GMAT Will Wear you Down: Avoid Unnecessary calculations and Don't Analyze Unnecessary Verbiage

The GMAT finds much of its competitive advantage in its ability to wear down its unsuspecting challengers, who perform unnecessary calculations on the quantitative side and reading and analyzing unnecessary verbiage on the verbal side, while all the while the GMAT packs its "knockout punch" in the form of a subtle uniqueness in the line of questioning that a tired examinee is unlikely to notice.

In order to combat this opponent, be sure to seek out opportunities to save time and energy when possible:

Quantitative Section

• When answering a Data Sufficiency question, once you know that you will get one definitive answer, you can stop performing the calculation. The actual answer does not matter, as the question is only concerned with whether you will, indeed, arrive at an answer.

• When calculating the answer for a Problem Solving question, consider the answer choices and whether an estimate, or a property of the correct value (does it have to be even? Must it be negative?) will be sufficient to solve the question without performing the entire calculation.

Verbal Section

• Decide what you are being asked to do before you read anything. The subject matter is much less important than your ability to answer the question, so if you can identify the grammatical error being tested in a Sentence Correction question, or the question stem of a Critical Reasoning question, you can prioritize the sections of the stimulus that you do read, and filter out the distraction created by the other sections.

• Pursuant to the above, technical terms or official titles are unlikely to be testable, whereas grammatical flaws and structural language are often tested. The former devices, however, can easily add strenuous words and syllables to your task, so take care to focus on what you know to be important, and save the less-likely components for when they are absolutely necessary.