Experts please pitch in

The good news for you - you know exactly where you need to improve...your Q48 is strong and you may notch that up a bit, but nearly all of your improvement should come from verbal, so you now know where to devote at least 75% of your study time.

And actually - I'd argue that your situation is pretty common in your SC frustration. Many - I'd say most - test takers spend most of their SC studying time studying "WHAT" (what you should know, what are the rules) and not "HOW" (how to do questions, how to know which rules are important, how to trim down a 45-word sentence into the 12 that are important).

My suggestion to you: Do problems and spend more time on "how should I have known it was testing ________" than on "what was the rule?". The solutions rarely do you any favors, as they tend to focus only on the rule ("(A) is wrong because it violates parallel structure...") but you can learn to spot patterns in questions like:

*If the beginning of the sentence is a description followed by a comma, and the underline is anywhere near it, it's a Modifier question.

*If there are any singular/plural differences between the answer choices ("has" vs. "have" or "its" vs. "their", for example), your job is to determine which noun/subject those choices refer back to.

*If you see words like "both" or "neither" setting up a construction, you're responsible for parallel structure between "both x and y", "neither x nor y", "not only x but also y", etc.

Based on what you've studied you're probably pretty close to where you need to be in terms of content, but the GMAT isn't a content-driven test. You now need to evolve your preparation to encompass what to do with that knowledge, and that comes from practice and strategy.

Thanks a ton Brian for your inputs.

I am going to follow the approach suggested by you for SC.


Thanks again!!