where you get stuck in the first place. It’s a fairly straightforward virtuous cycle, and the entry point is just learning to exit gracefully when a question isn’t yielding.

A Few Other Things Worth Mentioning

This isn’t the only way to lose time on GMAT verbal reasoning. However, this is the first place I go to when I work through timing with a student, because it tends to be the biggest source of time loss and is also the most fixable. If you can train yourself to get out of stuck questions without guilt, you’ll feel a noticeable difference within a few practice sets. The act of cutting your losses on the GMAT can feel oddly liberating, keeping you ahead both practically and mentally as you navigate the test.