Help me with a study strategy on improving CR

cshi wrote:Hi fellow GMAT peers, My test in on 12/30/16 and I'm looking to improve on my verbal section especially CR. I know it's not a lot of time to do any major progress, but I'm just looking for a little bit of improvement. I had busy work throughout, but alas I have days off from tomorrow to Jan. The last test I took had me score a 540, I'm hoping for close to 600. I reviewed my stats and find my weakness to be mainly CR and RC, I'm not really sure I can really improve my RC, so I want to improve my CR. I have read the 5th edition MGMAT on CR, I have attempted about 90/124 of the OG 2016 questions. On the easy questions I barely get anything wrong, but once I get to 65+ questions, I start to see quite a few of them. I never found the CR to be hard, but I guess there are many things that can distract you from the correct answer. I find that sometimes I have to read the questions twice because I lost focus, I'm not good at taking notes so I wont really try to do that, but who knows. How should I develop my study plan so I can boost my score?

Here's my verbal crash course:

- Read voraciously everyday for the next week. (Anything challenging will do.) There's research suggesting that the physiology of our brains changes when we read more: https://www.theatlantic.com/education/ar ... in/282952/

- Consider incorporating some mindfulness meditation. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archi ... on/275564/

Afterwards, review the official material you've worked through and see if there are patterns to the questions you've missed. Anything unclear, post here. Jot a few notes to yourself about simple adjustments you can make. Remember that for all the strategies/grammar rules we teach, the verbal section is primarily about logic and focus. Practice boiling everything down to its essence. Always ask yourself, before you select an answer in sentence correction, if the sentence, when read literally, is clear and logical. Before you select an answer in Critical Reasoning always take another moment and ask if your answer really does impact the conclusion. Before you select an answer in Reading Comp ask yourself if there's textual support for that answer. Be relentless. Then hit one last official test: https://www.mba.com/us/store/store-catal ... ack-1.aspx

"Always look at the answer choices before you start to solve a problem"

This was very useful for you for the problem-solving section. I would traditionally try to read the question, solve the problem and then look for which answer choice matched my solution. However, sometimes, the answer choices gave clues to what I needed to look for in the solution as well as whether there was a shortcut that I could use to save time.