The short answer
How to spend your minutes so a few hard questions don't cost you the easy ones.
Written and checked by GAMSAT tutors — not AI-generated.
Try the reasoning style
We treat forgetting as a failure — a lapse to be patched with reminders and records. Yet a mind that kept everything could not think; it would drown in the undifferentiated noise of every moment it had ever lived. To forget is not so much to lose information as to decide, mostly without our noticing, what was never worth keeping.
The author's argument relies most directly on which unstated assumption?
Pick an option to see how the tutor reasons to the answer — not just whether you were right.
Not quite — the answer is B.
Work backwards from the conclusion: a mind that ‘kept everything’ supposedly ‘could not think.’ That only follows if thinking means leaving most of experience out — so B is the premise the argument quietly rests on. A raises reliability, which the passage never weighs; C contradicts ‘mostly without our noticing’; D smuggles in a claim about intellect the passage never makes. The question rewards finding the hidden premise, not recalling a fact.
Most points are lost to the clock, not to difficulty. Within a section, every question is worth the same mark — so a brutal one and an easy one are worth identical points. Spend your minutes accordingly.
The golden rule
Never let one hard question eat the time of three easy ones. If you've spent ~2 minutes and you're stuck, flag it and move on.
The two-pass method
Pass 1 — harvest the easy marks
Go start to finish answering everything you can do quickly. Flag anything that needs real thought and skip it.
Pass 2 — the flagged ones
Come back with your remaining time and the easy marks already banked. Now you can think calmly.
Final 2 minutes — never blank
There's no penalty for guessing — make sure every question has an answer before time's up.
Your pacing benchmarks
Section III — 75 questions, 150 minutes
120 seconds a question. Plenty take sixty, and that surplus is exactly what pays for the genuinely hard ones. If you are past question 38 at the halfway mark, you are fine.
Section I — 62 questions, 100 minutes
97 seconds a question — but budget by set, not by question, because the reading is the cost. A four-question set is about six and a half minutes, most of it spent on the passage rather than the options.
Section II — 65 minutes for both essays
One shared clock, no per-essay timer, and nobody tells you when to switch. You divide it: roughly half each, with the extra minutes going to the harder task rather than the one you are enjoying.
Where the clock leaks
Time traps
- Re-reading a stimulus you already grasped
- Refusing to leave a hard question
- Second-guessing answers you were sure of
- Doing long arithmetic you could estimate
Time savers
- Read the question stem first
- Flag-and-move after ~2 min
- Trust your first solid read
- Estimate, eliminate, then commit
Check yourself
You're a full two minutes into a hard question and still stuck, with 20 unseen questions left. Best move?
Key takeaways
- Within a section, every question scores the same — triage ruthlessly.
- S3 = 120 s a question; S1 = 97 s (budget by passage set); S2 = 65 min for both essays.
- Two passes: easy marks first, flagged ones second.
- ~2 minutes stuck = flag, guess, move on.
- Never leave a blank; there's no penalty for guessing.
Practise this with real GAMSAT-style questions
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