Albuloushi wrote:
Hey Goodbyeboy
First, grats on that improvement. Second, I would really like to learn how you improved ur verbal score like that, like you I'm a non-native speaker and I have been struggling with all the complicated vocabulary on the GMAT.
My practice scores were ranging in 620-660, however unfortunately my real GMAT was a failure, even though I felt i did really well on the Verbal and the opposite on Quant, I had opposite scores.
Real GMAT 600 (Q47, V25 or 26)
Although i've been scoring in the 30's range in all my practice tests I scored a very low on the actual. So can you please help me out in improving my score to where you did? I haven't studied for english that much to be honest, but i'm finding difficulty on knowing how to study it. It seems that you have succeeded in achieving such improvement and I would like to learn how you did? Thanks
Hey there, I know how you feel - vebal section can be intimidating especially if you're a non-native speaker. Here are couple of tips I used to prepare for my test.
First, if you haven't yet, go ahead and purchase
MGMAT prep books - I think you're good with Quant so I'd say just buy ones for verbal section. I highly recommend them as they are extremely helpful.
For SC, make sure you know the general rules like FANBOYS, parallelism, sorting out unnecessary sentences etc. Make sure to write A-E on your pad and mark them out as you check out the wrong ones. Hopefully it won't take more than a minute to figure out the right answer, and most likely for harder questions you'll end up with 2 choices which you'll have to make a choice, but hey, 50% chance is better than 20%
For RC, I'd suggest you to read articles from HBR, The Economist etc - and apply your RC skills to figure out what the author is trying to say and skim down all the information. IMO, RC is ALL about focus, since answers are written right on the screen and all you have to do is focus and find the right answers.
Also, what I did was whenever RC section pops up, I see the very first sentence of each paragraphs and write them down on pad - without even reading the entire article, most of the times, especially for easier passages I knew what the author was talking about and the gist of the entire passage. For example, first paragraph would say something like:
1. For a century, scientists have speculated that.....(ok, the author is bringing something to the table here - it doesn't matter what it is yet. All we have to know is the purpose of the first paragraph)
2. Moreover, the stem cell research has experienced many breakthroughs.....blah blah blah (continuation of what was written before - nothing amazingly new here)
3. However, in contrary to what most scientists believed, it turns out that.....(You see the word However - so you know this paragraph is something that will try to negate the popular belief or assumptions)
4. (In this paragraph, all you have to check is the author's tone - whether he/she supports it, rejects it, or stays neutral)
Again, this doesn't work on all passages, but it worked for me on most passages.
For CR, the main thing you'll need to do is finding an assumption in questions. If you are able to find assumptions, most questions will be pretty doable. For harder and tricky questions - try to scratch out all the obvious wrong ones, and make your best bet and move on. It's really easy to waste time without knowing on those tough CR questions. What you don't want to do is waste time on those hard questions and lose your score on easier ones.
Also, there are pretty obvious CR patterns out there - X causes Y, Y causes X, etc. I think you'll be able to find those patterns in this site so I'd suggest you to remember those patterns to quickly pick out the right answers.
Hope this is all helpful - feel free to PM me if you have any more questions
Good luck!