The Verbal Reasoning section of the GMAT Focus Edition is 45 minutes long and contains 23 Critical Reasoning (CR) and Reading Comprehension (RC) questions. You might calculate, therefore, that you have just under two minutes per question. However, it would be a huge mistake to give yourself exactly that amount of time for every question

Finishing the section on time won’t help, if you don’t get the questions right!

Your focus must be first and foremost on solving the questions correctly, and the speed at which you do so will be a byproduct of practice. Remember, the GMAT is adaptive. This means that you are in a dialog with an algorithm that is tracking your level, adjusting the level of the next question on the basis of your answer to the previous question. The algorithm ultimately is trying to find the level at which you get 50% of questions right. So, to end up with a high score, you need to convince the algorithm that you are a high-level test taker who can answer hard questions correctly half the time and easy questions correctly 100% of the time.

What that means is that you don’t have to answer every question correctly to get a top score! Remember this later, when we get down to the nitty gritty of timing.

That said, you can keep some basic guidelines in mind for timing:

Critical Reasoning: approximately 9 questions
Easy questions: 1.5 minutes
Medium questions: 2.5 minutes
Hard questions: 3.5 minutes

This way, you should end up spending a total of around 21 minutes on the CR questions.

Reading Comprehension: approximately 14 questions (2 short texts with 3 questions each and 2 long texts with 4 questions each)

Easy texts (with 3 questions): 6 minutes (4 minutes reading, 2 minutes answering question)

Long texts (with 4 questions): 8 minutes (5 minutes reading, 3 minutes answering questions)

This way, you should end up spending a total of 28 minutes on RC.

But wait a minute!  If you do the math (21+28=49), you will find that you are 4 minutes over! 

Where do you get back those 4 minutes? Somewhere along the way, there will be a couple of questions that are just far too hard to be worth the time. This is one of the ways your managerial skills are tested-- your ability to look at the big picture of the exam and decide where not to invest your energies. Two extremely hard questions can and should be thrown away, while the rest should be worked through diligently. The very highest level test takers may do questions faster than the times suggested and may not have to sacrifice any questions. But most high-scoring test takers will need to sacrifice a couple questions, and the key here is to recognize which ones very quickly. Any questions you don’t get to at the end, you should at least put guesses.