GMAT Verbal & Essays

Hi All,

I have seen lot of posts about people achieving 85 % + accuracy in the verbal questions of OG. My question is this: is this the accuracy you have when you are about to give your gmat and you have redone the OG questions more than once? Or is it the accuracy while you are in the initial stages of study?

If it's the latter, then I guess I have a long way to go when I consider that I am not just that high as far as accuracy is concerned.

Thanks
Ricky

Hi there,

Don't worry so much about your overall accuracy at this point. As you probably know, the GMAT is adaptive, meaning that you'll only get the really difficult questions if you're already doing well. So, when you're studying, you should break questions down into groups (I do easy, medium, hard, insanely ridiculous). You can definitely get a very good GMAT score if you've only mastered the easy and medium material. It's possible to score, say a 600, with a hit rate of 50% as long as you're not getting the easy and medium level questions wrong.

In terms of the OG, the questions are in approximate order of difficulty, so if you're struggling at this point, focus your energy on the first half or so of each section.

Hope this helps!

Jim@VeritasPrep wrote:Hi there,

Don't worry so much about your overall accuracy at this point. As you probably know, the GMAT is adaptive, meaning that you'll only get the really difficult questions if you're already doing well. So, when you're studying, you should break questions down into groups (I do easy, medium, hard, insanely ridiculous). You can definitely get a very good GMAT score if you've only mastered the easy and medium material. It's possible to score, say a 600, with a hit rate of 50% as long as you're not getting the easy and medium level questions wrong.

In terms of the OG, the questions are in approximate order of difficulty, so if you're struggling at this point, focus your energy on the first half or so of each section.

Hope this helps!

Jim,

Thanks for your reply. This might sound weird, but I have seen that while attempting the OG Verbal questions, I tend to get more correct on the harder bin when compared to the easier bin. I gave a CAT exam and scored a 600 ( with about 50 % accuracy in both quant and verbal). At this point I am not sure what my best strategy should be in order to increase my score by 100 points. I have my exam in a month and I am trying to find the best strategy from now until my exam. Your thoughts?

Thanks
Ricky

Hi Ricky,

Well, if you're getting "easy" questions wrong, you should focus on eliminating silly mistakes (I'm assuming that if you get "hard" questions right, then you know what you're doing - something else must be going on here). Obviously a good way to do this is to practice "easy" questions -- an added benefit of doing this is that you'll familiarize yourself with some common question types so that when they pop up on your GMAT you'll know exactly how to approach them.

Another good way to improve is to focus on your fundamentals. For example, in quant, spend some time working on the rules for doing calculations with fractions. A lot of the lower-bin questions revolve around calculations rather than number properties or other theoretical concepts. So, you might be struggling to perform calculations quickly and accurately, even though your mathematical reasoning (i.e., the skill required on upper bin material) is solid.

Good luck!