Hi DS219.
What you experienced happens all of the time. A person thinks that he or she scored pretty high on verbal, and it turns out that actually the score was way lower than what the person though he or she had achieved.
This generally happens for a couple of reasons.
The less common reason is that the person used mostly non official practice tests and was a little thrown off by the difference between the style of the questions on the practice tests that the person was using and the style of the questions on the actual GMAT. So if you mostly used non official practice tests, you might have had something along these lines happen.
The more common reason is that the person's processes for choosing answers were just not tight enough or had significant flaws in them. I mean, consider what happens if you have flawed methods. You use those methods and feel great! "I am doing everything just right." Meanwhile, since the methods are flawed you are using them "just right" for getting wrong answers. Often the result of using flawed methods is pretty much just what you experienced, a score in the low to mid 30's.
Here's an example to hammer my point home.
I was working with someone who claimed to be "good at sentence correction." So we did some medium level, maybe 32 to 37 level, questions, and he was getting them all right, rather quickly. "See that? I am good at sentence correction." but I was watching "terrified". Why, because his methods were way flawed. He was getting them right without noticing that what he was doing was something like driving with his eyes half shut, and just barely missing trees. So I suggested that we do some higher level questions. He got smoked right and left.
The methods that he was using were good enough for more basic questions, but once the questions got trickier, the flaws in the methods starting directing him to wrong answers.
So to consistently score higher on verbal, you have to do two things. You have to get better at seeing what you have to see in order to make good decisions, and you have to tighten up and otherwise improve the processes that you use to get to answers.
You asked what resources to use. I am not aware of any resources that can accomplish these things for you. Yes there are some that can outline some of the things you have to see, such as key aspects of CR questions and sentence construction basics, and suggest some processes to use, but mostly you have to train yourself to do these things.
How can you do that? By doing verbal questions very slowly and carefully, and shooting for a close to 100% hit rate in practice. How do you hit 100%, or close to it? By not leaving a practice question until you clearly see EXACTLY why all of the wrong answers are wrong and why the right answer is right.
If you don't get one right, consider what you needed to see in order to get it right and what about your process could have been better.
Then do more questions and seek to see more and use better processes.
If you can clearly see what you have to see and if your processes are tight, you will get pretty much every verbal question right and score V46+.
For more verbal questions, you could use the GMAC Question Pack, you could get the e book, not the destructive paper version, of the OG for Verbal Review, and use the online question bank.
Also, do not finish the section early. Use up all of the time you have to see as much as possible.
There's your prescription. Take that approach and you can get to a point such that you clearly see the right answers to pretty much all verbal questions all of the time. Getting the right answer may not be easy every time - sometimes you have to be dogged, looking and looking at the question and answers until you see what's going on - but you can become very good at achieving the clarity that you need in order to get them right.
Last edited by
MartyMurray on Wed Feb 06, 2019 9:14 am, edited 1 time in total.
I hope you will do great next time! And thanks everyone for great tips!
