How to improve verbal from 33

Rajesh,

This is the problem with me as well! At least in CR with practice I have improved my reading speed but reading comprehension - I read a paragraph twice! Need to improve that! I think few other threads on this forum suggest that we read more from reputed newspapers / magazines such as Economist / Wall Street Journal etc and make reading a regular habit and also take short notes to form the short story (main point) so that it helps us with the RC section.

Hey Rajesh,

On average, you should be aiming to answer each question, in less than two minutes.

When it comes to the timing aspects of the test and stress management - make sure you think extreme positivity and pay attention to this critical element of the test. We highly recommend that you read through the timing tips that we put together for you on this blog post:
https://www.gmatpill.com/about/studying- ... trategies/

Also, in case you haven't seen, the GMAT Timer is just one of many features we already have in the Practice Pill Platform: https://www.gmatpill.com/gmat-practice-test/

You can time yourself for each question, get a video explanation explained the GMAT PILL way, and post questions / get answers to your questions.

Best of luck - and we are here to help.

First step would be to opt for Enhanced Score Report and see how you performed in each of the 3 question types: SC, CR and RC.

Thanks Ashish for reply.

As per my ESR, my individual percentile for SC, CR, RC is 77, 82 and 40.
Also, my accuracy for first, second, third and last set of questions in verbal is 100%, 29%, 86%, 50%.
Based on this, I think
1. I have to first increase my ability to answer hard questions(since my accuracy for Que 11-20 was 29%).
2. I need to improve in SC.
3. low percentile in RC is because of attempting only 2 RCs and guessing rest two. It happened because of lack of time. So, I need to improve my timing in CR and RC to improve my RC percentile.

Anything else anyone suggest me to do based on ESR?

Can we post ESR on public forums?

Thanks,
Rajesh

You have your task cut out Rajesh. In fact, ESR is very clean in your case, in the sense that it is telling you very specifically few things (and is not giving mixed signals):

i) At a high difficulty level, your accuracy level is dipping (100% accuracy in first set is brilliant!).

ii) Time management is an issue.

iii) 50% is not reflective of your ability because you just guessed around 6-7 questions.

So, even if you maintain your current proficiency level in Verbal, just focusing on time management should actually bump up your score by 3-4 points.

p.s. It's really wonderful how much detail GMAC is now giving our in ESR.

Thanks Ashish for your input.
Could you also provide your input for my QA ESR result.
accuracy was 100%, 71%, 57% and 86%. Though I had more than enough time in 3rd set, my accuracy still dropped. (does that mean we should be processing with our regular pace even when we get time left in the end?)
I became slow in third set because I had ample amount of time and as per my mocks analysis my majority of mistakes were "silly ones". But it seems putting more stress on avoiding silly mistakes made me do more mistakes in 3rd set as compared to 1st, 2nd and last set.
I am also wondering even after doing 100% correct in first set I didn't touch QA 50.

Any inputs to reach Q50 or 51.

Thanks,
Rajesh

That's probably the core of your problem, then! I can offer a few quick tips, but the most important thing you can do here is practice with a timer. Do a lot of randomly selected Verbal problems, time yourself, and only do the amount of work that you're able to do within the time limit.

A few points:

- On RC, if you're slow, you're probably reading for detail too much. As soon as you recognize something as a detail / example / jargon / etc, immediately start skimming. All you need to know about a detail, on your first read through, is why it's there - not what it says. If you need to know what it says, you can go back to it later (the GMAT is an 'open-book test'!)

- In general, on RC, the more complex/jargon-y a passage is, the less time you should spend on your first read. The more jargon there is, the less complex the structure probably is.

- On SC, are you using splits (differences between the answer choices)? That can help on some problems. On longer problems, where there aren't clear splits, you can still save some time by going issue-by-issue, rather than answer-by-answer: https://www.manhattanprep.com/gmat/blog/ ... n-problem/

ccooley,

There are questions in RCs that resemble CR questions. Do you think skimming would help? Shouldn't one understand the structure, argument and key points within the RC and then go back just for specific reference questions as such CR Type questions may be hard to answer if one skims. Please suggest a way out for such questions

I assume you're talking about things like main idea questions, author's purpose, etc. Those are exactly the sort of things you're looking for when you're skimming, actually! You're ignoring details, but you're trying to get an 'outline' or 'flowchart' of the passage in your head. You don't need to 'get' the ideas in the passage, but you do want to get the way those ideas relate to each other and what they're generally saying.

Thanks ccooley,
In SC I try to understand the meaning first and then find problems in original sentence then go for choices and look for errors. But I took a little more time in this way.
My major issues in SC are
1. I forget some known concepts during solving questions. For example, redundancy. Though I know yearly and per annum in one sentence are not acceptable but I am not able to catch this while solving.

2. Hard questions of Parallelism and comparison area. I know the basics but not able to put them on hard questions
Any tips? (currently I am solving old gprep questions for these specific areas but haven't found any pattern or strategy that works for me)

Thanks,
RAJESH

Sent from my HM NOTE 1W using GMAT Club Forum mobile app

I have a similar problem going on - however, I am stuck at the 35-36 mark.

I've been writing practice tests for a month now - and in about 5-6 practice tests (from Vertias and MGMAT) the verbal score has been 35-36. Today I wrote the GMAC prep - and voila - 35 again.

Whats interesting though is that I dont have a time management problem. Plus I've become quite good at SC. But I feel there is chasm that I still need to cross.

In some of the MGMAT tests I've written - I have infact hovered in the 95+ percentile - but somehow lose track and get bogged down to 70-low 80 range.

Whats the strategy now to adopt? I feel I have pretty much memorized the MGMAT SC guide. I do make some errors in CR which I am shoring up and I have made a dedicated effort to read the Economist which has tremendously increased my reading speed and comprehension. Please advise!!

I am not the right person to comment here since I am already struggling to improve my score. But still in my opinion you should first see your ESR report and find out where did you go wrong. For me it is simply my ability to answer hard questions and timing issue.
If you can find out where you are lagging then only you can think of any strategy.