beckb wrote:I have gone thru all materials
OG - Manhattan- Power score Bible for Cr
All my mocks V28 remains stable.
How to improve it further?
Hi beckb.
While it's a little challenging to determine what you need to do to increase that verbal score without more information, in general what I see when a person's verbal score is stuck is that the person has not fully grasped what the questions are really testing or has not figured out what it takes to get right answers.
For instance, in SC, people often get the impression the getting right answers is all about applying a set of clear rules, when actually, while the rules are useful, there is much more to getting right answers than just applying those rules. In fact often people who score high in SC don't even know that many of the rules. In one case, a guy I have been working with completed a full GMAT Prep course and so knew all kinds of SC rules and concepts. He would approach an SC question by looking over the answer choices to find which rules were being broken, only to get the question wrong because maybe meaning rather than grammar rules was what mattered in that case. In order to get more right, he had to reduce his reliance on rules and pay more attention to the overall meaning and effectiveness of the sentences.
In CR, scoring high require an attention to detail beyond what many people are using. Often people just look at answers and choose one that "seems right." Other times people eliminate answer choices that seem too weird or don't have an obvious connection to the question. The truth is that often the weirdest answer is the right one. So in order to get CR questions right, especially more difficult CR questions, one has to go beyond applying basic strategies to really noticing details and fully understanding the logic of arguments, questions, and answer choices. For example, I have seen people miss CR questions because they were not paying attention to every word in arguments or answer choices. One word can make all the difference, and when these people realized what they were doing and changed it their scores rapidly increased.
In RC, one does not really need to learn much about strategies or concepts to get right answers, but one needs to be have effective methods for reading the passages efficiently, and one has to be super careful when going though answer choices to notice whether the choices being chosen really reflect what is said in the passage.
Overall, GMAT verbal is not really an English test. It is a reasoning game that requires clear vision and attention to detail. So the upshot is that one can learn rule after rule and concept after concept and still not score high on the verbal section of the GMAT until one develops the key basic skills necessary for getting right answers.
Also, in preparing for verbal, people are often focused on reading the explanations to question after question. While there is some value to doing this, I tell them that way more important than understanding the explanations is understanding what processes they need to use in order to get the right answers.
The key question is "Knowing what I already know, how can I get this one right?"
So there are some things for you to consider. With some more information, we may be able to give you additional insight.
Are you finding all of verbal equally challenging or are you doing better at answering some question types than you do at answering others?
Is timing an issue?
When you do verbal practice questions, do you tend to always do them on a timed basis or have you done much practicing on an untimed basis?
I am not all that familiar with the resources you mentioned, but whatever resources you use, you may have to go beyond learning concepts and rules or applying the recommendations they provide to honing basic skills like the ones I described above.
A nice thing for you to realize is that the vision and reasoning skills you have been using to score high on the quant section are applicable to verbal too. It may be that you just need to make some connections and see some things you haven't.
