GMAT Strategy

Hey Guys,
I need some advice on attempting verbal part in the test. I have been preparing for sometime and my last mock test score(MGMAT) is 610(Q46/V29).

For Quant, I haven't done a lot of 700+ question so i know i will improve once i complete my practice.

I am spending 80% most of my time studying Verbal but it is not improving at all. When i practice from OG, results are not very bad but timing is not good. I am taking more time doing CR questions and sometime more time on SC questions. IN SC, more time is spent on questions which are completely underlined. In CR, I always take 2 n half minutes to 3 minutes. In mock test this completely throws me out because i finally skip 1 or 2 RC altogether and it affects my SC too.

Can you please give some advice on how to improve CR accuracy rate and timing?

Timing is your issue right now. Accuracy isn't an immediate concern.

Pedagogically, the biggest thing you should change immediately is how you practice. You should practice EVERY question timed. Don't ever practice without a stopwatch running. Always do problems in sets with an appropriate time limit applied. (E.g. If you do a set of 5 SC questions, give yourself a time limit of 7:30.

Be ruthlessly strict about this. When the buzzer goes off, you're done. Just like the GMAT, you don't even get 1 second of grace period. Practice like this for a while, and you will already start to speed speed improvements.

Also, incorporate more guessing into your normal routine. On the real GMAT, questions will adjust to your ability such that you simply can not answer all of them in time. Get used to guessing on questions you don't know how to answer. As a first cut, I would plan to guess on 1 out of 5 questions, so in that set of 5 SC questions we mentioned before, give yourself a free skip on one of them. Choosing which one to skip is a skill all it's own.

My suggested vanilla timing (without knowing more about you):
SC: 1:30
CR: 2:20
RC: 1:00
RC Passage: 3-4 min
DS: 2:00
PS: 2:00

Let me know how it goes,

Hi there!

Let me try to answer your specific questions first:

1. "I am spending 80% most of my time studying Verbal but it is not improving at all."

At the outset, how do you know that you are not improving?? Basing it on your accuracy on OG may actually be a wrong way to measure progress because OG questions are graded from easy -> medium -> hard. So maybe a 70% accuracy on the earlier questions is poorer than a 60% accuracy towards the end. If your basis of evaluation is purely test scores then again there are a lot of things which can go wrong there - such as at what time you took the test (if you started it late), or if you took it with or without the AWA section etc.

In short as long as you are learning from your mistakes (and your correct responses) you are on the right path.

2. "When i practice from OG, results are not very bad but timing is not good. I am taking more time doing CR questions and sometime more time on SC questions. IN SC, more time is spent on questions which are completely underlined. In CR, I always take 2 n half minutes to 3 minutes. In mock test this completely throws me out because i finally skip 1 or 2 RC altogether and it affects my SC too. "

Firstly, tell me if your accuracy is very high if you take (say) 2.5 to 3mins in a CR question? If so and the only thing that is stopping you is the extra 30-40seconds you seem to spend then DON'T WORRY! Trust me you are in a far better position than most people who struggle with accuracy. Also remember that A TOUGH CR QUESTION WILL TAKE MORE TIME THAN ANY OTHER QUESTION TYPE ON THE GMAT. A tough inference or assumption question will throw a lot more at you than what you can handle in sub 2minutes.

Secondly I am not sure how long you take in SC since that information is missing from your post. Remember that EVERYONE finds the SC question where the complete sentence underlined difficult. So this is not a unique problem to you - it is a problem by the very nature of the question type. Since the entire sentence is underlined it is very hard to do a vertical scan PLUS it can be time consuming since you end up reading the same parts multiple times.

Thirdly as therealtomrose above suggested try to make sure that you are able to spend only a pre-determined time on each question type during practice. This is important because though on the test you would not be looking at the clock so often you will DEVELOP AN INTERNAL CALIBRATION of how long you are taking on a question. Why this is important is because
YOU SHOULD PICK AND CHOOSE YOUR MISTAKES THAN LET GMAT DECIDE IT FOR YOU!

Going by the last rule remember you rather chose to make a mistake (by educated guessing) on a tough CR or SC question (say the one where the entire sentence is underlined) then let go of (what could be a possibly easy) RC passage.

Some generic rules for the Verbal section on the GMAT:

1. Solve as much as Official Stuff as possible. This includes the OG, the Verbal Supplement, and tons of GMATPrep questions available online. Most test prep companies don't come close to making them as elegant as an official question. Worse you might end up learning wrong rules. As long as you are confident about the right answer try explaining it yourself.

2. Analyze each question thoroughly. I see way too many students just superficially skimming through the explanation. This is a waste of valuable questions (assume you are solving only Official ones). More than trying to glean the theory - try to see if there are structural patterns you can pick. For example - was I able to apply negation (for a CR question), could I have read this passage faster or did I waste time remembering too many details (for a RC question), could I have solve this question faster or should I have just guessed after I got to the last 2 choices (for any question type).

3. Remember that Verbal is still a lot about logic. There is only so many rules you can possibly learn. The difference between a 550 and a 730 is not that the latter "knows" more rules. I see people wasting time trying to memorize stuff: V-A-N pattern, Contra-positive etc. Not worth it. What is worth is the rules you can apply in less than 2 minutes on the test. So the RIGHT QUESTION TO ASK IS NOT "IF I CAN SOLVE THIS QUESTION" BUT "IF I CAN SOLVE THIS QUESTION IN 2 MINUTES".

Hope this helps,

Arun