Sentence Correction

Hi,

I am facing major issues in gmat sc.Even after going through egmat sc and manhattan sc i seem to remember nothing when sc questions pop up ie can't apply the rules/dont remember. I have solved all og gmat sc questions using my methodology that is do what seems right. My accuracy in medium and easy questions is 78 % with maximum time spent to be around 1 min 44 sec on a question majorly sloving questions within 1 min or a min. when it comes to hard questions i am not able to figure out answers and accuracy has fallen to aroung 48 % time taken per question is also more around 2 min or so. Kindly guide how to go about sc and do well i have a month in hand.

Hi krishhxa.

What you are experiencing such that you can readily handle the easier and medium questions but have a much lower hit rate on harder questions is rather common. Here's what I have seen underlying your type of situation.

The sophistication of the easier and medium questions is significantly different from that of the harder questions. The easier and medium questions tend to involve fairly straightforward errors often in a way appearing in patterns in the answer choices. In the more sophisticated questions the errors are more subtle and are often meaning based, and the answer choices can be significantly different from each other. So certain types of decision making strategies that tend to be effective for getting the right answers to easier and medium SC questions can be rather inadequate for getting the right answers to harder SC questions.

Here's an illustrative example.

Recently I was working with someone who told me that he was "good at SC." So we started answering some questions together, and he was doing medium questions and getting most of them right. That was great in a way, except that in watching what he was doing I could tell that his processes had significant flaws in them. I even felt nervous just watching him.

Then we went to harder questions, and surely enough he was stumped constantly and got many of them wrong.

His processes were just not sophisticated enough for getting the harder questions right. In some cases he was fairly confidently choosing the wrong answers and eliminating the right ones. In other cases he had almost no idea what to do.

So flawed or insufficiently sophisticated process are generally the reasons for people getting harder SC questions wrong. In fact, much of the time the harder questions are more meaning based than medium questions, and so things like memorized rules and idioms may be of limited utility for answering many harder questions, making processes even more important.

The upshot of all this is that in order to get more harder questions right, you need to make your processes more effective. In order to do that probably you need to work on SC questions very slowly, learning to see what you need to see in order to get the harder ones right consistently. Each question may take you fifteen minutes or more working that way, but you need to develop form before you speed back up. Taking three minutes to get a wrong answer is pretty much worthless. When you are practicing you are better off taking a half hour to get a right answer, because in doing that you develop the skills that you need.

Also, probably you should do questions one at a time. That way if you don't get a question right, you can recall exactly what you did and what was going through your mind as you went through the answer choices. A key question is, "What did I need to see in order to get this one right?" Another is, "How could I have gotten this one right without knowing anything other than what I already know?"

Using myself as an example, I achieved a high SC hit rate long before I knew some of the SC rules and concepts that I now know. What I didn't have in terms of knowledge of rules and concepts I made up for with solid processes.

So work slowly and develop solid processes. You may need also to review a few rules and concepts, but really there are not that many rules and concepts that one needs to know in order to achieve a high SC hit rate. Also, many of the answer choices contain multiple decision points, so that even if you aren't sure about one rule or concept you can make a correct decision without using that rule or concept.