How to Improve Timing in Verbal?

dabaobao
Mentioned below are some of the pointers based on my personal experience.

1) The first thing that comes to my mind for mastering SC in verbal is hands-down e-gmat SC course, You can opt for e-gmat verbal course or go through below free resources mainly for SC.
https://gmatclub.com/forum/e-gmat-s-all ... 44985.html
P.S. It is not any paid advertisement from my side, the course is indeed very helpful

2) Always go for the meaning of the sentence, remember - meaning over any other rules. Do read the sentence completely till the end, many of the times there is one keyword at the end-non-underlined part that completely changes meaning of the sentence( Damn you GMAC, you ain't giving me that point so easy ). We have this habit of going for an option which looks/ sounds good but take a pause and try to infer what the intended meaning is before hitting the submit button.

3) Go through Ron Purewal's videos(must if you are aiming to score high in SC) mentioned in below link:
https://onedrive.live.com/?authkey=%21A ... 2A63933A42

4) Try revising SC flashcards, you can prepare them on your own or just download one that is floating on the GC already, and trust me there are plenty useful ones.
Personally I found the below mentioned flashcard the best, Thank you slingfox :
https://gmatclub.com/forum/slingfox-s-g ... 96483.html

5) Follow some verbal legends here on GC, go through the ways they tackle SC questions and I guess that should be it.
If you follow the aforementioned pointers, you would be the next GMAT SC Spartan.

Happy learning!
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Use the attached. It is a summary of the Powerscore CR book. If you know how to identify each game type and subsequently the parts of each question (premise, conclusion, ect) you will be able to solve almost any problem.

-- Mod Nightblade

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Go through Ron Purewal's videos(must if you are aiming to score high in SC) mentioned in below link:
https://onedrive.live.com/?authkey=%21A ... 2A63933A42

above link is not working

Try this :
https://onedrive.live.com/?authkey=%21A ... 2A63933A42
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dabaobao, this video goes through some advice on how to set your priorities efficiently on SC. Hopefully that will help a bit.

It doesn't necessarily sound like your general approach is flawed, though. My hunch is that the trouble is happening AFTER you've already eliminated anything with a clear grammatical error. At that point, you have to figure out how the tiny differences between the answer choices affect the meaning and logic of the sentence. That part is much trickier, and it can take some time to really develop that skill. (And I hope that my hunch is wrong, because your test is coming up really soon!)

If that first video doesn't do the trick -- or if you want some examples of what to do when the meaning gets really hairy -- check out this follow-up.

I hope this helps!
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Hi dabaobao,

Your post seems focused on Verbal questions/advice, but based on your prior Official Score, you appear to have a big opportunity to pick up points in BOTH the Quant and Verbal sections. Before I can offer you the specific advice that you’re looking for, it would help if you could provide a bit more information on how you've been studying and your goals:

Studies:
1) When did you take the Official GMAT? Have you taken it just once?
2) How long have you studied?
3) What study materials have you used so far?
4) How have you scored on EACH of your CATs (including the Quant and Verbal Scaled Scores for EACH)?

Goals:
5) What is your overall goal score?
6) When are you planning to retake the GMAT?
7) When are you planning to apply to Business School?
8) What Schools are you planning to apply to?

GMAT assassins aren't born, they're made,
Rich

I need some advice on improving my timing in Verbal. I would really appreciate if some experts/mods could shed some light on this. GMATNinja hazelnut nightblade354 Vyshak

I’m pretty well-versed with the verbal content since I’ve gone through Manhattan’s and e-gmat’s verbal material quite a few times. I've also completed CR Bible. I've been practicing 2 RCs everyday for the past 4 months. I've also been doing 2-3 verbal mock timed sets [36 Q (14 RC, 12 SC, 10 CR) in 65 min] using GC tags. I can never finish the test. When the last 2-3 minutes are left, I'm usually >85%ile but I'm left with around 8-13 questions for which I randomly mark D for all in order to complete the test. This pattern has been consistent over various CATs and my practice mock tests. More details here: https://gmatclub.com/forum/how-to-maxim ... 69791.html.

I believe I need to work on my application of concepts so that I can do Qs faster. I’m current average is 2/Q for SC and 2.5/Q for CR and RC.

Q1:
Do you think I need to cover any additional material or watch videos in order to improve my speed in Verbal?

Q2:
This might be an awkward Q Which verbal video series would be more useful in my case of decent accuracy but slow speed (I believe in terms of application of concepts and strategy, particularly for SC & CR): Thursday with Ron’s videos or GMATNinja’s videos? I have great respect and appreciation for GMATNinja Sir but Ron's videos seem to be quite a popular choice. I would want to know what's the difference between them. I've watched 1-2 videos but for different sections so it's hard to decide which one to go with.

Q3:
Except for 1 playlist (GMATNinja Live Tips - Season 1), I don't seem to find any playlists for GMATNinja's videos. Any suggestions on how to go through them in an organized manner? It would be great if GMATClub could create different playlists for GMATNinja's videos since I've heard that they are really good.

There is some good advice here already - have you seen my post about Timing Strategies by chance?
https://gmatclub.com/forum/timing-strat ... 06035.html
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There's no way anybody could give you a particularly useful answer to this, unfortunately. Ron and I are radically different teachers, and we have wildly different personalities. So our videos will resonate differently with different people. If you're not sure, why not watch them both, and see what you can pick up? There's no reason why you have to choose one or the other.


We've done two live video series. The first is detailed here; the second is here. More coming soon.

I hope this helps!
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Thank you.
Liked the answer for query that many people might have but not everyone expressing.
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nightblade354 I've got a month for my official GMAT exam, been preparing already for a while now, jut realized that powerscore CR is a must book to go through. Would put myself as a 2.5/5 on CR, should I go through the whole book or rely on the summary posted on this thread? Thank you

A month isn't that long of a time to prepare. If you're at a 2.5/5, it sounds like you most likely need to learn/refine your basics, so I'd recommend reading the entire book. Please know that this will take away from practice time, so you may have to retake the GMAT. That said, the summary posted in my CR guide may be the way to go if you are determined to never look at the GMAT again and you get very lucky with the questions.

Good luck!
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Thanks a lot! This helps Given the book is already 300+ pages long, I think I should rely on the summary and practice questions (solving them itself revises the theory, don't you think?) + been watching GMAT Ninja's CR videos, they helped a lot. Do you think that must do enough to target a good verbal score?

There's more to verbal than CR. SC and RC are equally challenging, so there's no way for me to say whether you will get a good score. Following experts, learning how they think/solve questions, is the best way to master each section. Stick to OG/LSAT for verbal sources. Do not use unofficial questions for practice.
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If you can't get Powerscore, consider checking out Manhattan-Prep's 6th Edition for CR. There's also a Negation Technique video on the GMAT Knight blog you may find helpful for CR assumption questions.

All the best.
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@nightblade gmatknight thank you for replying! I'll check them out

Hi,

I would love to help you here as I was also facing this problem when I was trying to improve my verbal score. FYI, I had reattempted GMAT to increase my overall GMAT score but mostly, my weak area was verbal. During this time, I did the following things:
1. Start by figuring out your weak and strong areas in the verbal section.
2. My strong area in verbal was SC. So SC questions on average required less of my planned time per question.
3. I used this time to spend more time on tough CR questions, followed by RCs which anyway demanded more time from my side as my speed to read and answer the questions was very slow in the beginning.
4. Not all CR and RC questions that were taking more time, weren't all tough. For me, I was gradually getting better at attempting them and my accuracy grew as well.

Practice, Strategize, Excel...
Hope it helps!

Thank you LiamFudge for replying, adding a question that I need help with;

Are OG questions for Verbal enough?

How did things go with your actual GMAT?
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