Beat The GMAT a GMAT & MBA community

i received a private message regarding this thread.

for the CR and RC sections in particular, there shouldn't be anything to keep "fresh" -- because there is NO basis of memorized/learned knowledge in those two sections in the first place. apart from an extremely general understanding of how the question types work, those two sections of the test are based entirely on reasoning abilities that you already have as a result of your normal real-world experience.

what i mean by "extremely general understanding" is that there are a few ground-level things that you have to understand about the question types. for instance, on RC inference/detail questions, it's important to understand that you must basically be able to prove the correct answer from the facts given in the passage -- i.e., that you shouldn't pick an answer choice that seems "vaguely suggested" but isn't explicitly substantiated by the actual evidence.
this type of general understanding isn't something that you can really "forget" once you have it, so "keeping it fresh" is a non-issue. if someone is unclear on these ground-level general concepts, that means he or she never really understood them in the first place. (this is a very, very common problem on this forum: people are way, way too concerned with learning "rules" and minutiae, to the point where they never actually understand the general nature of the problems and/or of the test itself.)

other than that, the RC and CR sections are based on real-world thought processes that CAN'T be "memorized" or "kept fresh".
as an example, take a look at problem 109 in the 12th edition OG critical reasoning section. (i believe this is the same as problem 111 in the 13th edition, if you have that one instead.)
in that problem, you can't understand the correct answer unless you make a common-sense connection: namely, you have to understand that people who will probably get caught will be less likely to do bad things. in the correct answer choice, the fire department can figure out who is making the prank calls -- a fact that should make your common-sense brain say, "hey, that means people will be less likely to make the calls in the first place."
note that it's absolutely impossible to make this kind of connection through studying or memorization -- you must preserve your brain's normal, real-world thought processes.
this problem is far from unique in this regard; the need to use common sense / real-world lateral thinking is a nearly universal aspect of the RC and CR sections.

you may already understand this idea, but your question about "keeping things fresh" suggests that you don't. after all, the above kinds of realizations (the types of things that are based on real-world experience) are not the kind of thing you could ever possibly forget. e.g., you couldn't forget that people will be reluctant to do bad things if they're going to get caught.

--

in SC, there are *some* things you could "keep fresh" -- like idioms, particular modifiers, etc. -- but the good thing about GMAT SC is that the major ideas are NOT things that you can memorize (and, therefore, not things that you can forget!)

here's what i mean. the most important aspects of SC are the following:

* Meaning of the sentence: What is the intended message of the sentence? What meaning are the words actually trying to convey?
this part is pure common sense / real-world intuition -- not the kind of thing that you have to "keep fresh".
for instance, when you see "I read the book on the table", your intuition needs to tell you that "on the table" describes the book. when you see "I read the book on the subway", your intuition needs to tell you than "on the subway" describes the act of reading the book, not the book itself.
you can't "keep" this sort of thing "fresh"; it should just be something that naturally happens when you read a sentence.

* Parallelism: If you have two or more of the same kind of thing in a sentence, those things should be written as similarly as possible.
this is also not something you should have to "keep fresh"; it should be more like a basic instinct that you have whenever you're reading or hearing just about anything.
for instance, if you see (or hear) "I like swimming and to run", then you should have a very basic instinct that says, Wait a minute, that's not right -- you should realize without having to apply explicit rules that it should be either "swimming"/"running" or "to swim"/"(to) run", not one of each.
if you have to use explicit rules for this sort of thing, you aren't thinking about it in the right way.

* Modifiers:
ok, there are some modifiers for which you must memorize basic grammar rules. (for instance, "which" must modify nouns, not actions.)
on the other hand, most problems that test modifiers on the gmat are testing the meaning and/or placement of those modifiers -- i.e., is the modifier describing the right thing? is it placed as close as possible to that thing?
again, not the kind of thing you can memorize (or forget).

etc.

in general, SC has lots and lots of small components that you could memorize, but, at heart, it is NOT fundamentally a test of those things. instead, it's largely a test of more general, intuitive ideas such as the ones above.

--

there's good news and bad news here.

the bad news is largely restricted to people who are trying to study by memorization (and, by extension, to "keep" all that memorized stuff "fresh"). for those individuals, the bad news is that the gmat is ... well ... not that kind of test at all, and so that kind of preparation isn't going to work.

the good news is that the kind of stuff that IS tested on the gmat can't really be forgotten. in other words, if you have the correct mentality toward this test, you should be able to walk away from the verbal section for months, even years, and still be able to perform at pretty much the same level when you return. (maybe even better, if you've been wasting a lot of time trying to memorize stuff.)

the same isn't really true for the quant section -- if you walk away from, say, algebra for a few years, then you might legitimately forget how to factor expressions and so on -- but, on the verbal section, "forgetting" and "keeping things fresh" should be complete non-issues.

_________________
Ron is a Director of Curriculum Development at Manhattan GMAT. He has been teaching various standardized tests for almost 20 years.

He wears white after Labor Day, gets 55% of his calories from protein, and takes standardized tests for fun.

Pueden hacerle preguntas a Ron o en inglés o en español.

If you send Ron a private message, please allow 1-2 weeks for a response.

Learn more about ron

The only stuff on quant is, essentially, your standard mathematics up through first-year high-school algebra and geometry. Beyond that point, it's really a matter of strategy -- especially making frequent use of non-"textbook" methods (e.g., backsolving, plugging in your own values for unknowns, estimating answers, and testing cases on DS).

Studying obscure/advanced mathematical principles may actually work against you on this exam, by distracting you from the smaller, more circumscribed set of principles that are actually tested.

_________________
Ron is a Director of Curriculum Development at Manhattan GMAT. He has been teaching various standardized tests for almost 20 years.

He wears white after Labor Day, gets 55% of his calories from protein, and takes standardized tests for fun.

Pueden hacerle preguntas a Ron o en inglés o en español.

If you send Ron a private message, please allow 1-2 weeks for a response.

Learn more about ron