GMAT Focus Timing “Strategy” for Quant
UPDATED FOR THE NEW GMAT IN 2024
HOW MUCH MATH DO YOU REALLY NEED FOR AN ELITE GMAT SCORE?
The best quant time management strategy for the GMAT or the Executive Assessment is so simple that it feels incredibly silly to even call it a “strategy” at all.
Here it is:
When a question pops up on the screen, read it. (This is scintillating, right?)
Read it again. (Yes, you should re-read every single question. It’s just too easy to misread something, so give yourself a shot to read it correctly).
If you can’t think of an efficient way to solve the question, quickly guess and move on.
Use the time you save to be ridiculously accurate on the other questions; always check your work carefully before you click “next.”
That’s it.
By following this strategy, you will spend the majority of your 45 minutes (on the GMAT) or 30 minutes (on the EA) actually solving problems, and waste relatively little time clawing away at questions that you’d be unlikely to answer correctly, anyway.
How a good quant timing strategy can boost your GMAT or EA score
Read below for the story of Ms. A, a student who effectively employed this strategy to gain nearly 40 percentile points on the GMAT quant section in only four weeks – enough for a 720 composite score (equivalent to a 665 on the GMAT Focus) and admission to a top-tier MBA program. (Please note that Ms. A took the pre-2023 version of the GMAT, and throughout this article, we’ll translate references to “old” GMAT scores into equivalent GMAT Focus Edition scores.)
We pride ourselves on brutal honesty as GMAT tutors: if I suspect that one of my GMAT or EA students might need a ton of luck and a herculean effort to achieve her score goal, I’ll tell her. A huge part of our job is establishing realistic expectations, and if I think that a student’s goals are utterly hopeless, I’ll say that, too – though I’ll usually say something far more diplomatic than “you’re hopeless.”
But sometimes my dire predictions of GMAT or EA frustration are ridiculously wrong, and sometimes one of my students makes me feel like a complete idiot.
I love it when that happens.
Once upon a time, a warm and thoroughly loveable student – let’s call her Ms. A – came to us for a four-week GMAT tutoring “crash course”. Like most of our GMAT tutoring students, she was targeting a 700+ score on the old GMAT (equivalent to a 645+ on the GMAT Focus Edition).
Unfortunately, her math skills were pretty shaky. She wasn’t AWFUL at math, exactly, but her academic background was in the humanities, and she hadn’t taken a math course since she was 15 years old. Ms. A was clearly intelligent and competent, but I didn’t immediately see much evidence of quantitative talent or training.
To make things worse, math – or at least GMAT math – seemed to scare the poop out of her. Ms. A would make a sad, cute whining sound – imagine a frightened puppy, and you’ll be close – whenever she saw a quant question that intimidated her.
Unfortunately, that happened with disturbing frequency. After a couple of sessions, I told her that she might need more than four weeks of GMAT tutoring, and that she would probably struggle for months to get her quant score anywhere close to a 700+ level.
She proved that I’m an idiot. But thanks to Ms. A, I’m a proud, happy idiot.
How Ms. A transformed her GMAT quant score
After giving her a friendly warning to keep her GMAT score goals in perspective, I asked Ms. A to do her first practice exam, knowing that it would be a painful experience. She got a 35 on the “old” GMAT quant section (roughly equivalent to 72 on the GMAT Focus) – around the 38th percentile at the time. Unfortunately, that result didn’t surprise me at all.
I then repeated our standard rant about GMAT time management: if you read the question twice and don’t see a clear path to the answer, just guess and move on. Use the time you save to be ridiculously accurate on the other questions; always reread each question and check your work carefully before you click “next.”
And I reminded her that she would probably miss roughly 40% of the questions on the quant section – but that her score would be determined by which questions she missed.
Put another way: the GMAT and EA scoring algorithms severely punish you for missing relatively easy questions, but your score is barely harmed by missing the toughest questions. The key to success – especially on the quant section – is to be 100% bulletproof on the questions that you understand, and to waste as little time as possible on the questions that are difficult for you.
(We repeat that advice constantly to all of our GMAT and Executive Assessment students, and I’m sure that our current and former students would roll their eyes as they read this. If you hire us as your GMAT or EA tutors, you’ll hear us say those same lines again and again… or at least until you stop making unnecessary mistakes on your practice tests.)
Instead of rolling her eyes, Ms. A looked relieved when I begged her to skip the hard questions and spend her time on the easier ones. I think she was genuinely thrilled that she could ignore the GMAT quant questions that made her whine like a homesick puppy.
The very next day, her quant practice test score jumped eight points, to a 43. A few days later, she scored 47 on another practice quant test (roughly equivalent to a 79 on the GMAT Focus Edition), which was in the 76th percentile at the time.
I would love to pretend that I taught Ms. A enough GMAT math to improve her quant score by nearly 40 percentile points, but she took all three practice tests in the same week, and I can’t honestly take much credit for improving her math skills in such a short timeframe. Sure, she was working hard and her underlying quant skills were improving steadily, but the key was that she executed her GMAT timing strategy to absolute perfection. After her first practice test, she never wasted time on overly difficult questions, and she almost never made careless errors on questions she understood.
In the end, Ms. A kicked the GMAT’s rear: 720 composite, with a 47 on the quant section – enough for a composite score in the 94th percentile at the time, and a ticket to her first-choice MBA program.
Could you achieve a similar improvement on the GMAT or EA quant section?
Was Ms. A special? In a way, no: she worked really hard at her math skills, but could never be mistaken for a natural math genius.
But in another way, Ms. A was (and still is) truly amazing: she has an unbelievably flexible mentality, and she was able to train herself to approach the test in a completely different way. She didn’t let the GMAT clock rattle her. No matter where she was in the test, she carefully re-read each question and re-checked her work, and she understood that it was worth spending an extra 10-20 seconds to do so. (It also helped that she was naturally gifted at verbal, and could afford to spend her GMAT study time almost exclusively on quant; Data Insights didn’t exist at the time.)
At the end of the day, Ms. A beat the GMAT with a wildly simple quant strategy: if she understood a question, she answered it carefully. If she didn’t immediately understand a question, she wasted very little time on it. Her approach was simple and elegant.
The GMAT world is filled with a cacophony of advice about test-taking “strategies”, but you don’t really need most of that stuff: just work as hard as you can to become better at answering questions correctly, and don’t waste your time chasing the nasty questions that you still can’t easily answer.
Could you be the next Ms. A? If you have a tendency to make careless errors on your homework, you’ll need to thoroughly re-orient yourself. I constantly hear EA and GMAT students say “I missed 10 questions on the homework, but they were just stupid errors – I understood all of the questions”… as if that’s a good thing! The GMAT or EA will rip you to shreds if you make silly mistakes on easy questions, no matter how well you understand the hardest concepts covered in the GMAT Official Guide.
So take Ms. A’s simple approach: be mind-numbingly accurate on the quant questions you understand, and save time by letting the toughest questions go. If you can do that with flawless consistency, your GMAT or Executive Assessment quant score will be perfectly solid, even if your math skills aren’t exactly incredible.
Want to learn more about GMAT and EA quant?
How to manage your time on an adaptive test like the GMAT (6-minute video)
Why it’s useful to think of the section as GMAT “Quantitative Reasoning”, not GMAT “math”
Complete, Free GMAT Quant Video Course, starting with a video on how to approach GMAT quant in general
Misplaced math anxiety: why you’re spending too much time on probability, combinatorics, and rates