GMAT Strategy

Hi There

Need an urgent help/advise/opinion...whatever you call it! I gave the GMATprep-2 yesterday. I got 660, with Q-43 and V-38. Now, when I looked at the report in verbal, it showed that my first 7 were right, out of 41 only 9 were wrong and there were never a straight row of more than 2 questions wrong at any time. My last question was wrong and before that 32 was wrong.

I don't know where it all went wrong. I thought getting first 5-10 right helps. Also, there are not many wrongs too...like 9 out of 41. I am little confused. How should i evaluate and practice. Need advise seriously! I have my test in less than a week!

Thanks a bunch!!!

Mukeshk,


Unfortunately, missing 9 questions on the Verbal section is more detrimental to your score than is missing 9 questions on the Quant. Although it does help to do well early in the Verbal test, from the research I have been a part of, the Verbal section is less adaptive than is the Quant section.

It also could be that few of your misses were taken as experimental questions, assuming that GMATPrep does indeed build in "experimental" questions as we imagine it does.

Ultimately, you need to get very few Verbal questions wrong, throughout the test, in order to score in the 40's. Now, this goal is certainly achievable. You can, through practice, eventually expect to miss 3 or 4 questions reasonably. It partially depends on your weakness.

You can expect to get every Reading Comp question correct, and nearly every Critical Reasoning question correct. (Of course, I am pointing this towards someone with an already high Verbal score.) If you find yourself missing many of these questions, you should carefully analyze them. Did you misread anything in the passages? Did you fail to prove your answer on the Reading Comp? Did you make any simple mistakes on the Critical Reasoning, such as not comparing answers fully, or selecting and answer of the wrong direction?

The sentence correction section is a little more difficult to master at the upper levels, in my opinion. It can still be done at a reasonable level, however. You want to create an error log sheet of every SC you miss on your tests and in your homework. Try to identify any common themes. For example, a lot of high score students miss parallelism issues due to carelessness. If you consistently catch yourself missing this error type, or any other error type, you can start to actively look for the error in question, which greatly increases your chance of success.

In a nut shell, there is not a lot more I can suggest without having a better picture of your ability level. Are you missing any one question type predominantly? How are you doing with your homework, specifically on the problems in the OG?

Let me know if you gather any further insight. Keep in mind, sometimes you just get beat on a really hard question. It is important to realistically identify which questions you miss for manageable reasons, and then adjust for those scenarios.

Thank you for such a detailed input Oliver! I am going to look at the questions/answer with a finer comb now. Thanks again!