didieravoaka wrote:Hi Murray,
Yes I used to do many practice questions in the OG 13 and did them quickly. I used a clock.
There's your issue.
To get GMAT verbal questions right, you need to develop an eye for key details and for the logic of the situations presented in the questions.
Also, you need to develop and refine processes that get you to the right answers.
Little to none of that development of skill happens when you do practice questions quickly, on a timed basis. You are doing them quickly, but without really learning much.
So in order to develop the skills necessary for scoring higher in verbal, and in quant too, by the way, you have to slow down, and basically forget about the clock for two or three days. You need to work on the questions slowly and develop skill in getting to RIGHT answers. I say two or three days, because my understanding is that your test is scheduled for just five days from now. If you were to have had more time, I would have said to spend weeks doing this.
I mean take ten or fifteen minutes per question, even an hour per question at times, working to see exactly why each wrong answer is wrong and each right answer is right. There is only one right answer to an official verbal question, and to most if not all test prep company verbal questions, and there are clear logical reasons why that one answer is right and the others are wrong. You need to develop skill in seeing those logical reasons and in being able to choose right answers with confidence. The way to do that is by slowing down and developing it.
Any skill you develop in that way can be applied at any speed, just you have to slow down to develop it.
When you are working more slowly, you could seek to achieve a hit rate higher than you have been, maybe for now around 65 - 75 percent right. If doing that takes 15 minutes per question, fine. Getting RIGHT answers is what you are training to do.
For SC, work on getting better at noticing the logic of how the answer choices are constructed. Your hit rate in SC is not all that low, and by slowing down and noticing more how things work, you should be able to get that hit rate to go higher.
For CR, get better at noticing the trap answers and at seeing the very logical way in which the right answer choice is related to the prompt and the question.
For RC, likely you need to get better at noticing the difference between certain answer choices and what is actually said in the passages. Often answer choices seem to reflect or to be related to what is said in a passage, but actually they are well constructed trap answers created just right to match what a test taker might think he read, which is often not what the passage said.
