How to Improve on SC

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How to Improve on SC

by Rajesh Palli » Thu Nov 29, 2012 8:01 am
Hi,

Iam badly looking out for a good Strategy for GMAT SC.

My Problem:

I have taken a topic "Subject and Verb Agreement" and I have read the basics from Both SC Grail 2nd ED and Manhattan SC guide(Which is one of the set of 8 strategy guides)

After studying the basics from both the above books, i still find it difficult to answer
the OG 12 SC - Subject and Verb Agreement questions and i got 7 correct out of 11 and i
took roughly 60 min to Complete the 11 questions.

After this exercise, iam completely down and dissapointed.

Can you please let me know a good strategy where i can improve in GMAT SC so that i can apply the same strategy to the Other SC topics such as Parallelism, Tense, Pronouns etc.

Appreciate an early reply:-)

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by theachiever » Thu Nov 29, 2012 11:52 pm
Hello Rajesh .
Since you are getting started with SC I would suggest that you improve on getting strong hold over the concepts.Don't set time constraints initially and put more pressure on yourself.

1.Veritas Prep Question Bank has pretty good questions for all Verbal sections and Quant.It also keeps a check on your avg accuracy analysis.

2.Tells you why your choice is correct or incorrect depending on the correctness of your answer.

Try them out if interested.


This thread might help you out to plan your approach towards SC

https://www.beatthegmat.com/sentence-cor ... 69595.html
Resilience is a trait that manifests in an individual when he/she faces consistent failures motivating them to succeed in the end.

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by The Iceman » Fri Nov 30, 2012 5:44 am
I concur with 'theachiever' when he says concepts first.

I think your initial focus should be not only on studying the concepts but also on building them through application on live questions one by one. This is the most important part.

When you learn a particular topic on SC, let's say subject-verb agreement, look for this particular error on all the questions of OG 12, OG 13, and verbal review. Your intention here should not be to get the problem correct, but only to identify all the possible subject verb non-agreements. Once you have completed this iteration in all the three books, repeat the same process for another topic of SC that you learn. And while repeating each iteration, do not think about the earlier concepts that you already applied (e.g. sv agreement), but only focus on the topic that you have picked up. Keep on doing this until you have covered all the key topics as mentioned in books such as Manhattan SC guide and SC grail.

After this, you should reattempt all the questions from the three books but now with the intention to get the right answer to each question. Now you are free to use all the concepts that you have cemented by learning through application.

You will feel the difference it makes to your accuracy and hence the speed. Speed by and large depends on how strongly you have ingrained those concepts. Then you will need to take a few time bound drills to improve your speed further.

With more and more practice the rules will become a habit to you...habit so strong that the rules will work almost as intutions.

Hope that helps!

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by theachiever » Fri Nov 30, 2012 6:23 am
The Iceman wrote:I concur with 'theachiever' when he says concepts first.

I think your initial focus should be not only on studying the concepts but also on building them through application on live questions one by one. This is the most important part.

When you learn a particular topic on SC, let's say subject-verb agreement, look for this particular error on all the questions of OG 12, OG 13, and verbal review. Your intention here should not be to get the problem correct, but only to identify all the possible subject verb non-agreements. Once you have completed this iteration in all the three books, repeat the same process for another topic of SC that you learn. And while repeating each iteration, do not think about the earlier concepts that you already applied (e.g. sv agreement), but only focus on the topic that you have picked up. Keep on doing this until you have covered all the key topics as mentioned in books such as Manhattan SC guide and SC grail.

After this, you should reattempt all the questions from the three books but now with the intention to get the right answer to each question. Now you are free to use all the concepts that you have cemented by learning through application.

You will feel the difference it makes to your accuracy and hence the speed. Speed by and large depends on how strongly you have ingrained those concepts. Then you will need to take a few time bound drills to improve your speed further.

With more and more practice the rules will become a habit to you...habit so strong that the rules will work almost as intutions.

Hope that helps!


That's too good an approach......by just merely listening to it I can think of how effective that approach would be.......thanks a lot SC and CR are my vulnerable areas will try and apply this approach there.......

Thanks a ton...... :)
Resilience is a trait that manifests in an individual when he/she faces consistent failures motivating them to succeed in the end.

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by Rajesh Palli » Sat Dec 01, 2012 5:01 pm
Thanks a lot for your replies. This helped me.