You may think that the only way to increase your Verbal score is to do something difficult or involved. However, you can also increase your score significantly just by doing basic things better.

For instance, in Reading Comprehension questions, incorrect answer choices are often half right and half wrong. So, if you read only the beginning of a choice before deciding it’s right or wrong, you could easily miss the part of the choice that is not correct. Test-takers choose incorrect RC answers for this reason all the time. By simply reading RC answer choices in their entirety, you avoid making a common, score-eroding misstep.

Similarly, in Critical Reasoning questions, there are sometimes incorrect answers that do the opposite of what the correct answer must do. All the same, those incorrect answers may be relevant to the given argument. So, if you lose track of what the question is asking, you can easily fall for one of these “opposite traps.” GMAT test-takers make this error all the time.

Of course, if you perform the simple step of making sure you’ve firmly identified what the question is asking for–or double-checking that your answer does what the question asks before you make your selection–you can avoid this trap.

Notice that these are pretty basic aspects of answering Verbal questions: read the entire answer choice, identify what the question is asking for–not the most complex stuff. Nevertheless, you will be surprised at how much your Verbal performance can improve if you make a point of executing these basics flawlessly.

Warmest regards,

Scott Woodbury-Stewart
Founder & CEO, Target Test Prep