Feruza works as an analyst at a bank in Tashkent and is preparing for the GMAT in the evenings. Her strongest section is Quant, so she expected Data Insights to be easy. Her first timed practice section showed her otherwise.
The section had twenty questions in forty-five minutes, a little over two minutes for each. Early on she met a Multi-Source set with three tabs and spent eight minutes on its first question, determined to get every detail right. Later, on a Table Analysis question, she judged two of the three statements correctly and the third one wrong. She was surprised to see that question marked as zero: there is no partial credit for multi-part questions. When time ran out, three questions were still unanswered.
Her tutor drew three lines on a sheet of paper. First, a plan for the clock: about seven questions by minute fifteen and about thirteen by minute thirty. Second, a rule for long questions: if one part of a multi-part question is still unclear after three minutes, choose the most likely answer, bookmark it and move on. Third, a rule for the calculator: use it for awkward divisions, not for simple percentages that are faster in the head.
The tutor also pointed out that the first question of a Multi-Source set is the expensive one. The time spent learning the tabs is recovered on the next questions, which use the same sources.
A week later Feruza sat a second practice section. She reached question thirteen at minute twenty-nine, answered every question, and used the last two minutes to change one answer through Question Review and Edit, which allows up to three changes in a section. Her result was clearly better, and she had not learned any new mathematics. She had only stopped letting one question decide the whole section.