Did you really see it, or did you just glance?
My maid had been working in the kitchen for about 45 minutes—cleaning, chopping vegetables, moving around. Then she went to fetch the broom at the usual place right outside our kitchen. But it wasn’t there.
“Bhaiyya, aapne jhadu dekha hai?” she called out. (“Have you seen the broom?”)
I looked around. The broom was lying right there in the kitchen, visible next to the wall. Not hidden. Not tucked away. Just … there.
Now, curiously: she had been in that kitchen the whole time. The broom was there all along. Did she really not see it? Or did she see it but not register it?
I can’t be certain. But because this happens to me all the time too, I suspect it’s the second. I often look for something, can’t find it, and then—once I do—realize that I’d “seen” it earlier but hadn’t processed it. My eyes had glanced over it. My brain hadn’t registered it.
The GMAT parallel
This has significant implications for GMAT preparation.
Because
- reading something
- and it registering in your brain
are two different things.
When practicing questions, especially Data Sufficiency*, we miss crucial details not because they weren’t on the screen or because we didn’t read them, but because we never registered them. We glanced; we didn’t process.
*What I’m discussing here is not beneficial only in DS questions. I see benefits of this practice in Problem Solving and math-related Data Insights questions as well.
How to ensure you’re registering information
For every piece of information you read, pause and ask yourself:
- What does this mean?
- What can I directly derive or infer from it?
- What can I not derive?
For example:
- “x is a positive integer” → ok, x = 1, 2, 3, … But there’s no upper limit.
- “xy ≠ 0” → ok, neither x nor y can be 0. They can be positive or negative. They need not be integers. But not even one of them can be 0.
Such tiny pauses might seem like an overkill. But, if in your practice you’ve ever got an answer incorrect because you “forgot” about a ‘trivial’ piece of information like this, I recommend you start doing so.
Explicit and derived constraints
Once you start pausing, you’ll notice there are three layers of constraints:
Explicit (spelled out):
- “x × y ≠ 0” → neither x nor y can be 0.
- “x is positive” → x can’t be negative; x can’t be 0. x need not be an integer. It can be a positive decimal also.
Derived (implied by context):
- “Apples are divided among friends” → total apples must be an integer; shares must be integers; no negatives allowed.
- “Three friends share the rent equally” → each pays one-third → The total rent must be a multiple of 3.
- A completes a task in 6 hours, B takes 4 hours to complete the same task → If they work together, they’ll anyway take less than 4 hours (The faster person alone would have taken 4 hours. Now they have help. So together they’ll take less than 4 hours).
Operation-based (implied by math itself):
- Denominators can’t be 0.
- Square roots can only be taken of non-negative numbers.
If you don’t give yourself the time to process such information, you risk such info slipping by. I have seen too many students make such mistakes too many times to think that they are one-off mistakes. I believe a change in the process (like the one I discuss here) is warranted.
Why taking longer won’t ruin your test
Now, a natural fear might be: “If I pause to process after every piece of information, won’t that mean that I’ll take too long, and as a consequence not be able to finish the section properly?”
I’ll start with this: What’s the alternative?
You rush, skip the pause, miss a detail, and make a silly mistake. You save 10-15 seconds, but you get the question wrong.
So yes, you may spend 10-15 seconds extra per question. But if those extra seconds mean fewer errors, you come out ahead, no?
To score well on the GMAT, you require both high accuracy and good speed. But, we don’t want higher speed at the cost of lower accuracy.
The DS micro-pause
Especially for Data Sufficiency, try this micro-pause after the question stem (before touching the statements):
- Are there any explicit constraints?
- Can I derive any constraints from context?
- Defaults: If nothing’s said → the value can be positive, negative or 0; integer or decimal.
- Edge cases to remind yourself:
- 0. Even. Neither negative, nor positive. A multiple of all numbers.
- “Not negative” ≠ positive. It includes 0.
One example: What’s the smallest non-negative integer that leaves a remainder of 0 when divided by 3?
The answer is not 3. It’s 0.
Measuring improvement
Don’t expect instant perfection. Instead, track this:
👉 What proportion of your errors are due to missed or assumed constraints?
If that percentage is dropping – if those mistakes are happening less often, or only after longer stretches -you’re improving.
That’s the metric that matters.
The real takeaway
I’m not talking about a trick here. It is a mindset shift.
Work with your brain’s tendencies. Don’t assume the brain will start functioning in some ‘ideal’ way all of a sudden. The brain doesn’t magically register details because you wish it would. It registers because you pause, pay attention, and give it space.
I have shared one example here. Such application could be widespread. The better we understand how our brain works, and the more we work in sync with it (as opposed to ignoring it or worse working against it), the better we can get.
So when you catch yourself missing something obvious, don’t beat yourself up. Just remind yourself: Sometimes the constraint is right there. Just like the broom was in plain sight. Perhaps just hadn’t registered it yet. Maybe instead of scolding yourself: “How could you miss something so simple?!”, you could realise: “Aah! Sometimes, what I think is obvious, I forget later. Perhaps my brain needs more time to register and process information than I am giving it currently.”
Tell me – have you ever forgotten something like “x doesn’t have to be an integer,” “x can’t be 0,” or “not negative includes 0” while answering a GMAT question?