GMAT Strategy

Hi sampolo:

It sounds like the best thing you can do to improve your verbal score is work on your pacing. You mentioned that when you go through various verbal questions in an untimed environment, you perform fairly well. This isn't necessarily the case when you're timed. This almost sounds like a psychological block rather than a lack of skill/knowledge.

If I were you, I would emphasize going through lots of verbal question sets and using a stop watch to make sure you are keeping pace. Time management is a real issue when taking the GMAT, and the only way I know of being effective at time management is doing a lot of timed practice.

Also--do you find yourself re-reading passages and CR prompts? This is a very common way to lose time on verbal. Try to force yourself to read text JUST ONCE, and see what happens to your performance. This is actually very difficult to do, but manageable with sufficient practice.

Best of luck!

Is it taking you 10 minutes to read a passage of this length? Or 10 min to read the passage and answer the associated questions? I'm not really clear on that...

Unfortunately, I can't really suggest an ideal pacing for RC because it dramatically varies from person to person.

Check out the RC resources available on the GMAT Resource Wiki: https://www.beatthegmat.com/wiki/

Best of luck!

Re: timing

Each range listed below depends upon the length and complexity of that particular problem / passage.

For SC, you generally want to spend about 1 to 1.5 minutes.

For CR, right around 2 minutes.

For RC, you should spend about 2-3 minutes upfront reading the passage and roughly 1.5 to 2 min for each question.

DO jot down some notes on RC - it will help keep you focused on your first read-through and you'll make sure that you get the most important points. Concentrate on high-level stuff (what's the overall point? what's the structure of the passage?) rather than nit-picky detail. You won't remember all the detail anyway - you can come back to it if you get a question on it.

Also, jot down some notes for CR. Depending on how good your short-term memory is, you may be able to do this only for the hardest ones, or you may want to do it for all of them. But, again, the note-taking is to help you focus and think critically about the argument on your first read-through. What's so important that it's worth writing down? Then it must be important to notice in general.

Also, do go back and examine questions after you finish them. Figure out not just why the right answer is right but why the four wrong answers are wrong. On verbal, it's often the case that you find the right answer only by eliminating the four wrong answers. The better you get at spotting wrong answers, the better you'll be at finding the right answers.

Oh - and when you get that SC book - memorize it.