Sentence Correction

Hey Guys.

Ive been studying for the gmat for some time now, finishing my second month on Empower right now. I have MGMAT books as well.

Thanks to Empower I was able to boost my score from mid 20s in the Quant section, to mid/high 30s.

However, my Verbal score for the last 3 MGMAT CAT Exams has been 28-29, which is so depressing. On today's practice CAT I thought I was doing so well on the Verbal, I finished 10 minutes with extra time, meanwhile I ran out of time on Quant.

I read the SC and CR books with with MGMAT and I understand and get a lot of questions right when I do the Empower course, but I am not sure what is happening.


Also On today's MGMAT CAT 6, out of 41 Verbal Questions, 28 were 700-800, 13 were 500-700..... I am not sure if this contributes to my lower score, but I got a lot of those 700-800 level wrong.

I feel like if i would be able to get my Verbal score up to high 30s, combined with high 30s in my quant, i would reach my target score.

Any ideas what I should DO?

Hi bmierz86.

Getting GMAT verbal questions right requires seeing key details and understanding the logic of the sentences, prompts, passages, questions and answer choices.

So one recommendation that I can make is the following. Unless you consistently get 100% of the questions in the verbal section right, do NOT finish the section early. Had those ten extra minutes been distributed over ten questions, you could have used the time to see things more clearly. Had you done that and gotten say 7 more right answers, you would have scored well into the 30's this time.

In fact, given that you said that you do well when you are doing practice questions, conceivably being a little more careful would have been sufficient for you to score that much higher.

At the same time, something else that you said is interesting.

On today's practice CAT I thought I was doing so well on the Verbal

Probably what what you said indicates is that there are flaws or holes in the ways that you handle verbal questions. In other words, you did what you do and you were confident that you were getting right answers. Then you saw that you had not gotten as many right answers as you though you had. The discrepancy can probably be partly attributed to slight flaws in some of the Manhattan questions, but mostly what it indicates is that what you are doing and what it takes to get verbal questions right are not quite the same.

Generally, when someone experiences that type of difference between perception of how they are scoring on verbal and their actual hit rate, what I have seen is that the person's approaches are overly formulaic. In other words, rather than seeking to clearly see the logic of each question, the person seeks to apply formulaic strategies to get right answers.

For example, there is a strategy called the splits strategy that sometimes works for getting right answers to sentence correction questions. The thing is though that sentence correction questions can contain false splits. So by using the splits method without really seeing what is going on in the answer choices of a sentence correction question, one can get it wrong, while being fairly confident that one is getting it right. "I found the split. So this must be the right answer!"

The upshot is that in order to get more verbal questions right, likely you have to get better at the basic task of seeing what is going on in the questions. To that end, probably you would be best off doing a fair amount of untimed practice, working on each question for as long as necessary to figure out why every wrong answer is wrong and every right answer is right. Are you using elimination only? or can you prove why each right answer is right? There is a difference, and developing the skills used to see with the clarity necessary for doing the latter can make a big difference in your hit rate.

When you are doing SC questions, go beyond looking for issues with certain words or phrases to really seeing how the answer choices work, or don't, from end to end.

When you are doing CR questions, be sure that you fully understand the arguments and that you identify the conclusions. Then seek to clearly see the relationships between the prompts, the questions and the answer choices.

For RC, work on noticing key details that indicate what the passages are about and making sure that you see the difference between answer choices that seem to match what the passage says and answer choices that actually do.

The more clearly you see what's going on, the higher you will score on verbal. On the GMAT, vision and logic rule.