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Last week before GMAT: Still suck at SC

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Last week before GMAT: Still suck at SC

by ds01 » Sun Jul 25, 2010 2:02 pm
Hey everybody,

was hoping for some help as i approach my last week of study. I've been reading the forums pretty regularly and seem to do great when practicing on SC from the OG and OG Verbal but for some reason cannot seem to do well on the practice tests. Just took the first of the two official practice tests and got a 730 (Q50 V38). I think i can improve the Q to a 51 but my verbal score is still predominantly being lowered by sentence correction (out of 10 wrong on verbal, 7 were SC).

I still have one more practice test left and the test is scheduled for august 2, but I am hoping to be able to improve to a 750 or so and think that if I can simply have some minor improvements in my strategy or a way to warm up quickly for the test I will be able to ace it. It seems as if it takes me some time to warm up on SC and I guess I am thinking if there is any easier way to quickly do this. I also keep finishing the verbal section with about 25 minutes left despite taking notes for both CR and RC.

Any help would be appreciated. So far all I plan on doing is reviewing the answers for all 200+ SC in the OG and OG Verbal and making sure to slow everything down on test day for SC.

Thanks in advance for any help,

David
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by barcebal » Sun Jul 25, 2010 9:56 pm
A few things that have been helping me (I'm a lot like you by the way, high Quant, lower verbal). Can't say they're that magic pill we all want, but they help.

(1) Look for 3/2 splits.

This completely changed the way that I look at SC. After I read the sentence carefully, I glance through the answer choices to find what's different. Maybe I see a difference in verb tenses, with two answers in the present and 3 in the past. Not all SC have a split, but a lot do. If you know, referring back to my example, that the tense MUST be present, you can begin to eliminate a bunch of answers quickly. Then you keep splitting. By focusing on the differences you can use process of elimination better. This works really well when identifying subjects after introductory phrases (e.g. "While in Paris, the artist painted") and subject/verb agreement items "The orchestra put its instruments away."


One last note on this: only split if there are key indicators that MUST be corrected to continue. For example, GMAT always tricks me with parallelism questions by making me think I need my lists to be a certain way, which I can't find unless I realize that they completely went about the correction in a different way.


(2) After I glance through all of the questions, I eliminate, one by one. I set up my paper like this (for all of my verbal actually)
A B C D E
1
2
3
4
5
etc

I put an X for answers I am confident are WRONG. I draw half circles for the ones I'm not sure of and full circles for what I'm 80%+ confident of. I always read the remaining answer choices even if i think an earlier answer choice is good enough.

(3) Tell yourself why the answers are wrong: As I draw my X's I try to teach myself why the answer is wrong. Another good way to practice this is to help someone in the forums. Even if you peek at the OA, you can still go through and explain to somebody what is wrong.

(4) Finally I use Grockit a lot. You can create your own study group and focus your study on specific types of SC and/or difficulty. I like this because I get a lot of questions that are within the same type of SC category which has really helped me understand things like misplaced modifiers.

Hopefully this helps.

Good luck man,

Blake
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