GMAT Verbal Tip - Treat verbal more like quant.We've all noticed that most people's GMAT quant scores are higher than their verbal scores, and there are many reasons for that pattern. At the same time, often, people wish their verbal scores were more like their quant scores, and they wonder why they are so different. If you are one of those people you may want to consider this.
It may be the case that your move is to treat GMAT verbal more like quant, and here's what I mean.
A Key DifferenceWhen people answer quant questions, they generally don't, for instance, work their way to two choices and then just go with one that they "like better," or choose an answer by using a gimmick that "works most of the time." Imagine? Sure, sometimes when answering a DS question, people will go with their intuition to a degree, but overall, when answering quant questions, people use precise calculations and have mathematically precise reasons for the choices they choose.
In contrast, in verbal, almost anything goes. In SC, people go with the choice that "sounds the best." In CR, people base their choices on roll of the dice reasons, such as that the word "some" rarely appears in a correct Weaken question answer. You know the kind of thing.
So, notice how different people's approaches to verbal are from their approaches to quant, and guess what. That difference is often a big reason for the differences between people's GMAT quant scores and their verbal scores.
I've seen this pattern over and over. A quant wizard who would never guess the answer to a quant question will go through a Jekyl and Hyde type transformation and have a completely different approach to verbal, doing all kinds of haphazard stuff when answering verbal questions. I'll ask, "Would you ever answer a quant question that way???" and the answer is always "No."
The MoveWhile, in rare cases, the reason why the correct answer to a GMAT Sentence Correction question is correct is a little vague or "subjective," in the vast majority of cases, there are mathematically precise reasons why verbal choices are incorrect or correct. What that means is that, if you handle verbal questions in a mathematically precise way, in other words, in the way in which you handle quant questions, you'll get them correct consistently.
Of course, most of us are more accustomed to handling math in mathematically precise ways than we are to handling sentences and language in that way. So, handling verbal in that way can take a little getting used to. All the same, if you take the attitude that you can approach verbal in that way and train with that approach in mind, you'll be doing just what you have to do in order to ace verbal, and you'll end up performing at a high level in verbal, just as you're used to in quant.
For some more on acing GMAT verbal, see this post.
How to Score High on GMAT Verbal