[Puppykoala]

Hi Community, I might be just too slow but I often encounter difficulties finishing questions in time. For 33 questions within 40-45 minutes, the per question time given is under 1.5 minutes. I sometimes spend 3-4 minutes on complicated calculations and end up getting a number that’s not even in the options. What’s your strategy in coping with this problem? Becker has a lot of calculations of course and I know people have seen hardcore calucations during the actual exams and got thrown off the cliff. Should I treat these type of questions with less energy, such as make educated guesses if I still don’t have much clue after 1.5 minutes in? Suggestions?

[cafeteria_food]

I would make an educated guess and flag for review. At the end of the testlet spend any unused time on revisting flagged questions.

[Recked]

Some questions will take longer than 1.5 minutes, and some will take less.
You can't focus on the actual time for each specific question because the calculation intensive questions will not be done that fast.
If you work through the calculation and end up with an answer that is not there, you're missing something.
My suggestion is to pick the closest answer, flag the question and move along. If you have time to review at the end then you can go back to it, but it's better to miss one MCQ, than waste too much time and potentially not have enough time to finish the SIMS.

[Puppykoala]

Both of you guys made a lot of sense. Thanks!

[Brokenglass]

With conceptual questions, I've always gone with the answer that comes to mind first and moved on. That alone will keep you under 30 seconds for conceptual questions.
For math questions, if it's simple I do it twice, because it can't be that easy, and I didn't spend much time on the question anyways. If complex, I always go with the first answer and move on, because if I did that many calculations and the answer is there, there is a good chance I did it right.
I probably flagged 6 questions for all the sections combined because I have a bad habit of going in circles with the questions I've already done, so for me I thought flagging more than 2 questions per testlet was ineffective.

If you keep getting answers that aren't there, my guess is that you make a lot of careless mistakes. Careless mistakes has always been my biggest weakness and the way I try to overcome that is by trying not to rush through the calculation and reading the question more carefully.

[WEEE2CPAYE]

aim to have at the minimum 2 hours to do the SIMS/Writing prompts.

[WarEagle]

My recommendation is to not focus on only spending 1.5-2 minutes for each question. Focus more on how much time you have for each section. When I was about halfway through the questions I would check the clock to see how much time I had remaining. Recked was correct as well. Some questions might take ~3 minutes to answer while others may only take 30 seconds.
–
Also, what I thought was helpful was to skip the more time consuming questions at first. If I saw a questions that would either take a long time to read or needed a complex calculation, I would flag it and move on to the next question. Once I finished all the easier questions, I would go back to the more complex ones. Then I then would quickly review all the questions before I moved on to the next section (if I had time for it). I would rather get all the easy questions right than spend most of my time on a few more difficult questions.

[Pork Flavored Bacon]

The one thing I did to save myself time was to always read what they are asking at the end of a question first before reading the question in its entirety. By doing so I already know what they are looking for and would not need to read the question twice. I can't quantify how much time that saved me but I know for sure it added up to quite a few minutes I was able to allocate to the simulations.

FAR - 75 | REG - 87 | AUD - 82 | LAW - 81

[Hank Scorpio]

I didn't flag questions at all. If I didn't know it, I would spend a little more time on it and guess. Then I'd move on and leave it alone. I always saved extra time for SIMS that way.

FAR - 10/3/16
BEC - 69 - 10/31/16
AUD - November 2016
REG - December 2016

[Author]

Replies