If you’re serious about GMAT Verbal and within 45 days of your Test Day, you should be doing pacing drills at least every other day. Most students have a hard time coming up with their own pacing drills, which is understandable. How much time should you give yourself to start? When should you start trimming seconds off? Should you time individual questions only, or groups of questions? I recommend you alternate between 5 and 10 question pacing drills once you’ve got a good Sentence Correction strategy going. If you only do individual questions, you won’t flex your muscles to hit those 14-15 SC questions on Test Day.

Be sure to regularly incorporate pacing exercises, both concept-specific and mixed-concept, in your study sessions. You don’t want the only time you work under pacing pressure to be when you’re doing a full-length GMAT CAT. Sentence Correction success lies in high achieving accuracy in a short amount of time. Start with the “Level 1” pacing drills as described below, then move on to the higher levels once your accuracy is above 80% at each level. For example, if you tried to complete Level 6, you shouldn’t move on to Level 7 until you were able to get 8/10 or more questions correct in 20 minutes on at least three separate occasions.

Level 1 – 5 questions in 12.5 minutes
Level 2 – 10 questions in 25 minutes
Level 3 – 5 questions in 11.25 minutes
Level 4 – 10 questions in 22.5 minutes
Level 5 – 5 questions in 10 minutes
Level 6 – 10 questions in 20 minutes
Level 7 – 5 questions in 8.75 minutes
Level 8 – 10 questions in 17.5 minutes
Level 9 – 5 question in 7.5 minutes
Level 10 – 10 questions in 15 minutes
Level 11 – 5 questions in 6.25 minutes
Level 12 – 10 questions in 12.5 minutes
Level 13 – 5 questions in 5 minutes
Level 14 – 10 questions in 10 minutes

Once you’re able to complete a wide variety of Sentence Correction questions in less than 1 minute per question with above 80% accuracy overall, you’re much less likely to lose accuracy during a full-length CAT! It may take you a long time to get there (or you may never get there), but at least these sequential drills will allow you to slowly shave some precious seconds off your Sentence Correction time!

Stay tuned for more posts featuring 5 and 10 question Sentence Correction questions grouped by concept!