My Personal Struggle with GMAT Verbal (and How I’m Trying to Improve)

Critical Reasoning, Reading Comprehension
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Hi everyone,

I thought I’d share a bit of my own journey with GMAT Verbal. To be honest, my weakest area has always been Critical Reasoning (CR). At first, I assumed CR would be straightforward—just logic, right? But on timed practice tests, I often find myself rereading the same short passage multiple times and still not being 100% sure what the “gap” in the argument is.

Here are a few things I’ve been experimenting with:

Pre-thinking: before looking at the answer choices, I try to predict what kind of assumption or reasoning flaw might exist. This helps me avoid getting distracted by tempting but irrelevant options.

Breaking down arguments: I now write a super quick structure (Conclusion / Premise / Assumption) on my scratch pad. It feels slower at first, but in reality, it saves me from second-guessing later.

Timed drills: Instead of doing 1-2 CR questions casually, I push myself to do sets of 10 under strict time. It really shows me where I lose focus.

Even with these tactics, I still feel like progress is slow. I’m curious:

Do you also struggle more with CR than SC or RC?

Have you found any particular book, video, or habit that really helped you crack CR?

Would love to hear how others tackled this challenge—maybe I can pick up some tips to finally make CR less of a pain!
Source: — Verbal Reasoning |

Newbie | Next Rank: 10 Posts
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I can relate to this a lot—CR felt deceptively simple at first, then became the most inconsistent section for me.

One thing that helped me was shifting focus from “finding the gap” to understanding the author’s intent. Instead of asking “what’s missing?”, I started asking “what is this argument trying to prove, and what must be true for that to hold?” That subtle shift made assumption questions especially more manageable.

Also, I realized I was over-reading. CR passages are short, but I used to treat them like RC. Now I read once, slowly but deliberately, and force myself to paraphrase the conclusion in plain language before moving on. If I can’t do that, I know I didn’t really get it.

For resources, I found it useful to review not just why the correct answer works, but exactly why each wrong answer is wrong. That’s where a lot of the pattern recognition came from.

Progress does feel slow with CR, but once it clicks, it’s surprisingly stable compared to RC. You're definitely on the right track with what you're doing.

Newbie | Next Rank: 10 Posts
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I can relate to this a lot. CR was definitely harder for me than SC because it feels less about memorizing rules and more about slowing down and understanding the logic behind the argument. One thing that helped me was focusing less on getting questions right immediately and more on reviewing why each wrong answer was wrong.

Your idea of breaking arguments into conclusion/premise/assumption is actually really solid. It feels slow at first, but over time it becomes more automatic. Also, timed sets helped me too, especially for building focus under pressure.

You’re probably improving more than you think—it just takes a while before it starts showing consistently in scores.