Study Strat for Verbal: Score progressively decreasing?

Critical Reasoning, Reading Comprehension
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Hi,

I've been studying for the gmat for about 2 months, and I am going to be taking the actual test this Friday. My weakest subject is quant, so I've focused my study there with good results (have increased my quant score from 44 up to 49). For verbal, I've just studied sentence correction using the Manhattan guide. On my first three practice tests for verbal(GMAT Prep 1, MGMAT 1 and 2), I scored a 46, 44, and 45 respectively. Considering my high verbal scores, I decided to solely focus on quant aside from practice some harder sentence correction questions. While I figured my first 46 could have been a fluke, after my next 2 high verbal scores, I figured I could consistently do well on verbal. However, after those three tests and after analyzing my mistakes on those tests, I've scored 2 41s and a 39 on MGMAT 3 and 4 and GMAT Prep 2, respectively. This is a pretty big problem considering my practice test scores have decreased from 730 and 740 (at the beginning) all the way down to 710 even while my quant score has increased.

What should I do over the next week to try to get my verbal score back up to par? I feel like I may be overanalyzing my answers or something at this point in comparison to at the beginning, but I don't know how to stop that considering analyzing is pretty much just the process of trying to pick the best answer. In terms of different answer types, I feel like I'm generally pretty solid on reading comprehension, and my errors come on sentence correction and critical reasoning questions. I definitely have time to go back through the manhattan sentence correction book again, and I could find some time to go through the Critical Reasoning Power Bible which I haven't done yet. Should I do either of those, or should I focus on some other form of prep?
Source: — Verbal Reasoning |

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by oldsole00 » Mon Apr 09, 2012 9:57 pm
Howdy, I'm curious how this worked out for you because I find myself in almost the exact same situation. First PT scored 720 (MGMAT PT 1) with 47V 42Q and that's progressively reversed itself to 49Q 42V for a 710 (GMAT Prep). I have about a month to fix this up, but it's alarming nonetheless and I'd love to hear how things worked out for you on exam day.

Cheers!