GMAT Verbal & Essays

When I took my diagnostic test I scored a V40. A second practice test gave me a V39. I have yet to do any studying for the verbal section of the GMAT so my question is, how much can I realistically expect to improve my initial score? I rarely miss a RC ? so I don't see the use of trying to improve that score, but I do think I could benefit from learning specific strategies for the other sections and from learning more idioms. I have all the Manhattan books at my disposal.

The reason I ask is because I have set a personal verbal score of 45 but I don't know how realistic it is to get that or higher considering how few people score that well.

thanks for the help!

b

If you are scoring 40 already and you think few people do score that high, then you should believe that you can be one of those 'few' who score well.

Just review your tests and make sure that you read all the explanations to see that you are sure of the concepts.

Yeah you are right. The truth is I do believe that with a little prep I could definitely get at least a 45 or 46. I was just reviewing the percentile and saw that passing 45 everything is 99th percentile and that psyched me for a second. So I guess what I really want to know is how feasible and worthwhile it is to try to score that high or past that. Not many people push their verbal score so high so I don't even know if there are resources or good reason to want to do better. It would help the overall score but considering that my math score right now is just average (Q42 on last practice) it might be better for me to take my verbal as it is and really push my math score up so that I can prove that I'm capable of handling the math required in an MBA (The only quant related courses I took in college were intro to finance and a couple of stats courses, no calculus).

Anyway I notice that I'm mostly just thinking outloud so thanks for the response. I think I will definitely make the effort to formalize the way I handle verbal questions and then I'll just see how far that takes me. In the meantime I'll focus on my Quant to make sure I have a competetive score there too.

Best,

Brian