Timing on verbal questions

[HenryL545]

What is a good way to identify questions to skip when running out of time? For quant questions, I can easily identify which questions are above my skill level, but for verbal, I can't quickly identify questions to skip...I can only identify questions questions that appear long (have a lot of text) and I end up skipping those. Is that a good way to identify questions to skip? CR questions are often longer than SC questions, so I usually skip those in order to make up some time.

Any good tips?

[Sage Pearce-Higgins]

Yes, it's harder to identify questions to skip on verbal. Sometimes long questions can be easy, and short questions devilish, but you don't know that until you've invested the time in reading the question!

In the end, it's a personal issue: you want to skip the kind of questions that you, personally, have a smaller chance of getting correct. Therefore, I would be guided more by the question type than by the length of question. In the couple of days before your test, come up with a plan: which CR question types are you weakest at (the MGMAT CAT assessment reports can help here) and which you'll be most willing to guess on.

It's also important to consider why you fall behind on verbal timing. If it's a case of you managing to get between two answer choices, and then spending an extra minute vacillating, then I would encourage you to be less fussy: a few 50:50 guesses might be all you need to speed up. If, on the other hand, you're a slower than average reader, perhaps skipping one RC passage is a better strategy. It sounds drastic, but I've seen it work for students before.