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Brian Galvin is the Director of Academic Programs at Veritas Prep, where he oversees all of the company’s GMAT preparation courses.
A common concern of standardized test takers everywhere, and certainly of GMAT students, is the worry that “I can usually narrow the answers down to two, but I’m not much better than 50% once I do.” Has this happened to you? It’s maddening – you do most of the work correctly, but feel as though you can’t confidently answer in the end.
There’s a common reason for that, and to understand it you may want to take a mental trip to the California coast, where if we’re not surfing or skiing we’re probably wine-tasting or eating sushi. When wine-tasting or eating sushi, the proprietors put a large emphasis on “cleansing your palate” between flavors so that you can rid your mouth of aftertaste and truly appreciate what’s next. The ideology is that, for the subtle-but-meaningful changes in flavor that await you, you can’t afford to have your senses numbed by the remnants of what came before, and so you’ll eat ginger leaves or soda crackers between bites or sips in order to prepare yourself to recognize and appreciate that subtle change.
GMAT questions are a lot like that, as well. Difficult, well-written verbal questions will rely on subtle-but-significant phrasing that makes an incorrect answer seem correct or vice versa. The test-taker with the most “sophisticated mental palate” is the one who is best suited to appreciate these differences, and examinees who find themselves with the “aftertaste” of irrelevant answer choices or information may find their senses numbed to the point where the differences are unclear.
Consider your typical approach through a verbal problem – you likely go through each answer choice, “hold on” to any that look like they could be correct and eliminate those that are certainly wrong. So, when you’re down to two answer choices, four of the last five sentences that you’ve read are wrong answers! Your mind is cluttered with misinformation and its “aftertaste”, and it’s no wonder that sometimes you can’t make a clear, efficient decision between those final answers, as it’s been a while since you’ve read the question at hand and its most important components.
The solution? Cleanse your mental palate, so to speak, by taking 5-10 seconds to refresh yourself on the question before you make that final decision. Simply treating the question as a new one with only two answers will help you to focus on what really matters, and to appreciate the subtle difference between the two remaining answer choices.
Furthermore, consider how you’ll likely use process of elimination – you’ve seen 3/2 splits in Sentence Correction (three choices use “its” and two use “their”, forcing you to make a singular-vs.-plural decision), and they also exist in Critical Reasoning and Reading Comprehension questions, in which three answer choices may be “out of scope” while the remaining two have a more subtle difference between them. If you treat the question as a new one, you’re far more apt to use a new thought process to make that last decision, as opposed to trying to force the prior thought process to work (when it didn’t give you a decision the first time through).
When you’re down to two answers, you’ve already put yourself in a terrific situation, so take the extra few seconds to reframe the question as you “cleanse your mental palate” of aftertaste in order to make that all-important final decision.
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