Game-Changing Verbal Tip
If you want to score high on GMAT Verbal, or you’ve been having trouble increasing your GMAT Verbal score, there are some highly effective steps you can take to get yourself on track to your goal. Let’s talk about one such step now.
Don’t Just Run Through Practice Questions to Prepare for GMAT Verbal
Many GMAT aspirants — particularly native English speakers — underestimate the difficulty of the Verbal section. They figure that, if they’re generally well-spoken and well-read, they can simply answer a bunch of Verbal questions and be ready for test day. What could be so difficult? It’s just words. Right? This line of thinking is far from the truth.
GMAT Verbal is no joke, even for native speakers. Increasing your Verbal score by, for example, 10 points can require a lot of work. So, unless your baseline Verbal score is already very close to your goal score, doing practice questions probably won’t be enough to close the gap.
You won’t likely learn the array of concepts and techniques you need to score high in GMAT Verbal by simply reading the explanations to Verbal practice questions you answered incorrectly. This is a popular but ineffective GMAT prep strategy.
A student answers a couple dozen random practice questions with a timer going, gets many of them wrong, and then reads the answer explanations for the questions missed, in order to find out what they needed to do to answer the question correctly. I know of students who answered literally hundreds of questions in using such a “study plan” and didn’t see their Verbal scores budge.
How can that be? Well, reading an explanation that tells you what you did wrong and what you could’ve done right is not the same as actually knowing those things and then putting them into practice. And when you’re doing practice questions as a method of learning, you’re probably not going to immediately apply what you just learned from an explanation. Instead, you’re going to say, “OK, I’ve learned that now,” and move on to the next set of questions, without applying what you learned. As a result, there is a good chance that you won’t think to use that information by the time you see another question to which the information applies.
Furthermore, completing lots of practice questions before you’ve mastered the concepts and techniques necessary for efficiently identifying the correct answers to those questions can be similar to going to the driving range and hitting thousands of golf balls without ever having learned how to use a golf club. Will your game improve that way, or will you just be solidifying bad habits?
Conclusion: Don’t attempt to master GMAT Verbal by simply answering practice questions and reading answer explanations.
