GMAT Strategy

Received a PM asking me to reply. Sorry for the late response; I've been on vacation.

I agree with chmny and Jim - it's hard to improve verbal quickly but, of the 3, SC is often the easiest to improve (though it does, of course, depend upon your own strengths and weaknesses).

I don't agree, though, that 1000 SC and LSAT CR/RC is the best way to improve. There are a couple of different issues here:

1) Just doing hundreds (or thousands) of questions is absolutely not the best or most efficient way to improve. You actually need to learn what to do - what the test-writers want from you on different questions, what the grammar rules are, what the wrong answers tend to look like / hinge on, what the traps are, etc. If you're not actually learning these things, then doing tons of questions won't help you to improve all that much.

2) The particular sources listed above are, in my opinion, not the best.

1000 SC is a file floating around on the Internet that someone compiled from multiple sources many years ago. Some of the questions are very good quality (in fact, some are old official questions that have been used without permission - which means the file is actually illegal, though nobody's going to arrest you for having it). Some of the questions are bad quality. I have personally seen SC questions that have grammar errors in the "right" answers, or questions that list the wrong answer as the official answer. I remember once everyone here at BTG getting all tangled up in one such question and they finally asked me to have a look. It turns out that the "right" answer they were all trying to learn was NOT the right answer. A different answer was the right one.

Here's the big problem with 1000SC: you have no idea which questions are the good ones and which are the bad ones. So, part of the time, you're learning the stuff you should be learning, but part of the time, you could be learning the wrong stuff.

As for LSAT materials, I also teach LSAT. In my opinion, the CR materials are not close enough to the same on the two tests to use the materials interchangeably. The RC materials are much closer... but then why not use actual GMAT RC passages to study for the GMAT? Why not use the real thing instead of something close to the real thing?

I think the best practice questions to use are those from the Official Guides, GMATPrep, and GMAT Focus.

At the same time, you do need to identify materials that will acually teach you what to know / do in order to get better at these three question types. That material is going to come from a test-prep company - could be a book, online materials, whatever. So, ask around, find out what people have used and liked, and even go to a bookstore to browse. Find what works for you and use it! Good luck!