360 to 520 to ?

[Porsche05]

Hey all,

I am fixing to take the gmat for the third time to raise the score, hopefully well-above 650. My biggest fault seems to lie in the sentence correction and quantitative areas. I notice a lot of the sentence correction ones, the sentence is alread correct, but I try to make something of it and say that it is not and add a comma or do something to change it.

Is there a strategy to better determine which ones need to be left as is?

On practice tests from mba.com, my tests were ranging from 400 all the way up to almost 700, but my actual test scores were in the middle of all of those, and then my essay was a 5 out of 6.

Is there any pointers to better conquer the sentence correction and quantitative sections?

Thanks,

Clayton
[email protected]

[papgust]

If you find Sentence correction difficult, then i guess you are having some trouble with grammar. I would suggest you to buy 'Doing grammar' by max morenberg. Although i haven't tried that book personally, i've heard great things about this book.

Get all Manhattan GMAT quant guides and Sentence Correction guide. These will really help you to boost your score.

[Brian@VeritasPrep]

Hi Clayton,

One more thought on Sentence Correction - particularly if you're trying to make changes to sentences that are okay the way they're written:

The GMAT loves to create long, awkward sentences by employing a lot of technical and descriptive language. Most of the errors are actually pretty straightforward (i.e. subject-verb agreement, pronoun reference, etc.), but they "hide" those errors (or lack thereof) behind sentences that are difficult to read. To combat that:

1) Ignore adjectives and adverbs

i.e. "The expert scientist performed a groundbreaking experiment" becomes "The scientist performed an experiment"

2) Ignore modifying clauses that don't belong to a modifier error

i.e. "The expert scientist, who studied astrophysics at Caltech under several Nobel Prize professors, performed a groundbreaking experiment" becomes "The scientist performed an experiment"

3) Break off independent clauses that are irrelevant to the underlined portion; the most common way to be able to find these is when the word "that" sets up a new subject-predicate relationship

i.e. "Researchers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology have recently discovered that Saturn has rings" becomes "Saturn has rings"

If you can streamline the sentences to more quickly identify the errors being tested, you can become much more efficient at Sentence Correction, and the errors will become a lot clearer. In your case, you may be eliminating "A" often because it just "sounds wrong", because the sentences are often long and unwieldy. If you can more efficiently identify the matter at hand, the sentences should become much clearer.

[Porsche05]

Thanks for the info, I will check that out in practicing. My next huge thing to conquer is the data sufficiency. How in the world can you conquer those? Those are almost impossible to me.

[papgust]

Everthing seems impossible at first sight for everybody. One needs to put that extra effort to conquer those weaknesses. I'm sure that you would do the same if you put some effort into it. Good luck!