I just took the GMAt today and nailed a 720 (Q48, V40).
Verbal by far was the biggest hurdle to overcome. my practice CATs were all in the 30 - 34 range. I managed okay with crit reasoning and reading comp, but the SC killed me. probably 30% of the time I was completely lost. the other70% I was getting it down to 2 choices and then usually guessing the wrong one.
The two most helpful resources for my verbal jump was the two power score books.
Crit. Reasoning and Sentence Correction Bible.
They help build a foundation for the verbal section. during the last week before the test, I stumbled upon the list of idioms that appear on the GMAt, some 12-15 pages of them. No, I did not memorize them. I simply read over them a few times to get a general idea, since I had heard most of them before in daily english language. For me there were simply too many to memorize. Also I browsed the Gmat Club comprehensive Verbal guide that the forum moderators put together. It was a good supplemental for a few of the topics.
After the Powerscore books, I simply practiced a lot with the
OG guide questions, and really scrutinized every question I got wrong, and tried to walk through my though process for answering each question, and where I was going wrong.
For SC:
- There are many times when I just couldnt find an error that jumped out at me, but I followed something I read before. Use the acronym VPIMPS. Verbs, Pronouns, Idioms, Modifies, Parrellism, Structure. IN THAT ORDER of importance, since I often found myself debating between two things I believed were wrong. The two most often issues of confusion were 1) is this the right idiom and 2) this idiom sounds right, but the pronoun is wrong.... At the end of the day, I learned correcting for pronoun errors always takes precedence, even if it doesn't sound smooth.
For CR / RC:
- First thing I always have to be on the look out for.. WHAT IS THE POINT? WHAT IS THE ARGUMENT? What the **** IS THE AUTHOR ATTEMPTING TO PROVE?
- After that, then I would focus on how everything else supports it. Many of the errors don't apply to the actual argument, so if you're still iffy on it, that's how the test makers get you.
Anyway, turned out to be a longer reply then I thought. I'll get off my soap box now. Hope it helps. Good luck.
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22 Aug 2012, 07:40
