aditya432 wrote:I gave GMAT last year when I got 640. Q49/V28
I am working on giving GMAT again this year in another 3 months. I have started preparing with Manhattan Verbal Strategy Series. I gave Manhattan CAT 1. I wasn't concentrating hard on Maths as I wanted to reach Verbal section.
In verbal, I was smoothly completing all the questions. My concentration was a bit poor though.
I scored 640 again with Q43/V34.
I have been practicing from Official Guide and Review. My accuracy in Verbal is 80%. I have Kaplan 800 to practice more questions.
Can someone suggest me a few ways to improve this? What else can I buy? How accurate is Manhattan CAT?
First of all, people using Manhattan CATs tend to generate score a little below what they would generate on an official CAT.
Now, as far as your CAT goes, it seems pretty obvious that your focus on verbal, both in your preparation and when taking the CAT, likely weakened your quant performance.
So one thing you need to do is keep working on quant, finding areas where you are weaker and working to get stronger in them and also just doing various types of quant questions to get your game back up to speed. For working on specific areas of quant, there are various categorizable questions banks, including ones offered by BellCurves and Grockit, to name just a couple.
I am not sure what else you might buy to get better at verbal. It sounds as if you at least have plenty of resources for learning rules and strategies for verbal. What you might need to do in order to do better on verbal is learn how to hack the verbal questions to get them right.
People get all caught up in learning rules and strategies to apply to answering GMAT verbal questions, but in the end what rocking GMAT verbal comes down to is one's skill in seeing details, understanding the logic of arguments and sentences, and generally hacking one's way to answers. So while it may help to continue learning about things like rules for SC and different components of arguments for CR, maybe to get better at handling the verbal section you need to work more on learning to hack your way to right answers.
This learning process can include doing things like not looking at explanations to questions you have gotten wrong until you have redone them seeking to get a right answer the second time around and looking over questions you didn't get to see how you could have gotten them right even without learning anything new. Also it can help to spend well over two minutes working on practice questions that are challenging you if that's what it takes to hack your way to right answers.
There won't be any explanations on the test. So get used to having at questions until you see what's going on and find your way to the right answers.
GMAT verbal is not such a mystery. It's one big logic and reasoning game, and the more you understand that and act accordingly, the better you will do on the section.
