Jasur is preparing for the GMAT while working full-time at a bank in Tashkent. On a Saturday morning he sat his first timed practice section: 21 quantitative questions in 45 minutes, a little over two minutes for each.
The first five questions went well. Question 6 was a mixture problem, and he was sure he almost had it. Seven minutes later he still did not. By the thirtieth minute he was only on question 10, and he fell behind badly. When the timer ran out, four questions were still unanswered.
His tutor looked at the sheet and made one point. Seven minutes on one question is the time of three ordinary questions. The mixture problem had cost him not one mark but several.
The next Saturday Jasur used a plan. He wrote three numbers at the top of his notes: question 7 by minute 15, question 14 by minute 30, and the end at minute 45. Whenever a question showed no clear path after about three minutes, he crossed out the choices he could rule out, made an educated guess, bookmarked the question and moved on.
He reached question 14 at minute 29. He finished all 21 questions with four minutes to spare, and he used them to review his three bookmarks. On two of them he found a clear slip in his arithmetic and changed the answer; the third he left alone, because he had no new reason to change it. The test allows up to three such changes in a section, and he did not waste one on a doubt.
His score on the second section was higher, though he had not learned any new mathematics during the week. What had changed was his discipline: he no longer let one question decide the whole section.