Try to view everything on the GMAT as a test of your decision making abilities. For example, the quantitative section of the test is not actually designed because business schools want to make sure that you have coordinate geometry skills (for example), but rather just to give them a subject matter to test your decision making.

For sentence correction, you do need to know standard English grammar but you don't really have to have a lot of technical knowledge or terminology, you probably know more grammar than you realize. The key is to view each sentence correction as a series of decisions. Look at the answer choices to spot differences. Use these differences to guide you in eliminating incorrect answers. This is a completely different way of looking at sentence correction. You are not reading the entire sentence each time looking for the one that sounds best, but eliminating the incorrect answers based on definite choices like singular versus plural.

You can even try looking at the answer choices before you read the sentence (just to practice - not for test day) and work on identifying these differences in the answer choices. As you get better at spotting these you will be more confident in your sentence correction!

Hi David,

I have tried your strategy and it seems to have worked. I just did Manhattan Practise test 1 (From 2010 book), got Q(+30, -7) and V(+26, -15). In 2 weeks, if I can manage to reduce my incorrect from -7 to -3/-4 in Q and from -15 to -8/-12 in V, will this help me achieve gmat score of 700+. Also, I have Manhattan 2010 book, is it any good? It has 5 CAT and 1 online (dont want to do easy test and think that I am improving. Thinking of registering for few more test from other websites. It would be good for to advise on this.

Many Thanks

Glad to hear that you are already improving...for Reading Comp. you might want to try stopping after each paragraph -immediately after you read it - and boiling it down to between 6 and 12 words. It is hard to do at first, but soon you realize that you can do it for any paragraph. This will help you focus on the "comprehension" part of reading comprehension.

I really can't speak to the Manhattan 2010 book. You should search other posts for a discussion of the relative difficulty of their practice tests. I have seen such a discussion in this forum not too long ago.

Perhaps others will weigh in on practice tests that you might want to purchase...we have 15 tests available at Veritas (more than other leading companies) but those are only offered in conjunction with a course or private tutoring...

David