GMAT Verbal & Essays

Hi guys,

I'm taking the GMAT next Saturday. I've taken 5 practice exams over the course of last two months and my verbal has been consistently 41-42; 3 Practice exams from Economist GMAT Tutor and 2 from GMAT Prep.

Initially, I had problems with CR and RC when taking the Economist tests. Then I started practicing with Powerscore CR bible, and my accuracy rate has consistently improved with each exam with regards to CR and RC. In the last exam I took (GMAT Prep), out of the 8 errors, 6 were SC and 2 were CR.

Out of the 6 SC:
2 were silly errors - Didn't see the missing participle.
4 were always down to choices that seemed really similar and I chose the wrong one.

One thing I've noticed is that I'm always finishing verbal with ~15-20 minutes remaining each time. I've tried slowing down, but it seems to be really difficult for me. I seem to be really confident of my choice during the exam.

I've downloaded a bunch of question banks from different websites with really difficult SC questions, and I hope to work on it over the next 10 days.

Is there anything else I should be doing? Any tips, suggestions would be welcome.

Cheers!

Hey man,

I apologize, this comes way too late to help you, but for anyone else going to take the test: I was in the same boat for sure.
I was scoring about 42/43 consistently during practice tests, making more errors on SC than anything else, and I say - the way forward is definitely as you mentioned - (assuming you're already familiar with all the rules) - just practice every sc question from a reliable source as you can - especially those tricky SC questions- but some part will for sure be up to luck on test day.

Luckily CR and RC are more forgiving in the sense that it's based on reasoning - and even if you don't agree with GMAT logic, at least you can learn GMAT's logic pattern and hopefully keep errors on these questions to a minimum.