Don’t Focus on What GMAT Verbal Did in the Past[/color]
Often, GMAT Verbal tips and tricks involve “what the GMAT does.” For example, someone might say, “In a Critical Reasoning question about a city, information about another city is not relevant to the argument. That’s what the GMAT does.” Or someone might say, “In Sentence Correction, a pronoun referring to a possessive noun is incorrect. That’s what the GMAT does.”
Here’s the thing though: It’s true that the GMAT has done both of the things I just mentioned. However, it’s also true that the GMAT has also done the opposite of those things. In other words, information about a city has been relevant in a Critical Reasoning question about another city, and a pronoun referring to a possessive noun has been considered correct in Sentence Correction.
So, what’s going on here? What’s going on is that, when people talk about “what the GMAT does,” they are often talking about what the GMAT did in the past. The issue is that what the GMAT did in the past isn’t necessarily what the GMAT will do on your test. This fact isn’t surprising since language is flexible, and what doesn’t work in one context may work in another.
Furthermore, there are many ways GMAT Verbal questions can work. So, the Verbal questions you see on test day could be rather different from any past Verbal questions.
The takeaway here is the following. If your Verbal GMAT prep is too focused on what went on in past GMAT questions, you may get false impressions of what’s incorrect or correct. Also, you may not learn what you need to know to correctly answer the Verbal questions on your GMAT.
Warmest regards,
Scott Woodbury-Stewart
Founder & CEO, Target Test Prep
