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Cracking the Verbal Section

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Cracking the Verbal Section

by ashish2104 » Thu Jul 22, 2010 6:32 am
I am nearing my 2nd GMAT attempt.
First one was a disaster, scored just 570. Screwed up badly in quants and verbal.

I seriously need to do something for my verbal score. I am not sure if I am actually weak in SC, RC and/or CR. But one thing is for sure, I end up commiting similar no of wrong questions (12-18), irrespective of test source. Also, the mistakes arent always in one topic. they are interspread.

Any tips for this?

Also, i think i need to improve my CR's.....all suggestions welcome.
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by jonnymba » Thu Jul 22, 2010 8:29 am
hey Ashish,

What were your verbal and math subscores? How did you study verbal to prepare for your last test? Maybe it's the tools you used or how you used them?

I hope you get the improvement you seek. Verbal, especially SC, is what gave me the most trouble but I was able to improve it a lot between tests. I wrote about what worked for me in my debrief. Maybe you can use some of my experience to help your case. most important for me was to learn how to organize my study and how to review questions
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by Brian@VeritasPrep » Thu Jul 22, 2010 9:16 am
Hey Ashish,

Good question - if I could give you a one-liner on how to improve on verbal from a high level, it would be:

Read with a purpose; don't read simply to understand

The GMAT is, as much as anything else, a management test (it's the second word...that's the 'M'!), and one thing that they test over and over on the verbal side is your ability to manage information, and to manage it toward a specific goal.

Because of that, you want to be proactive with the way that you read so that you don't get lost in the details and forget your overall mission, which is:

SC - Look proactively for the errors that they test over and over (subject-verb agreement, pronoun agreement, parallel comparisons, etc.), and set aside the things that tend not to matter (adjectives and adverbs, descriptive modifiers that do not contain a modifier error, etc.)

RC - Read for the author's intent and main point by noting how he lays out an argument (this blog post explains it further: https://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/2010/04/ ... on-success), rather than trying to understand the subject matter (which is irrelevant - why would a business school care whether you know about different species of roundworms?).

CR - Read the question stem first to determine what your role is within the question - are you attacking an argument, trying to defend it, drawing a conclusion based on facts? Once you know your role, then read critically to better perform that task - look for holes in the argument presented if you're attacking, or note the specifics of the facts given if you're drawing a conclusion (e.g. "some, but not necessarily all, Democrats support the new spending bill...").

Obviously there are plenty of other techniques and strategy that will help you fine-tune this high-level strategy, but if I have only one forum post to tell someone how to improve on verbal, I'd say that reading proactively is the single-biggest key to verbal success.
Brian Galvin
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by ashish2104 » Thu Jul 22, 2010 9:17 pm
First of all, thank you jonny and Brian.
hey Ashish,

What were your verbal and math subscores? How did you study verbal to prepare for your last test? Maybe it's the tools you used or how you used them?
Jonny, My maths subscores range from 48 to 51, just fell below 48 ,sadly on the actual test to 44. I was weak in SC, so worked hard on it. But i lost my touch on CR. I have used 1)MGMAT SC guide, 2)OG12, 3)Verbal guide 2nd Ed, 4)Princeton review 5) and more recently, gmatfix solutions engine. But the real problem I face now is consistency. After solving 15 questions, i tend to get bored of reading. To get around this problem I had tried to read,read and read. But that only increased my reading speed.

I really liked Brian's sugestion. I normally read to understand which takes a lot out of me in those 15 questions. I wil now try to focus more on logic rather than detail.

Brian, I tend to get caught up in 2 choices in almost all verbal questions. The correct ans normally turns out to be the one which I eliminate. Any suggestions for this issue?
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by Brian@VeritasPrep » Fri Jul 23, 2010 8:42 am
Hey Ashish,

Great question about that "narrowing it down to two" problem. There's a reason for that:

I liken it to wine-tasting or eating sushi. You know how they give you the ginger leaves between pieces of sushi and the soda crackers between wines? In those cases it's to "cleanse your palate", or eliminate the aftertaste of what you just tasted so that you can fully appreciate what's next.

Well, think about what happens when you've narrowed your verbal answer choice down to two - in doing so, you've just read five answer choices, of which four are wrong. Those wrong answer choices are not part of the question - they've started to distract your mind from the real task at hand, whether that be weakening an author's conclusion in a CR problem or determining the cause of a scientific reaction in an RC problem. Effectively, you're left with the "aftertaste" of the wrong answers that may make it difficult for you to truly focus on your job.

The solution? "Cleanse your mental palate" by stopping and refreshing yourself on the question. You've already read the question and the stimulus, so it shouldn't take more than 5-10 seconds, but go back and re-read the question and the relevant part of the stimulus and you should be that much clearer on what you need to do.

The other benefit is that, typically, you'll eliminate 3 answer choices for one reason (g. "out of scope"), but the final decision requires a new thought process. By almost treating that final decision as a new question, you're much more likely to see the need to have a new basis for your decision, and will likely make that decision much more decisively and correctly.
Brian Galvin
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by Ratna » Sat Jul 24, 2010 12:45 am
Hi Ashish,

Even i used to do the same, doing all questions from different sources and used to spend very less time in Reviewing.

Which is a bad strategy, because we are trying to narrow down our boundary and being happy with the correct ones.

Now i postponed my date and started with verbal preparation and doing regular review and extensive thought process in mistakes and trying to get over them.

Hope you also can try this, it might work.

Thanks.
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