Math strategy

[Eddie Gutia]

Hello,

After analysis of my quant CAT, I found out that I am spending excessive time on a few questions as I am 100% confident that I will get the answer right. So I sometimes I end up spending 3-4 minutes on a single question putting myself in jeopardy of skipping easier questions.

What would you suggest that I do in such scenarios? If you suggest skipping, do you have any suggestions to follow so I can skip questions intelligently?

Thanks,
Aditya

[RonPurewal]

Threads like this one belong in the General GMAT Strategy folder. We'll leave this one here, but this isn't where it belongs.
Thanks.

After analysis of my quant CAT, I found out that I am spending excessive time on a few questions as I am 100% confident that I will get the answer right.

Interestingly, you've left out whether you actually get these problems correct.

If you are getting the problems correct, then there's really no issue.
Make sure you aren't thinking of 2 minutes as though it's some type of maximum. 2 minutes is an AVERAGE time, and, obviously, an average is not a maximum.
If you're dealing with a long word problem, there is absolutely nothing wrong with taking 3 to 4 minutes.

If you're not getting the problems correct, then, clearly, step #1 is to be more honest with yourself.
I.e., if you are "100% confident" but then get problems wrong, then that's false confidence, and you need to revise it.

[RonPurewal]

What would you suggest that I do in such scenarios? If you suggest skipping, do you have any suggestions to follow so I can skip questions intelligently?

Good time management is actually pretty simple:

• Be brutally honest with yourself about when you're stuck.

• If you're stuck, stop what you're doing.
Try to think of something else.
If you can't, quit and guess.

That's it.

Think of how you'd behave if you were driving somewhere and were already late.
If you were lost--even a little bit-- you definitely wouldn't just drive around in random directions and hope that you miraculously arrived at your destination. Nope. You'd IMMEDIATELY stop, pull over, and try to figure things out.
Just import the same attitude here.

If you have good enough time management, you won't ever have to think consciously about minutes and seconds.