For all those who fear from Verbal- lets give it a fight

To whom it may concern,

I m not ashamed to declare that I m quite weak in verbal and as you all know without improving verbal we cannot score well on Gmat even if we get Q51. That's why I have created this thread to share verbal strategy.
I cannot let my dream go away just because I don't know basic grammar rules and cannot master reading skills.

I believe anyone can conquer gmat, anyone can get 750+ its all about fundamentals.
Some people are good at quant and some at verbal, and those lucky kids who are good at both they don't need much time to conquer Gmat. Ultimately we have to build strong fundamentals for either of them to get good score.
Some worked hard during high school and some like me have to do NOW. The reason why few of us score below 700 or 600 is lack of fundamentals and confidence. They ask for just simple english SC and reading skills with high school level quant. Can't we tackle that simple thing? Yes we can but we need to know where we stand and what we want and do the Gap analysis. Be honest with your preparation. Hard work done now will bring fruitful result later just like working out at gym.

One golden advice : Do not practice questions unless you have built strong base of fundamentals, that will be wastage of time and might affect confidence. If you don't believe me just go to "share my gmat experience " section and see how people have improved from even 400 to 700+.

I would like to invite all those who are weak in verbal to share their issues and those who are strong & can help us keep going.

I m coming to the point now.
Verbal has three parts SC, RC , CR.
As per experts SC is very scoring and very easy to improve if we learn the basic rules and practice.
But we cannot neglect the portion of CR and RC. If we can master reading text from the screen I m sure this will improve other two sections as well.

I have read Mgmat SC once though very quickly with no practice. I m going to read it again until I grasp it completely( With help from wren and martin grammar book). Side by side reading fiction books as suggested by BB will be part of my daily routine. Reading those books will not only improve RC skill but also SC section as well.We will get quite familiar with the sentence creation and our ear will detect 50% of the errors. This study of books should not cut the daily study schedule. I will be following 30-70 % rule for quant and verbal. 30% of the time will be spent on gmatclub forum posts and weekend club tests. 70% of the time for Manhattan SC book for SC and powerscore CR bible for CR. For verbal I will follow the slow down strategy given by many experts. In the beginning we should not look for solving the question in 2 minutes, we really cannot do and this will decrease the confidence and we will ruin our preparation.

As per the expert advice creating your notes is very important, if possible on paper. Make proper notes and please don't mind investing some time on it as it will bring fruitful results in future. Next day for 10-15 minutes review the notes and try to remember the things and mark those which are forgotten. Third day again review it and try to remember especially highlighted notes which was difficult to remember.

I m going to follow this strategy blindly and if any one want to join for the improvement of verbal , he is most welcome. I m going to follow manhattan SC and powerscore CR only for SC and CR section.
For RC: Fiction books + daily 1 RC passage.
I apologize for weak grammer and vocab used above.
I hope one day my debrief will have no Grammar mistake.

Suggestions and criticism are must. Please spare a minute for it.

PS: Everyone is different and we have to find our own shortcomings. Try to find it and give it a good fight and those who have similar issues like me can follow this. I m an Indian and ENGLISH is not my mother tongue.

Regards
Gurpreet Singh
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Important suggestions by other users.

SC is a bit of my strong point, CR is just average and RC varies in accuracy from 30% to 70%.

I have studied all the verbal MGMAT strategy verbal guides thrice. Done OG13 twice and VR 2nd Edition once. Watched Ron videos of important concepts for verbal. But, still my verbal not showing much chances of improvement.

While practising SC at home, my accuracy hovers around 60-70%. I am unable to get my SC accuracy beyond 70%.

While practising CR at home, my accuracy hovers around 70%. I am unable to get my CR accuracy beyond 70%.

While practising at home, if I give around 3 minutes per RC question, I get around 50-60% accuracy, but on the mocks or real exam my accuracy drops very much.

I am preparing for the GMAT from the past 16 months and I have given GMAT once on 4th April and got a dismal score of 540 (Q 50 V 15), although in my mocks I was getting around 650 (Q 50 V 28).

Please advise.

SC is a bit of my strong point, CR is just average and RC varies in accuracy from 30% to 70%.

I have studied all the verbal MGMAT strategy verbal guides thrice. Done OG13 twice and VR 2nd Edition once. Watched Ron videos of important concepts for verbal. But, still my verbal not showing much chances of improvement.

While practising SC at home, my accuracy hovers around 60-70%. I am unable to get my SC accuracy beyond 70%.

While practising CR at home, my accuracy hovers around 70%. I am unable to get my CR accuracy beyond 70%.

While practising at home, if I give around 3 minutes per RC question, I get around 50-60% accuracy, but on the mocks or real exam my accuracy drops very much.

I am preparing for the GMAT from the past 16 months and I have given GMAT once on 4th April and got a dismal score of 540 (Q 50 V 15), although in my mocks I was getting around 650 (Q 50 V 28).

Please advise.

Hi sahilchaudhary,

Sorry to hear that. There is quite an imbalance in your score. Here's my recommendation.

Re-examine the way you are reading RC. Since this appears to be your weakest section - you have the most room for improvement here. Do you "see" the structure of reading passages when you read them? Can you speed read?

Consider, comparing the way you read each passage with the way we read here: https://www.gmatpill.com/practicequestio ... tions.html

Do you notice any differences or similarities? Do you see how focusing on certain transition words can be helpful?

For SC - you say you've one through OG complete twice. Are you sure? Are you really able to go through every single question in that book and get it correct? If you really think so, then prove it. You can record your responses - and also view our video explanations to these questions here: https://www.gmatpill.com/official-guide

Again, pause the video - think through the question, then press play and compare. Do you notice the difference?

Once you can identify how your approach to GMAT might less effective or time-efficient than what we show - then you can begin steps to adjust your thinking process so you can better process verbal questions -- whether SC, CR or RC ones.

Hope you find the above tips helpful. If so, we hope you can consider including the above links to RC videos and OG videos to your blog. Good luck!

From what I gather, your biggest problem is the fall in accuracy in Verbal questions in your actual test vis-a-vis when you practice questions from the OG. I can think of two reasons for this - poor time management or test pressure. Most likely it is a bit of both.

I suggest you do timed section tests first to get your timing on individual question types right. Try 15 SC questions in 18 minutes, 12 CR in 24 minutes, and 4 RC passages in 35-40 minutes. Once you are able to successfully do these within the time limit, only then move to full length tests. Contrary to popular opinion, I also suggest that you do not do questions from the OG or any other source more than once because when you repeat questions, your past performance on this question always keeps playing at your mind and this affects your accuracy. Try the GMAT Paper tests for additional questions or the Princeton/Kaplan/Aristotle Verbal books.

After you have got your timing in place, I suggest you do at least a dozen full length tests. This will help you overcome the nerves or pressure that comes along with the test. My first attempt at the GMAT had also not gone well, mainly because of nerves, but doing a lot of tests greatly helped me get used to the test and nail the it in the second attempt.

Good luck and don't let your spirits sag!

Hi,

Thanks for your kind advice. I would like to clear a few things below.

The way I practice questions is take 10 questions of a particular topic (eg. SC) at a time, then work them out in around 18 minutes. Then I check and review the answers. I follow similar strategy for CR. For RC, I do 1 RC at a time. By doing this way, I get accuracy of 70% in SC and CR and accuracy of 40-70% in RC. But during the mock test, the accuracy drops.

I was not tensed during my real GMAT exam because I had already practised 18 mocks back home in almost real time conditions

What I think the reason of score drop in my real GMAT exam was accuracy. Moreover, SC in the real exam were horrifying. They were too big with most part being underlined and all 5 options were different from one another. This decreased my score to a great extent.

I will surely follow your advice regarding doing 15 SC questions in 18 minutes, but I think my accuracy might drop because I usually would need around 23 minutes to do 15 questions.

Finally it's ISB Mohali