Hi All,

I've never written on any forums before but this time I decided to share my experience and ask for help.
I'm Russian female 26 years old so you could guess that verbal section was/is a challenge for me -you can see that from the above breakdowns of my scores. I started studying for GMAT in January 2012 & my initial practice score was 550 (don't remember the exact breakdown something around Q35-37 V31). The ideal score that I'm set on is 700+ which is at least 30 points away. This may seem as little but I feel stuck since I don't know how to improve further and application deadlines are approaching. So I feel pressure to improve & improve soon.

Once I saw my first score of 660 - I was ambivalent: I felt happy since I've never gotten anything above 650 on my practice test but at the same time I was upset since miracle I was hoping for didn't happen and I was 40 points away from my target score! So I decided to work hard on my verbal- I purchased 5 MGMAT verbal books and read through all of them & went through Official Verbal GMAC practice questions. I felt like I understood all the questions better and what GMAC was looking for in RC & CR questions; however, because English is not my first language I struggled tremendously with answering difficult (700-800 ) questions correctly under time constraint. I also feel that it takes me a long time to read carefully through RC passage & then choose the right answer for the questions that refer back to the text (usually I have 2 answer options that are very similar; however, only a small detail makes that choice incorrect/correct)- To catch that small hint that separates the right answer from the wrong one is very time consuming for me. I also noticed that it takes me longer than a minute to find the right answer on SC questions - especially the difficult ones (700-800 level).

Does anyone have any suggestions on how I could improve my verbal - any effective study plan?
I feel like I wasted 2 months studying all those verbal books but my score improved by only 10 points.
I'm planning to retake the test within a month so I could start applying to schools in November. Any help/advice will be highly appreciated! Thank you in advance

Hi,
Thank you for your reply! I will definitely use all the above sources that you've mentioned.

As I said before I just need to change something about the way I study & my strategies because I don't see any significant improvements in my score. Any advice on how I could improve Quant? I found MGMAT advanced very useful but now I need other sources so I could move forward and improve.