Do the strategies work anymore SC GMAT ??

Hi GMATBaumgartner,

Let us talk about SC first. There are two types of sources for practice. 1-> GMAT OG,questions from GMAT Prep. 2-> Other sources that are not mentioned in 1.
Since there are limited number of sources fron OG and GMATPrep we need to do some practice from other sources.
My practice was like this:
Stage1: Study all the chapters of manhattan SC. Then practiced 50 questions from OG.
Stage2: Practiced 100-200 questions from 1000SC series.

After stage1 and stage 2: i was constantly scoring 75% on every 20 questions. (But i was unable to spot where my errors, since they were very random).

then came GROCKIT into picture. The advantage with it is that it allows you to choose 1) the type of questions you want 2) the difficulty.
I followed this particular strategy, which has definitely improved my skills,understanding and confidence:
Choose a particular type of error/topic: example subject verb agreement and practice 10-15 questions. Review why a particular answer choice is right or wrong. then go back to the respective chapter in ManhattanSC and read it from the first word to the last word carefully. This is a very good strategy. This makes you a skillful at that particular error. ( So its like, become skillful with subject-verb agreement first, then skillful with tense, then with parallelism and so on. When you become skilled with each of them, you will be better prepared to answer questions which include more than one error.).

A tip while following grockit or 1000 sc: Some questions would seem very unconventional. If you find some answer not satisfying, research on the internet forums extensively.

Then go back to OG before the exam and solve all the SC questions.

Critical Reasoning:
Critical reasoning bible is a good book for reading and understanding.
Follow some online lessons or private tutoring to learn the strategies to attack different kinds of problems.
With CR, you should be adept at attacking the question type.
Practice grockit and OG.

Reading Comprehension
Time management is the most important thing. Long passages in GMAT are structured. Give a quick glance through the paragraphs. Dont try to remember details. While practicing tune yourself to make a mental map of the following 1) Why has author written this passage? 2) Did he agree or disagree , praise or criticize the main idea? 3) What is the connection of each passage to the previous passage, what is the connection of each line to the previous line?

If you find a passage very difficult to understand, dont waste your time in understanding completely. Starting answering the questions.

Generally the large passages in GMAT has the following structure.
Para 1-> Introduction
Para 2,3-> is mostly about examples or explanations or counter example.( you can skim through these two paras. just understand why this para is present and what it contains. if it talks about the population of USA in the 1940 before the blah blah blah.................. your job is to remember that the keyword population of USA exists in para 2.)
last para -> author states his stand using examples.

Short passages: No short cuts read it completely.

"Thursdays with RON" by manhattan forum has 60-70 free classes. Go through them.