ESR Analysis: How to go from v38 (730) to v42-44 (760)

Question

Hi Experts,
I need your advice to improve my verbal score. I want to score 760. Here is a summary of my prep.

I am a Non-native English speaker from India. I gave a self prep attempt last year in Feb and scored 680.

This time, I did verbal prep from e-GMAT course.

Gmat prep 1 - 730 (q50 v38)
SC - 7 incorrect
RC - 4 incorrect
CR - 0 incorrect
Slow speed in reading RCs. Had to rush through last 10 questions

GMAT prep 2 - 730 (q51 v37)
SC - 6 incorrect
RC - 3 incorrect
CR - 2 incorrect
Slow SC and RC speed. Had to rush through last 12 questions

I worked on my SC through OG practice. RC, I find it hard to retain and recall the content in Long RCs. If I read slow, I am able to retain a lot but have to tradeoff a lot of time.

Actual GMAT - 730 (q50 v38)

High-level ESR analysis: 
I scored super low in CR, which was my strongest area. 
In the second section in VA, I got 3 questions wrong and spent 3min 50 sec on each wrong answer. I got a super-dense long RC and went blank.
In the end, I had to rush through the last 10 questions and my accuracy took a hit.

I have attached my ESR. Need your help to suggest some strategies for improving RC speed and verbal score in general

cc  MartyTargetTestPrep   ccooley   ScottTargetTestPrep   EMPOWERgmatRichC   egmat   GMATNinja   MentorTutoring  @mcelroytutoringc

AndrewN · Answer

Hello, Bhanu. Thank you for sharing your ESR with me and requesting help. To address your last concern first, perhaps RC speed is not the problem, but the lack of a methodical approach may be instead. The content of the passage hardly matters when you keep an eye on the following:

1)  Authorial presence : How does the author present the information? Is the passage informational? Persuasive? Does it present two sides, only for the author to champion one of them?

2) What is  the relationship of each paragraph to the one that preceded it , and, in a longer passage, to each of the other paragraphs? Ask yourself why the author chose to break the information at that point. Typically, a shift in focus occurs at such a paragraph break. A topic sentence—the opening sentence of the paragraph—can cue you in on where the paragraph is going.

3)  Watch for transitions . If you see  for example , then you know that even if you did not grasp the meaning of the previous sentence, it is okay: you are about to get an illustration of that point. If you see  nevertheless , then you can anticipate that despite X, a condition that would lead to a certain logical outcome, Y occurred instead. The transition trail, as I like to call it, often lays out the key ideas of the passage in a more digestible manner, keeping you from getting bogged down in the details.

4)  Look for strong, emotional language . Judgmental language such as  poor  or  excellent , as well as absolute markers such as  never  or  always , can reveal the tone of a passage or how someone mentioned feels about such and such. Questions are often based on such emotional responses.

5)  Make every word count in an answer choice . There are many ways to take a correct line of thought and spin it into an incorrect answer. If you align the keywords of the question stem, the passage, and the answer choice you wish to select, then you will start to notice an uptick in your number of correct responses. If you go into each answer choice looking to disprove something, anything at all, based on what the passage presents, then you will be much less likely to fall into the trap of selecting a half-correct answer. (I like to say that an answer choice that is even 90 percent correct is still 100 percent wrong.)

6) Understand that  you do not have to make a determination on a given answer choice as soon as you read it . Sometimes the test throws a mealymouthed response at you, one that is hard to make heads or tails of. Just skip it and move on. See if you can make an on-the-spot assessment of other answer choices. If you work from a place of comfort, again, your accuracy will often go up, even as your timing will start to go down. Too often, students are reluctant to let go of a response before they feel they have a definitive answer, Yes/No, but the GMAT™ is not that sort of test, and some questions and answer choices warrant a closer inspection. I use a green, yellow, and red light system that maps onto the universal traffic signal colors to acknowledge that a yellow-light read is fine and ensure that I do not waste too much time or mental energy looking to qualify that answer before I have had a look at others.

7)  Spend time on a question if you need to . Focus on your timing for a passage as a whole instead. If I get a four-question set in practice, I look at my timing for that cluster of questions only after I have completed the set. I have even spent 4 minutes on a single question (not even the first question) because I knew from practice that my timing averages out to roughly 2 minutes per question anyway. I typically observe a tapering effect from the first question to the last of a given set, but sometimes I encounter a difficult inference question three deep, and I give it whatever time I feel I need to arrive at an accurate conclusion.

8)  Get your understanding up first . Let timing be a secondary consideration. If your accuracy starts to go up, your timing will go down with practice. But if you dedicate equal weight to the two, then that tug-of-war will always be playing out in your mind, and you will make no genuine progress while you exhaust more and more practice questions. You can learn more from a passage or two than you can from a dozen taken in haste just to get your timing down.

9)  Work on improving your timing on other types of questions . That sounds like an odd recommendation for RC, right? But trust me when I say that if you can get your timing down on SC especially, it can take a lot of pressure off you when you hit an RC passage. When you are caught up thinking about other  junk , for lack of a better way to put it, you cannot focus as well on the task at hand. Again, I know from practice that my timing on SC questions tends to hover around a minute, so each SC question on average buys me about 45 seconds, time that I can apply to breaking down longer or more complex RC passages and accompanying questions.

From what I can tell from your ESR, the wheels kind of came off in Verbal in the second quarter of the exam. You were getting harder questions correct, on average, while missing easier ones, and you never want to see that sort of inversion. Consistency is key. Make sure those Medium sets are in good shape before you tackle a bunch of Hard questions. Otherwise, you might nail those 700-level questions, but you could see a lot fewer of them, since you keep messing up the Medium ones.

Finally, I spotted an anomaly in the Quant section. What kinds of questions did you miss, I wonder, that were rated so high on the Average Difficulty chart as to be at the uppermost point of the graph? I am not accustomed to seeing anything even close to that high on the chart. I am not sure what to tell you on that one.

Anyway, I hope the above may help you in your preparation for a retake. Keep in mind, a 730 is a fine score. But I understand the pull of achieving a score you feel is more in line with your abilities. Best of luck to you. If you have further questions, please let me know.

- Andrew

ESR Analysis: How to go from v38 (730) to v42-44 (760)

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