GMAT Strategy

I had 2 months to study for gmat. I spent most of my time studying Quant and I feel I am comfortable with everything that Quant has to offer. I took a practice test and scored a miserable 55 percentile on verbal. I only have 10 days left for my GMAT and I need to attack all the low hanging fruits of verbal.

Any suggestions on the low hanging fruits? I have the beat the gmat flashcards which I starting doing, anything else??

Hi Abhijeet,

You can't succeed with the low hanging foods as there is no short cut to success. What you will need to do is to focus on your strong points in these last days. You need to cut down those mistakes you are doing/making in your strong areas. We can suggest you to go through solved queries as much you can and try to polish your strong points.


Wishing you good luck

You could try memorizing idioms. That will maybe help you get 1-2 more questions right on the verbal section. It might be worth the effort.

Hate to disagree with IJR but I disagree 100%. Idioms are the highest-hanging fruit (if you'll continue the analogy) out there...there are thousands and you'll see maybe 15 SC questions, so it's a pretty low ROI.

I'd advise focusing on:

Critical Reasoning
Paying particular attention to the conclusion of each argument. Maybe the easiest mistake to make is to misread the conclusion ever-so-slightly, and the GMAT usually has a good trap answer waiting for you if you make that mistake. Spending an extra 5-7 seconds to really embrace the conclusion specifically can pay huge dividends, and if you emphasize that in your studies you'll see that improvement.

They love to give you conclusions such as "we should restructure the workday so that people will get more sleep" (your mind thinks "shorten the workday"); "ancestors of modern humans lived in region X between these years" (your mind thinks "the earliest modern ancestors"); "one must be impartial with personnel matters when dealing with one's own relatives" (your mind thinks "do not hire/promote relatives"). And the trap answers are set to exploit where the test knows your mind is likely to go, just a few degrees out of scope.


Sentence Correction
Find 2-3 error categories and just master them to the point where you're salivating, hoping that they give you, say, a modifier. I don't think anyone should ever miss a modifier...they're set up with commas and underlines, making them clear to spot, and then your job is also clear - if it's not a logical description of the adjacent noun/noun-phrase, it's wrong. If you can find a couple of error categories and just make it your duty that those will never beat you, you have a huge step forward.

Reading Comprehension
Do some passages and just focus on spotting structural language (however, thus, also, a first/second/third reason, etc.) and understanding the direction of the passage even with minimal understanding of the content. You'll find that you can answer a lot of questions just by getting the direction right, and you can use this method to save some time to go back and answer the specific questions (the answers to which you're probably not going to remember, anyway, so you might as well plan on going back to the passage to find/understand details in the first place).


These verbal articles should give you some insight...

https://www.veritasprep.com/blog/2011/08 ... trategies/

https://www.veritasprep.com/blog/2011/07 ... trategies/

https://www.veritasprep.com/blog/2011/06 ... trategies/

That's quite comprehensive Brian.

I am at a slight discomfort with SC questions.

My test date is almost 2 months away but would you recommend familiarizing myself with Idioms or should I just concentrate on parallelism and subject verb agreement etc.

Thanks,
Suyash[/quote]

IJR wrote:You could try memorizing idioms. That will maybe help you get 1-2 more questions right on the verbal section. It might be worth the effort.

In the GMAT Sentence Correction questions, GMAC has tried to minimize cultural bias. Instructors, please correct me if I am wrong. Instead of being tested on idioms, you will often be confronted with two answer choices which are grammatically correct, but only one of which has the correct intended meaning. I am just parroting what I have heard through the grapevine, so I could be wrong. It's worth an investigation.

From Dr. Rudner's post (GMAC)

Regarding Idioms:

"The general categories of language-use skill tested in GMAT Sentence Correction items haven't changed, and test takers do not need to do anything different to prepare for the Verbal section of the GMAT.

For years, GMAC has paid close attention to the growing international make up of GMAT test takers and has worked to assure that the exam is not viewed as - nor is it actually -an American test. As the GMAT exam has expanded globally and been taken by more students from around the world, GMAC has continually made extra efforts to ensure that newly introduced GMAT items do not depend on familiarity with distinctively American expressions and usages. We have taken steps all along the way to ensure global fairness and appropriateness."

Regarding Grammar in Sentence Correction Questions:

"In recent years, GMAT item writers have been concentrating on the reasoning aspects rather than the purely grammatical aspects of Sentence Correction skills. As always, test takers need to carefully read the prompt in order to choose the answer that produces the most effective sentence. This means that while two sentences may both be grammatically appropriate, the correct answer is the sentence that is most "effective," the sentence that better expresses the idea.

The end result is a GMAT exam that doesn't test simply a person's ability to memorize grammatical rules or recognize idioms for their colloquial meanings but a test that rewards reasoning regardless of the test takers background."

Finally, Dr. Rudner closes with this statement:

"The GMAT exam tests higher order reasoning and preparing for the exam remains an exercise in developing and exercising those skills."

Great stuff, artistocrat - and Suyesh I'll echo what artistocrat said. Memorizing/learning idioms is the lowest ROI on your study that you can have. I'd spend your time becoming really comfortable with subject-verb agreement, pronoun agreement, modifiers, verb tenses/timelines, etc. You know that you'll see several of each type on the test. Idioms are pretty much by definition single-use rules. And maybe the most dangerous thing about making that a primary study method is that it "feels" productive when it's really not. You're spending time and energy on something that the GMAT doesn't even really test, and that time and energy could be exponentially better spent learning and mastering the GMAT's core concepts.