How to Get Faster at GMAT Focus Verbal: Top 6 Tips

Reading Time: 8 minutes

Wondering how to get faster at the GMAT Verbal section? Unsurprisingly, GMAT Verbal time-management is a major concern for many students preparing for the GMAT Focus Edition. After all, the Verbal section allows only 45 minutes to answer 23 questions, or under 2 minutes per question. So, completing the Verbal section of the GMAT Focus on time presents a significant challenge.

Fortunately, with the right strategies, anyone can speed up in GMAT Verbal and achieve his or her Verbal score goal. In this article, I’ll give you my top 6 tips for doing just that.

• Tip 1: Develop Strong GMAT Verbal Skills by Practicing Untimed
• Tip 2: Eliminate Inefficiencies in How You Handle Questions
• Tip 3: Read More Carefully
• Tip 4: Reduce Note-Taking
• Tip 5: Don’t Prethink Answers to Critical Reasoning Questions
• Tip 6: Don’t Get Bogged Down in the Details of Reading Comprehension Passages
• Key Takeaways
• What’s Next?

Let’s start by discussing how to develop the strong Verbal skills you’ll need to solve Verbal questions quickly.

Tip 1: Develop Strong GMAT Verbal Skills by Practicing Untimed

When people want to get faster at answering GMAT Verbal questions, one thing they typically do is start answering practice questions with a timer going. Now, there is clear value to doing timed practice later in your GMAT Focus prep. However, for much of your prep, timed practice is not productive. 

In fact, people who do all their Verbal practice timed are often the same people who have the most difficulty with GMAT Verbal time-management on test day. Why? Because they haven’t given themselves time to develop strong skills.

If you aren’t skilled in a certain question type, then sure, you can answer those questions quickly, but you won’t answer many of them correctly. The truth is, the main reason you’re able to correctly answer a GMAT Focus question quickly is that you’ve got the concepts and strategies down pat.

Think about it: you didn’t learn to solve 5 + 10 in the blink of an eye by setting a timer and trying to will yourself to the correct answer. You spent many, many hours counting, doing basic addition, and practicing efficient strategies for combining different types of numbers—without a timer going.

Gaining speed in answering Verbal questions (or any GMAT Focus question) is no different. First, you have to take the time you need to become skilled and accurate. You have to carefully analyze every answer choice of every practice question without thinking about the clock. As your skills increase with practice, so too will your speed.

Remember, the best way to get faster at answering GMAT Focus Verbal questions is to become more skilled!

The best way to get faster at answering GMAT Focus Verbal questions is to become more skilled!

Tip 2: Eliminate Inefficiencies in How You Handle Questions 

Many GMAT Focus students don’t realize that they’re using inefficient methods to answer Verbal questions. Some of these time-wasting strategies may be the result of bad advice, while others may simply be a student’s default mode of handling a particular question type.

Part of training for the GMAT Focus is rigorously evaluating each technique we use to answer questions. If, for example, we read about a particular strategy online, we should ask ourselves, does this strategy make sense? If we incorporate the strategy into our practice, we should periodically analyze whether it’s bringing the results we expect. If there are ways we’ve never thought much about that we naturally work through certain types of questions, we should stop and ask ourselves, is this really the best way, or is it simply the way I’ve always done it?

For example, many GMAT students mistakenly believe that reading a Critical Reasoning question stem before reading the passage saves time. Yet, these students inevitably read the question stem a second time after they read the passage. So, they end up adding time to their work. A more efficient method is to simply read the passage first, and then read the stem.

In Reading Comprehension, students may skip reading large portions of a passage only to find that they have a lot of trouble locating the information they need to answer questions. Perhaps counterintuitively, it’s actually more efficient to read the entire passage. That way, you have a sense of where different discussions are within it. Additionally, looking for structural keywords in a passage can help you locate needed details far more efficiently than trying to memorize exactly where details appear.

Tip 3: Read More Carefully

You might think that reading more carefully would slow you down. And on the front end of dealing with a question, you may technically be correct. But here’s the thing: even if reading more carefully initially slows you down a little, it sets you up to answer Verbal questions much more quickly. In other words, you make up the time in spades on the back end. How is that the case? Because you have a more solid basis for choosing an answer.

For instance, people often skim Critical Reasoning passages in the interest of saving time. Or, sometimes they don’t read all of a Verbal answer choice because they feel that they can eliminate it on the basis of what the beginning of the choice says.

However, they’re operating on incomplete information. So, it often turns out that they’ve eliminated choices too quickly. And when they can’t identify a correct answer, they end up having to reevaluate those discarded choices.

Or, because they’ve missed a key detail in skimming the passage, they cycle through answer choices again and again, unable to see why one choice is better than the others.

Conversely, when students read the passage carefully from the get-go, often the correct answer practically jumps out at them.

So, to answer GMAT Focus Verbal questions more quickly, read passages, questions, and answer choices more carefully.

Tip 4: Reduce Note-Taking

Often, people who have trouble completing GMAT Focus Verbal on time don’t realize how much time they’re spending on note-taking. The thing is, what can be helpful in small doses can be score-eroding in large ones. For example, you can get caught up in taking notes on every aspect of questions when just a few quick notes would be just as helpful.

So, if GMAT Verbal time-management has been an issue for you, you may need to consider taking fewer notes. For example, a CR passage is only a few sentences; if necessary, you can quickly reread key parts of it.

You can also return to an RC passage at any time to find information you need. So, taking notes on many details is unnecessary. In fact, people who take copious notes on RC passages often find that they ignore those notes when answering questions!

Of course, while some people score high on GMAT Verbal without taking any notes, every test-taker is different. You may find that taking some notes helps solidify in your mind key aspects of an RC passage, such as the author’s main point, or the ways that different CR answer choices relate to the given argument. I would just encourage you to actually evaluate whether note-taking is speeding up your work overall or slowing it down. And if taking notes really does help you, then seek to streamline your note-taking as much as possible.

Tip 5: Don’t Prethink Answers to Critical Reasoning Questions

You may have heard of or be using a GMAT Critical Reasoning strategy known as “prethinking,” which involves coming up with a possible answer to a CR question before analyzing the answer choices. This strategy is flawed for a number of reasons, but wasting precious time is one of the big ones. 

First of all, prethinking takes time you don’t need to spend. The 5 answer choices are right there in front of you. So, you don’t have to come up with an answer on your own in addition to analyzing the choices presented.

Secondly, prethinking can cause you to waste time when going through the choices because you’re looking for a prethought answer. The thing is, there is a good chance that your prethought answer won’t match the correct answer, especially in a medium- or hard-level question. In fact, your prethought answer likely won’t even be among the choices.

At best, then, your prethought answer will be a distraction that slows your evaluation of the choices. At worst, you’ll first go through the choices just with the aim of finding the one that comes closest to your prethought answer. Then, when no choices are a match, you’ll go through them a second time to actually analyze them. What a waste of time.

Generally, the reason some GMAT teachers recommend prethinking is to get students to pay attention when reading CR passages. Of course, you can pay attention without prethinking, and save time by doing so. So, to move more quickly through the GMAT Focus Verbal section, don’t prethink.

Tip 6: Don’t Get Bogged Down in the Details of Reading Comprehension Passages

Some GMAT Reading Comprehension passages are chock full of details. For example, a passage may mention 3 different scientists and each of their theories on a certain topic. Or, a passage might describe multiple causes and effects of a certain natural phenomenon. Facing such passages, it’s easy to get bogged down trying to fully process every detail or keep every detail straight.

Here’s the problem: the questions associated with the passage won’t ask about every one of those details. So, we’ll spend time trying to get all the details straight, and much of that work won’t even pay off.

A more productive and quicker way to handle RC passages is to initially read through them with the aim of gaining an overall understanding of what the passage is saying, not keeping every detail straight. We can always go back to the passage and get details straight if necessary to answer a particular question.

Notice that the idea here is not to skim passages or use a gimmicky strategy such as reading only the first and last sentence of each paragraph. Those strategies can end up adding time to our work because we haven’t gained the proper foundation for answering the questions. The point is that we can save time by not bothering to fully process and get straight every single detail the first time we read the passage.

Key Takeaways

By implementing the following 6 simple strategies, you can speed up your pace in the Verbal section of the GMAT Focus and achieve your Verbal score goal:

1. Develop strong GMAT Verbal skills by practicing untimed.
2. Eliminate inefficiencies in how you handle questions.
3. Read more carefully.
4. Reduce note-taking.
5. Don’t prethink answers to Critical Reasoning questions.
6. Don’t get bogged down in the details of Reading Comprehension passages.

What’s Next?

For more on how to efficiently work through the GMAT Focus Verbal Reasoning, check out these GMAT Verbal timing strategies.