Hi sandeepsharma,
The approach was just to keep it simple..!! I could never manage/maintain error logs, study loads of books, retain rules and the like.
Even though a cliche, but I can not emphasize enough the important of practice. What particularly worked for me was the fact that over the period of my prep time, I had developed an over familiarity with almost all problems. The result was that in most cases I could extremely conveniently, without second thoughts, eliminate the wrong choices and eventually reach the right option. However, this is true just for SC and CR.
Particularly in SC, I believe I had seen and done an enormous amount of problems to get aquainted with most of the problem types. I tried learning grammer but to no avail. Everytime I would end up forgetting most of the rules or some exception somewhere. But after having attempted sufficient number of problems things started clearing up better.
From my experience, I have learnt that grammer can be learnt the other way round as well. That is to say, learn through problems. Familiarizing with the problem types can help you learn the rules of grammer!! I went through Manhattan SC Guide quite a few times, but I can assure you I hardly remember 70-80% of it. I managed to learn the most essential rules from the problem itself with the help of which I could reach 85-90% accuracy on SC.
Similarly for CR, familiarity could work well for most of us. After having seen multiple problems from all sorts of sources, multiple number of times, patterns begin to emerge. You would begin to clearly see why the wrong options are wrong and later realise that in mostly all the problems, similar techniques are use to engineer incorrect options. Elimination then becomes a very quick process, almost impulsive. I used to always have trouble with the "out of scope" options(nothing sounded out of scope to me
). Such options become apparent candidates for elimination the moment you can associate them with your prior knowledge of such pattern and familiarity.
In addition to this, understanding the stimulus at the first go is very important. This saves precious time and does not confuse you. If you'd read the stimulus multiple times, out of scope options will start to weigh-in in ur head!! That could be dangerous. Develop the knack of being able to read and understand the stimulus at the first go. This can also be developed with familiarizing yourself with the problem types. You would not have to really re-read the stimulus, forcing yourself to understand every bit of it, rather you will have a basic template in your mind and fit the current problem into the template's basic elemants. (Accuracy close to 80%.)
RC! Well, I cant tell you much about RC. It it were'nt for RC probably I would've done 20-30 points better on the real exam.
Anyway, it is extremely important to read actively rather than passively. I believe if you would practice difficult passages, understand how the questions are framed and how the correct answers could be arrived at, RC could be managed at a decent accuracy.
An other unconventional approach: Read an article, say in a newspaper, and try to make you own questions. Think how can you make answer options extremely close and what elements should a test taker focus on in order to arrive at the right option. This might help you understand what goes in the head of the creators of the test.
One important advice I would like to give any test taker who is struggling to score in verbal is that he or she should atleast get good timing on two of the three major topics in Verbal. This would leave you with sufficient time to concentrate on the third and your weakest.
It also helps to stay ahead of your time on the practice test so that whenever a question from one of your weak areas come up, you can afford to spend an extra minute on it without fretting much! This helped me to stay focussed and confident right through my 75 minutes
Those were my 2 cents.. Let me know if any of this makes even the slightest bit of sense to anyone
Feel free to ask anything else
~Shubham