Critical Reasoning

Hi Experts
I have my GMAT scheduled on 20th June and I have been trying a lot of verbal sets of late to try and increase my stamina.
I am seeing a usual pattern with my verbal sets. Whenever I read any CR question and if I understand the argument correctly then I am pretty sure that I will nail that question any given day, but if I do not understand the argument in one go then followings things happen to me :
1) I am for sure going to take more than 2.5 minutes on that
2) My chances of getting it right is very very low
3) As a result of this I mess up my future questions.
So my point is if I get 3-4 CR questions in actual GMAt that I do not understand, then there is a very high probability of me messing up my verbal section.
Please help me any specific pointers that I can include/improve to increase my CR accuracy.

Some history about me :
I kicked of my prep one month ago and I have tried GMAT PREP 1 and 2 yet.
Took GMAT prep 1 before starting my prep and scored 620()
Last week took GMAT prep 2 and scored 680(Q50 and V31).
I could not finish my verbal in time because of this issue , otherwise I am confident that I could have scored more in verbal.

Hey manihar,

The best resolution to your problem is pretty simple. While I am unable to diagnose your primary issues with critical reasoning given the limited information that I have, I can certainly diagnose a testing problem that you have. The GMAT is a game, and one to be played strategically. You do not want to view this test like you would a test in high school or college -> take your best shot at every problem until the end. If you know upon reading a critical reasoning question that you do not understand it and are highly unlikely to get it correct, then you should be spending less time on that question than average, not more. As soon as you come to the realization that you are highly unlikely to understand and correctly answer a question, you need to immediately begin thinking about how you can get rid of some of the answer choices with logic in order to increase your odds. If you really don't understand the argument, then your best bet here is to probably try to pick 1 or 2 answer choices that seem very out of scope, scrap them, and then guess from the remaining answer choices and move on.

Devoting an excessive amount of time to any one problem on the gmat is never worth it, period. The test is very holistic, and no one problem really matters that much...unless you let it. You let it by taking a disproportionate amount of time on it, and ultimately missing a bunch of other questions later on during the test because you are low on time. You are scoring high already, so if you clean up this habit that should help increase your verbal score and push you into the 700's.

I hope this helps!

Thanks for your prompt response Brandon.
I have one more question : Can you tell what should be my Verbal accuracy to hit V40.
I am asking because I do these verbal sets from GMAT prep qb1 and if I do 30 questions(10 questions each section) in a timed environment, then on an average I get 73-75% questions right. Will this be sufficient to hit V40 or I have to push more.

So that is a good question but unfortunately one that does not have a clear answer. The GMAT uses a pretty advanced and difficult to decipher algorithm that takes many factors into account when determining your score. Some of these factors include the difficulty level of the questions that you get correct/incorrect, how many questions you get incorrect in a row (a string of incorrect answers starts to hurt a lot), whether you leave any questions unanswered (this hurts you more than getting questions wrong, so if necessary guess on the last few to get answers in), etc. In general the most important thing is the difficulty level of the questions that you are missing -> missing easier questions hurts more. This is why Veritas preaches "securing your floor" in order to have a solid ground game on this test. You can get the same percentage of questions correct in 2 different tests and have substantially different scores.