Daves10 wrote:Regarding the verbal section I need some training in this (english not my first language), some texts I had difficulty in clearly understanding the meaning/purpose of the section. I finished with around 10 min still available.
Hi Daves10.
Scoring high on the verbal section tends to take careful attention to the details and logic of the various parts of the question. In other words, while many can finish the verbal section in under 75 minutes, unless you are getting every question right, finishing early is not a good idea. I am not saying that finishing early this time was your plan. I am saying that going forward, you should use up all of the time allotted in order to maximize what you see in the questions. In fact, had you used that ten minutes this past time, you might have gotten enough verbal questions right to hit your score goal. Think about it. An extra minute or two spent on five to ten questions may have given you time to get the key insights you needed in order to get them right.
Now you could go back over the ones you didn't get and seek to get them right BEFORE you read the explanations. In doing that you would be training yourself to see what you have to see and to do what you have to do in order to get right answers to verbal questions. Then after you have given them another shot, you could go the explanations to get some additional insights.
Regarding the verbal practice, in other words not parts of tests, questions that you do, you should do them untimed. You need to learn to more consistently get right answers to verbal questions, and at first getting right answers may take more, even much more, than two minutes per question. The best way to train to see what you need to see is to work on questions for as long as it takes to get a high percentage, 80 - 100%, right. Once you have developed solid processes for getting them right, you can seek to speed up.
The same goes for quant questions. Start off doing them slowly and carefully. Then speed up once you know how to get them right. If you find certain types of quant question to be particularly challenging, then find a bunch of questions of those types and work each type separately.
To maximize your score, make your preparation more test driven than material driven. In other words, don't prepare for the GMAT the way you might prepare for a school test, by covering every little thing. Prepare for it by figuring out how your score could be higher and addressing that directly. If you are taking forever to handle a particular type of quant question, work on that type. If you are having trouble with reading comprehension, work on that.
Here's a great post on GMAT quant. The title mentions careless mistakes, but the post goes into depth regarding what it takes to score high.
https://magoosh.com/gmat/2013/careless-m ... gmat-math/
If you get better at handling various types of quant questions and at seeing the details and logic of verbal questions, your score could increase by 100 points, or more, within two months.
By the way, be careful to not get too caught up in learning commonly used "strategies" for handling verbal questions. Many of those strategies are good for getting to the 600's but are not very good for getting harder questions right. Your best approach for verbal is mostly to just get better at seeing exactly what's going on in the questions and answer choices.
