GMAT Strategy

hello everyone,
I need some help. My test is on 9/27. I have given several MGMAT CAt, GMATPrep 1 and other CATS and my scores are all aout 660 with (Q45 and V35). I feel like I am stuck here. I have 4 more weeks to go. My target score is 720. I am confident that my quant score will improve up to 48. But my biggest question or worry here is that my verbal score. Lots of people who wrote the tests recently have much reduced score in verbal in the real exam. This is where I can go wrong on test day. I score very poorly in RC. CR is good and SC has improved a lot. I am still not able to hit my desired score in my practice test.

Please give me some inputs to improve my score leading up to the test day.

Regards
Raj

Raj -

Since the verbal adapts as a whole, your performance in reading comprehension affects the difficulty of the questions that you are given throughout the verbal section. If you are good at critical reasoning this means that you will not be given the hardest critical reasoning questions and will not get the opportunity to get credit for getting these difficult questions right. So, it is very important that you improve your reading comprehension score. Just remember to keep studying CR and SC as well - especially sentence correction - so that you are ready for those more difficult questions. By the way, on the GMATPrep and on test day when I faced the tough sentence correction questions the major way that the test writers thought to try and trick me was parallelism and incorrect comparisons, so be on the alert for these...

Here is something about reading comprehension that I shared with another student that you might find useful.

"Realize that something like 3/4 of all reading comp questions are best addressed by re-reading a portion of the passage and often the correct answer choice is a paraphrase of the text. Even within the paraphrasing key words will often remain like scientific words and business jargon. Have you been going back to the text when you can? You will know that you should re-read the text if the question stem itself points you to one paragraph. If the question stem is so general that you could return to multiple paragraphs or the entire passage you should start with a process of elimination of the incorrect answer choices. Remember, if you can go back to the text you want to do that.

To help you know which paragraph to return to, and to help you comprehend the passage as a whole you should stop at the end of each paragraph and think about what was in that paragraph. I usually write down 6 - 12 words that describe the main idea of the paragraph. This will help fix in your mind what was in each paragraph and will help you to return to the correct paragraph when possible. If you cannot sum up a paragraph take the time to re-read it - it is worth the time.

Do not try to make up time on the actual reading of the passage. Skimming is inappropriate - but as so many others have mentioned on this site - so is reading for detail. Read for the context and the main idea of each paragraph not for the exact number of gallons of water or exact date something happened, etc."

And let me add that at Veritas we use a technique called "STOP," which instructs students to not only stop at the end of each paragraph, but to concentrate on the things that are at the right level for your reading...the Scope of the Passage, the Tone, the Organization, and the Purpose.

Hope that Helps!

David

Hi David,
Thank you so much for your response. I am definetly trying to improve on Reading comprehension. Will follow your advise from today onwards. I think I am scoring at 50% in RC during practice tests. For CR and SC, my accuracy rate is about 85%.

I am confident that if i can somehow improve my RC, I can achieve my target score(720).

Regards
Raj