VeritasPrepKarishma wrote:
ARASHFRX wrote:
I have GMAT exam in 2 weeks and I am really confused about the RC section.
I am a non-native test taker and some RC questions are really hard for me. it happened to me time and time again that after spending too much time on a long tough passage finally I answered more than 75% of the questions wrong! (awful isn't it?)
Finally I decided to take the following strategy for RC:
Select a tough passage, and guess all the questions without reading it. in this way not only i can save more time on the other questions , including other time-consuming and difficult RC questions that require too much time, but also it will reduce my stress.
I'd really appreciate it if you can guide me about this strategy.
moreover, if you think that it is a good idea to do o, how can i guess the entire questions of a passage in a way that i can reduce the probability of wrong answers?
Thanks for your help in advance.
Before we discuss the wisdom of using this strategy, I have certain questions regarding its implementation.
How will you select the passage you will skip? (It's a computer adaptive test so all passages are not in front of you)
How do you know that 'this' passage will be the hardest? (though once you skip an entire RC passage, chances are your following passage(s) will be low level)
How do you know whether a passage is hard without reading it?
4 questions wrong in a row is not a good idea at all. You need to practice working on long tough passages. It's ok to guess on one question if you feel it is too complicated and will take too much time but skipping an entire passage is not a good idea. As for 'how can you reduce the probability of wrong answers?' There is no such strategy. The probability of any option being correct is 20%. Generally, if people want to skip a handful of questions in a row, they mark every question with the same option, say (B). The logic is that hopefully at least one question will have (B) as the answer. But we know that the answers may not be evenly distributed among the 5 options in a bunch of questions. In fact, in an entire section, you may have two or three predominant answer choices. Its impossible to say what will work.
Thanks for your response,
I came up with this strategy my self (not saying that too proud of it!!) . The reason that I think that it can improve my overall score in Verbal is that first of all, even if i spend too much time on the difficult passages (i will tell you later how can i distinguish them) finally most of the time many of them are not true (as i mentioned more than 75%). secondly, my experience is that if i spend enough time on each passage (average about 2 min and 20 sec for each question) i can answer more than 75% of the question correctly, obviously, in this way despite the acceptable outcome, i usually face lack of time for other questions and my overall performance will decrease. therefore if i guess all the questions of an entire passage, i would not lose too much score, because even if had spent time on them. on average only 1 out of four questions were correct. when generalizing this too all the passages, it would be a disaster! however by saving time with one passage and spend it with others, i can claim that i would do better on other passage (this time more than 75% CORRECT). besides that, consider that when guess, all the answers are not necessarily wrong. in addition, as a non-native test taker, i need more than standard time for other questions )specially CR which i can get a good score in them if i have enough time (about 2 min per question)
i have to say that i am not very optimistic for verbal section, all i need is a score about 35 (don't blame me, but now my average score in prep's is about 28!) so in your comments please consider this score.
Moreover, about the tough passages, some of them are obvious, the long passages with more than 50 lines are usually tough (isn't it?) also by reading first few lines of other passages you can define if they are tough (for example passages about lawsuits are deadly hard for me).
in addition, i think that if i consider my approximate performance on previous questions, i can guess that the current passage might be for example 700-800 score.
I am looking for an overall score more than 680, so with a score about 49 in quantitative section i need just a 34-35 in verbal.
sorry for too much words (and definitely too much annoying grammatical errors!) . again thanks for your generous guides, it really means a lot for me, especially in these less than two weeks to exam.