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Disappointed by Verbal score and SC

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Disappointed by Verbal score and SC

by nav!n » Thu Jul 07, 2011 8:20 am
Hello,
I have started preparing for the Gmat since last month. I am finding myself struggling with the SC section. I have almost read on every single forum that if you are weak in SC you should feel lucky because you have maximum scope of improvement in SC , but unfortunately i am finding it the most difficult section to improve.

I got 650 on Gmat Prep 1 (q 49 , v 28).
I started my SC prep with MGMAT SC book . I read it about 3-4 times , took notes and solved the exercises at the end of chapters (Didnt solved the OG's questions though , I thought that would not be a good strategy to prepare as questions become relatively easy when they get categorized by topic , so i kept OG for later practice). After finishing MGMAT SC I started with OG 12 , I was very disappointed by my performance on it , i had a consistent hit rate of 50-60% on the SC section :(. RC and CR were good with around 90% hit rate .
I need some advice regarding strategy to deal with SC questions , i think i am getting phobic to this section . After 3 weeks of study I find myself where i started. I have also heard that verbal contributes more toward your percentile as compared to quant which doubled my apprehension as i was relying on my quant , but it is not going to help with this verbal score.

I gave my another gmat prep test today and i skipped the score window in a hurry to review a quant question on which i got stuck and realized that you cannot see your scaled scores again :(.Is there any way by which i can get to the scale score window as in the image i have attached .





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by Brian@VeritasPrep » Thu Jul 07, 2011 9:16 am
Hey nav!n,

Sorry to hear about your SC frustration!

Based on what you wrote, I'm pretty confident that this is your situation:

-You're overthinking grammar way too much
-You're looking at idiomatic differences and missing the more common error categories (like verb tenses, pronoun agreement, etc.)
-You're forcing yourself to think in grammatical terms (gerund, participle, past-progressive, etc.) and not allowing yourself to think logically

Does that sound like you? If you've read the same book multiple times, focused on taking notes, etc., it certainly sounds like you're prone to the above, labor-intensive method of SC. But SC is much more about logic than you'd think. My suggestions:

1) Relax - it's not as hard as you think it is.

I say that because you're seeing conspiracies all over the place, as though Lee Harvey Oswald wrote these questions for the CIA. "Every single forum" says that "you should feel lucky to be weak in SC"? The verbal section counts more toward your percentile? You're stressing these things that don't matter and aren't really true. Yes, if you're weak in an area it's good to see it as an opportunity to improve and not a death sentence for your score. And, yes, if you have a near-perfect quant score the verbal section is going to be more important for your overall percentile since you don't have much wiggle room on the quant. But the GMAT is a lot more straightforward than you think, so don't see it as a spy novel! As on any test, if you answer questions correctly you get a high score.

2) Avoid using words like "unidiomatic" and grammatical jargon

You have to make these questions make logical sense to you, and for most of us that grammatical jargon just doesn't aid that. If you see a sentence like:

Before he has been swimming he will be eating a sandwich.

Yeah, the first verb is present perfect and the future progressive (I think...) but you don't need to use terms like that (thank God...although I'm pretty sure I'm right) to know that this is an illogical sequence of events. The sandwich eating has to come before the swimming - that's what the word "before" indicates. So we need verb tenses that give a logical sequence:

Before he went swimming, he ate a sandwich.

Similarly, the word "unidiomatic" may be the least helpful word in the English language. It means about as much as someone calling you "sweet" or "nice" in a middle school yearbook - it's a placeholder adjective because someone can't think of or doesn't want to say the appropriate word. "Unidiomatic" just means "that's not the way you say it", and on a standardized test that's not an effective burden of proof to determine that you're a good fit at Harvard and I really can't apply to anywhere in the top 50. For the GMAT to be a well-written test the standards have to be much more concrete, so look for reasons why "that's not the right way to say it". More often than not those reasons have to do with logic, but in order to pay attention to the logic of a phrase you almost have to divorce yourself from dissecting the sentence term-by-term. Take a step back and ask "does this make sense" or "how is this meaning in B different from the meaning in E".

3) Analyze your own performance and ask "why" a lot.

"I'm really struggling with SC" is a tough phrase to get your head around. So try to think about which types of SC questions are giving you the most problems. Do you struggle with:

Comparisons
Modifiers
Sentences in which the entire sentence is underlined
Longer sentences

And when you're selecting incorrect answers, is it because:

The wrong answer just "sounds better"?
You're unable to determine the proper subject of the verb in question?
You think that the correct answer is idiomatically wrong?

If you can narrow your difficulties down, sometimes just that alone is a great signal to yourself to focus more when those situations arise. Or at least you'll be better able to work on specific areas and see yourself making progress.


Overall, I think the biggest key for you is to do SC on your own terms - understand how you think about these and how to use your strengths (the fact that you're doing really well on the other question types means that you're a strong logical thinker) to solve these. GMAT SC is much less technical than most people make it out to be, so see if you can take a few steps back, relax, and learn to enjoy these (or at least not completely stress them).
Brian Galvin
GMAT Instructor
Chief Academic Officer
Veritas Prep

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by nav!n » Thu Jul 07, 2011 12:29 pm
Based on what you wrote, I'm pretty confident that this is your situation:

-You're overthinking grammar way too much
-You're looking at idiomatic differences and missing the more common error categories (like verb tenses, pronoun agreement, etc.)
-You're forcing yourself to think in grammatical terms (gerund, participle, past-progressive, etc.) and not allowing yourself to think logically


Yes that's very true .
Thanks a lot for suggestions. :)
Dear life , When I said "Can my day get any worse" It was a rhetorical question not a challenge!
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