I am curious regarding what you did to prepare for verbal. For one thing, many people somehow seem more comfortable preparing for quant, which seems to require skills more defined than those required by the verbal section.
So maybe you could help me to help you by giving me some sense of what you did to prepare.
Meanwhile, from what I have seen, when a person is not scoring that high on verbal, it's mostly not because the person does not have particular knowledge. It tends to be more because on some relatively basic level, the person just isn't approaching the questions optimally.
For instance, a person might get the impression that SC is all about rules, and some prep companies even say things like, "What rule is being tested here?" So the person focuses on rules and doesn't realize that SC is about much more than rules and tends to be about skill in reasoning or hacking one's way to the right answer.
When doing CR, people may miss answers because they miss that they really need to clearly see the logic of the arguments and answer choices, and instead seek to use formulaic ways of getting to answers or simply quickly choose answers that kind of "sound right." The truth is that often the weirdest answers to CR questions are the right ones.
Similarly, people often don't give RC questions a healthy amount of respect, and just pick answers that sound right, without realizing that the answers they are choosing don't really match what is said in the passages.
Notice I didn't say one thing about lack of sophisticated strategies or lack of GMAT specific knowledge. I am talking about basic things here, things like being careful, paying attention to details and really looking for the logic of situations.
Another thing people do is focus on the explanations to questions rather than on what they could change about their own processes for handling questions. Sure, the explanations contain useful information, but even more important than learning about that is asking one's self, "How could I have gotten this one right?"
One way to address much of this is to do practice verbal questions on an untimed basis, seeking to achieve a high hit rate by spending lots of time looking at the questions and answer choices in order to really see what is going on. In the beginning it may take ten minutes or more to really figure out what is going on in a question and hack one's way to a right answer, but by doing this slow, careful work, you develop the skills it takes to get the right answers.
Then once you have developed form and are achieving a high hit rate on an untimed basis, you can speed up.
Meanwhile, I also suggest looking over your practice tests to see what areas of quant you could get stronger in. I bet there are a few such areas, and by concentrating on becoming expert in those areas, you can get some more quant points.
So there are some ideas, and as I said, if you provide some more information, possibly about how you have been preparing or how you have been doing in the three areas of verbal, maybe I can give you some more.
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Marty Murray | Chief Curriculum and Content Architect
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