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Updated on: 20 Feb 2025, 09:31
How to go from V78 to V85
There are a lot of threads already about verbal study plans, but I planned to address a particular “getting plateaued” issue that a lot of students (myself included) faced during their preparation to ace the GMAT.
Assumptions:
Most Likely Reasons for Lower Verbal Scores:
There might be a couple of reasons to why your score is always hovering around the V30 range (V28-V35). I would like to address almost all of them below.
How to Improve:
Timing
Timing yourself while attempting the questions is crucial in the later part of your preparation. You should try to use the GMAT Club forum timer when you answer questions on the forum. They will be saved in your error log and you can use the Forum Quiz feature to focus better. Remember to use a stopwatch when you revisit the official guides or any question bank you are working on. Check the Timing strategy collection too.
Strategies
Your strategies should be iron clad. Figure out what exactly works for you. E.g.if you think reading through the passage for every detail is a better idea follow the strategy from the YouTube Video. Remember that the main point questions will probably be on your test for more than one time with a 90% chance. So, make sure you have that concept and strategy internalized.
Break
Make sure you take a break in the practice tests after the quant portion. Also, sentence correction is your weapon when your brain starts to wear. Sentence correction mostly does not involve a lot of brainwork and often acts as a refresher after a heavy RC. So make sure you work hard on SC strategies and practice (including getting a 90%+ accuracy in official questions) so that you take less time in solving sentence corrections and dedicate the balance to offset for the reduced functioning of the zombie brain.
Use OG for Verbal
Make sure you buy and use extensively the official guide to supplement your GMAT preparation. Trust me when I say that the official guides are the most underrated books in the GMAT world. Sure, almost everyone buys them but you cannot deny that the relative importance the official guide gets compared to other “prep books” is quite on the lower side. The real blasphemy in the GMAT world is the statement “Official Guide is a question bank”. I could not stress more on the importance of the official guide, especially for your verbal preparation, for it is the only book which has all the information you need. You just need to learn to look for them. Don’t just answer the questions on the official guide. Review extensively as to what was particularly tested on that question. For example if you are studying modifiers and you are having a go at the modifiers questions in the official guide make sure you understand why exactly the other options are incorrect (awkward/wordy are NEVER good explanations). Refer to GMAT club resources on every single question and look at the expert replies and the discussions. I know it sounds very tedious but this is the most important step in boosting your verbal score. See the two questions at the bottom as an illustration.
Specific Tips for Each Section:
There are a lot of threads already about verbal study plans, but I planned to address a particular “getting plateaued” issue that a lot of students (myself included) faced during their preparation to ace the GMAT.
Assumptions:
- You are consistently achieving V30 or above.
- You have almost finished 80% of the verbal syllabus (if you have planned any) that you intended to cover in the course of your GMAT preparation.
Most Likely Reasons for Lower Verbal Scores:
There might be a couple of reasons to why your score is always hovering around the V30 range (V28-V35). I would like to address almost all of them below.
- You have covered your verbal books such as MGMAT CR/RC, Powerscore, older Kaplan Books and the available question banks but often on a practice test you see a lot of questions, which seem to test something else.
- You have not understood some of the concepts written in certain books (sometimes, as it happens, you think you have understood a certain concept such as pronoun ambiguity but it becomes harder to apply in certain questions as the concept is a little abstract in itself).
- You have not timed yourself when you practiced from question banks.
- Some of the absolute strategies that have been advised by the authors of the books you are referring to are not working for you. This is most common for Reading Comprehension.
- You seem to answer the questions correctly when you review the practice CATs but somehow you answer them wrong while taking the test.
How to Improve:
Timing
Timing yourself while attempting the questions is crucial in the later part of your preparation. You should try to use the GMAT Club forum timer when you answer questions on the forum. They will be saved in your error log and you can use the Forum Quiz feature to focus better. Remember to use a stopwatch when you revisit the official guides or any question bank you are working on. Check the Timing strategy collection too.
Strategies
Your strategies should be iron clad. Figure out what exactly works for you. E.g.if you think reading through the passage for every detail is a better idea follow the strategy from the YouTube Video. Remember that the main point questions will probably be on your test for more than one time with a 90% chance. So, make sure you have that concept and strategy internalized.
Break
Make sure you take a break in the practice tests after the quant portion. Also, sentence correction is your weapon when your brain starts to wear. Sentence correction mostly does not involve a lot of brainwork and often acts as a refresher after a heavy RC. So make sure you work hard on SC strategies and practice (including getting a 90%+ accuracy in official questions) so that you take less time in solving sentence corrections and dedicate the balance to offset for the reduced functioning of the zombie brain.
Use OG for Verbal
Make sure you buy and use extensively the official guide to supplement your GMAT preparation. Trust me when I say that the official guides are the most underrated books in the GMAT world. Sure, almost everyone buys them but you cannot deny that the relative importance the official guide gets compared to other “prep books” is quite on the lower side. The real blasphemy in the GMAT world is the statement “Official Guide is a question bank”. I could not stress more on the importance of the official guide, especially for your verbal preparation, for it is the only book which has all the information you need. You just need to learn to look for them. Don’t just answer the questions on the official guide. Review extensively as to what was particularly tested on that question. For example if you are studying modifiers and you are having a go at the modifiers questions in the official guide make sure you understand why exactly the other options are incorrect (awkward/wordy are NEVER good explanations). Refer to GMAT club resources on every single question and look at the expert replies and the discussions. I know it sounds very tedious but this is the most important step in boosting your verbal score. See the two questions at the bottom as an illustration.
Specific Tips for Each Section:
- Sentence correction is ideal to guarantee a steep improvement in a relatively short period of time (you have to review the official questions in excruciating details).
- Critical Reasoning can be a little more difficult to improve upon, but certain strategies do come in handy. I have my own views about prethinking. For strengthen and weaken, prethinking can be a great idea as strengthen and weaken questions test logic that is already there in your brain. For example when your dad used to say “you must have been the one who broke the glass windowpane while playing cricket”, you instantly used to reply “It was not me but the kid from the next block.” You were, in fact, weakening your dad’s conclusion. But, trying to find out assumptions in convoluted arguments can be extremely tedious and you should be careful in not wasting a lot of time. For inference/bold face questions let your common senses take the back seat and rely solely on the premises and facts in the argument.
- You can review official CR questions. For every strengthen/weaken questions try to figure out an alternate answer choice which would be just as good. This might not be entirely possible for every single question but it will definitely set the right direction for you in such questions.
- Reading Comprehension is crucial when it comes to improvement, for if you do not comprehend a passage well you will end up making repeated mistakes, which we all know can be pretty detrimental with that Verbal score of yours. Make sure you follow a strategy that works for you and then go on a mission to solve official questions. Simplify the question set into specific sets such as main point/inference/detail and work on them. It is up to you whether you want to make notes, but make sure they are as brief as possible. Main point/primary purpose questions are the most important one to crack on RC so make sure you get them internalized.
- Books & Courses are as good as you make out of them. I, for instance, started my verbal preparation with MGMAT SC and took a MGMAT CAT after I was finished with it. I scored a 680 with Q49 V34. I was pretty devastated as people who did well in their verbal prep said MGMAT books are more than enough. Believe me they are. But as it happened, being a non native, I was pretty out of shape in my verbal skills and even though I “knew” all the concepts of grammar for the GMAT, I failed to apply all of them in the test.
For example, I knew that in case of a bilateral doubt in a sentence we use “whether” and not “if”. But I did not know whether it was supposed to be “whether” or “whether or not”. There, I also used a whether in the sentence
. - GMAT Club's Verbal Videos on YouTube - you need to check them out: RC videos, CR videos
- Verbal timing is incredibly crucial in getting a good verbal score. Initially I would be looking at the clock every 5 questions and spend 10-15 seconds on mental calculation as to how many minutes per question I have left. This folly brings a variety of problems. If I am not doing that great I would be incredibly tensed if I realize that I have less than average minutes per question left. Even if I am doing well with my time, the useless mental calculation takes a relatively considerable amount of time itself.
I would like to add or share my opinion, my thoughts about this.
To break the barrier of a decent (really) decent score in verbal section, as in quant, is not only a question of rules, practice, drill sets, mock tests and so, the list could be endless.
I remembered an article by Brian Galvin from Veritas prep: is not important how much you know but how you think, is not important how much question you did, is important what you learned and apply the concepts to a new task. is not important the past but how NOW you see odds angles to comes up with a solution; and not a simple solution but THE solution in the time allotted. Efficiently. Strategically. Like a razor edge. it is not simple, on the contrary, is quite difficult. The variables to take in account are so many...
That say, in my experience on the verbal section:
Critical reasoning: the best advice: try to pre-think the answer with a brief brain-storm and identify always the conclusion of the argument, working from outside to inside, from wrong choices to the right one.
Reading comprehension: Pre-think and use the stop strategy. After a single paragraph ask to yourself what is the author main point, the tone, the connection among the parts of the same. read the entire passage, once: the most difficult passage are strictly related from the beginning until the end, in a consistent manner.
Major Takeaways:
To break the barrier of a decent (really) decent score in verbal section, as in quant, is not only a question of rules, practice, drill sets, mock tests and so, the list could be endless.
I remembered an article by Brian Galvin from Veritas prep: is not important how much you know but how you think, is not important how much question you did, is important what you learned and apply the concepts to a new task. is not important the past but how NOW you see odds angles to comes up with a solution; and not a simple solution but THE solution in the time allotted. Efficiently. Strategically. Like a razor edge. it is not simple, on the contrary, is quite difficult. The variables to take in account are so many...
That say, in my experience on the verbal section:
Critical reasoning: the best advice: try to pre-think the answer with a brief brain-storm and identify always the conclusion of the argument, working from outside to inside, from wrong choices to the right one.
Reading comprehension: Pre-think and use the stop strategy. After a single paragraph ask to yourself what is the author main point, the tone, the connection among the parts of the same. read the entire passage, once: the most difficult passage are strictly related from the beginning until the end, in a consistent manner.
Major Takeaways:
- Practice as possible with official material aka OG. is not important that you do 2 or three times the OG, is important to understand well each question before to move on the next.
- Gmat is a test for business schools, is an entrance test; is a test that is not structured for the students who score well at the end of the day, month, semester. The gmat tests on how you move BEFORE you move into the argument's sake. It is a test on how you can achive a certain result with the minimum effort and the maximum gain, leveraging and bringing to your advantage what you have.
- And last but not least: STAY MOTIVATED.
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