Method
How to actually get faster at quant
Most aspirants do not fail the quant section for lack of theory. They fail it for lack of seconds. Here is the routine that changes that — the short version first.
The short version: build a recall base (tables to 20, squares to 30, cubes to 15, the fraction–percentage pairs), learn five multiplication shortcuts, then practise against a clock every day and review the method rather than the answer. Fifteen minutes a day beats a three-hour session on Sunday, because speed is a motor habit, not knowledge.
1. Build the recall base (two weeks, ten minutes a day)
Every fast solver has the same lookup table in their head. Nothing clever, just automatic:
- Tables to 20. Not to 12 — the paper is full of teens.
- Squares to 30 and cubes to 15. These turn whole questions into one step.
- Fraction ↔ percentage pairs. 1/8 = 12.5%, 1/6 = 16.67%, 3/8 = 37.5%, 1/16 = 6.25% and the rest. Most percentage questions collapse to a fraction you already know.
- Reciprocals to 1/20, for time & work and boats & streams.
If you are recomputing 17 × 18 during a paper, no shortcut will save you. Fix this layer first.
2. Learn five shortcuts — not fifty
Vedic maths has dozens of sutras and you need a handful. The five that cover most of what a prelims paper throws at you:
- Nikhilam — multiplying near a base: 97 × 96 = 9312 in two steps.
- Ekadhikena — squaring anything ending in 5: 75² = 5625.
- Yavadunam — squaring near a base: 88² = 7744.
- Antyayordashake — same tens, units adding to 10: 43 × 47 = 2021.
- Difference of squares — multiplying through a midpoint: 47 × 53 = 2491.
All five, worked step by step →
3. Practise approximation deliberately
In a five-option MCQ you usually do not need the exact value — you need enough precision to eliminate four options. Get comfortable rounding to convenient numbers, doing the sum, and checking whether any two options are close enough to force exactness. This single habit is worth several minutes across a paper.
4. Put a clock on it — every day
This is the part people skip, and it is the part that works. Untimed practice trains accuracy, which you probably already have. Timed practice trains retrieval under pressure, which is what the exam hall actually measures.
Practical rules:
- Short sessions, daily. Ten to fifteen minutes beats a weekend marathon; motor habits are built by frequency.
- A real deadline, not a stopwatch you glance at. The question should stop being answerable when time is up, otherwise you will always take "just a few more seconds".
- One topic at a time. Per-topic timing tells you where you are slow — "time & work costs me 70 seconds" is fixable; "quant is hard" is not.
5. Review the method, not the answer
After each question, ask a different question than "was I right?". Ask "was there a faster route?". Right-but-slow is the actual problem, and it is invisible unless you look for it. When you get one wrong, name the specific error — order of operations, a dropped carry, nPr instead of nCr — because a named error is one you can stop making.
A realistic six-week arc
| Weeks | Focus | Daily time |
|---|---|---|
| 1–2 | Recall base: tables, squares, cubes, fraction–percentage pairs. Plus daily timed easy drills. | 10–15 min |
| 3–4 | The five shortcuts, one at a time, then applied: percentages, simplification, averages on a clock. | 15 min |
| 5–6 | Application topics at medium/hard: DI, quadratic comparison, profit & loss, time & work, P&C. Track which kind is slowest and drill it. | 15–20 min |
This is a speed routine, not a syllabus. Keep learning topics you have not covered from whatever course or question bank you use — this sits alongside that, it does not replace it.
Where ComputePrep fits
ComputePrep is step 4 made effortless: three timed drills a day, 15–70 seconds each, one kind a day rotating through 21 kinds, with the fast method shown after every drill and the deadline enforced on the server so the clock actually means something. It is free, needs no account, and takes about five minutes.
Start today's drills →Reasoning has the same problem. If puzzles and seating arrangements are what cost you time, our sister product Deduce runs the identical daily habit for the reasoning section — 27 puzzle types, one fresh puzzle a day, every one proven to have exactly one solution.