Need verbal guidance to push my score to 730

Hello, Mohan, and hello, Andrew (from one to another—I have not seen you in the forum for a while). I could not agree more with Andrew above on the utility of third-party questions. In fact, I just wrote a post yesterday in which my words of caution were strikingly similar:


Where the other Andrew and I might hold divergent views are in the latter few points of his post. Although it is practical to develop a timing strategy of some sort on a timed test, I would not recommend skipping questions if your aim is to score a 37 or higher in the section. Most test-takers, even those who can consistently score above a 40, are not adept at identifying the difficulty level of a given question, and a quick five-second guess on a "skip" question could prove detrimental if you happened to take a pass on the wrong question and miss it. The test punishes mistakes on Easy and Medium questions more harshly than it rewards accuracy on Hard questions. This tendency can explain why a test-taker who misses a single question across the Verbal section can earn any of a 48, 49, or 50. (Yes, I have seen a verified 49 from someone who posted a debrief last year. I remarked that I did not know such a scaled score was possible.) You risk digging yourself a hole that might take two or three questions to climb out of if you "skip" at an inopportune moment. Furthermore, the Verbal section does not increase in difficulty from beginning to end even if you answer every question correctly. The following ESRs from test-takers who have missed only up to one question in the Verbal section reveal as much. Note that "Average Difficulty" means just that—some questions will be more difficult, per official designation, in any given quarter of the test, while others will be less difficult.




This sort of inverted V is common among top-scoring test-takers. (Quant is different, and does, in fact, show more of an uphill battle, at least to a point.) The point is, rather than play the odds and hope to pass on the right questions, you might do better to improve your conceptual understanding across the board. Better understanding tends to lead to decreased time spent, not on every question, but on average.

You might be interested in this recent debrief in which the poster outlines how he raised his own Verbal score from a 14 to a 38. No, I was not his tutor, so this is not some self-serving plug. He also started with e-GMAT, but it seems as though it was not until he studied under Chiranjeev Singh and Anish Passi of GMAT Intensive that he made significant inroads in his approach to Verbal questions. Lest you question my possible affiliation with these folks, the test-taker also made use of Target Test Prep and found that platform helpful.

Finally, I would not recommend touching LSAT questions unless you have an expert tutor or teacher such as Andrew above or GMAT Ninja hand-selecting questions that they know align well with the kinds of questions that appear on the GMAT™. Too many students get bogged down in LSAT Logical Reasoning questions when there are hundreds of official CR questions that are better suited for the purpose of GMAT™ preparation. Unless you know the difference in questions, you will most likely miss out on that "flavor" Andrew mentioned and toil over many questions that have little applicability to the matter at hand. I would reserve LSAT questions for when you have already pushed into the 40s and may have exhausted the 700-level official questions for CR.

All of that said, good luck with your studies, however you choose to go about them.

- Andrew

Any tips to improve from V27 to V37.

Some verbal tips on the blog. Hope they help!

How to get a V40 or higher on the GMAT? What about a V51?

Hi Mohan,

First off, a 640/Q50 is a solid Score, so it could be enough to get you into your first-choice School. Depending on the Schools that you plan to apply to, you would likely find it beneficial to speak with an Admissions Expert about your overall profile and plans. Those Experts should be able to answer your Admissions questions and help define the specific areas of your profile that could use some improvement. There's a Forum full of those Experts here:

https://gmatclub.com/forum/ask-admissio ... tants-124/

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) How long have you studied? How many hours did you typically study each week?
2) What study materials have you used so far? What “brands” of CATs/mocks have you used?
3) On what dates (or approximate dates) did you take EACH of your CATs/mocks and how did you score on EACH (including the Quant and Verbal Scaled Scores for EACH)?
4) When are you planning to apply to Business School and what Schools are you planning to apply to?

If you took your Official GMAT at a Test Center, then you might also choose to purchase the Enhanced Score Report. While the ESR doesn’t provide a lot of information, there are usually a few data points that we can use to define what went wrong on Test Day (and what you should work on to score higher). If you purchase the ESR, then I'll be happy to analyze it for you.

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

Contact Rich at: Rich.C@empowergmat.com

Hi Mohan,

First of all, a Q50 is a solid score to secure in Quant Section. You clearly have mastered this Section. However, your verbal score is an area of concern. You clearly need to work hard in case of Verbal and develop a solid understanding first by revisiting the concepts and then approach the problems in a systematic and logical method.

For scoring 700 and above, you need to get the easy medium questions right as GMAT test is adaptive in nature. You can afford making mistakes only in the latter half of the Section, not in the beginning. You have to make the GMAT algorithm serve you difficult questions and get them right. For that, being conceptually clear on all topics is really vital. Not only this, you have to be good with application of concepts because GMAT is a test of application of concepts.

Time management is one of the most important skills for competitive exams that most students struggle with. There is a significant penalty for failing to complete any section of the GMAT exam, so it is also important to develop pacing skills. Once you hone your time management skills strategically, you will be confident about not missing out on any questions on the test day.

The possible reason for struggling with time management in case of Verbal:

Talking about the reason behind struggling with time management, you are likely taking more time to solve RC questions. The reason for this might be you are taking too long to read a passage or you might be going back and forth to the passage for every question. This happens when you don’t use the right reading strategies. Students often read the passage from a detail perspective and stuff themselves with the details. And once they come across an inferential question or a main point question, they cannot answer it and they read the passage again to find the answer. This would often lead to the wastage of time.

While in case of CR and SC, the reason could be -not having conceptually clear knowledge about how to approach problems thereby leading to confusion in eliminating the incorrect choices.

For GMAT Verbal, it is very important that you follow the right methodology and the logical approach. Your focus has to be on eliminating four incorrect choices rather than choosing the right one. The key is to develop a solid understanding of the concepts that are typically tested on the GMAT and master the process skills that are required to solve GMAT questions. Only then, you will be able to smartly avoid the traps set by the test makers and avoid taking too much time in solving questions.

• For SC – Follow the meaning based approach.
• For CR – Focus on Scope Analysis and Framework driven Pre-thinking.
• For RC – Involve yourself in the passage and understand why the passage is written and not just on what’s written.

I’d recommend you to follow this order for the verbal part - SC->CR->RC. The reason for this is very specific. Each question type on the GMAT is testing a specific skill. SC tests your comprehension skills. CR tests comprehension & analytical skills. Finally, RC builds on the previous two skills and also tests your ability to be able to grasp the central point of the passage i.e. Your inferential skills. Thus, when you learn in this order, it's much more effective.

This should help.

Important Tip – Don’t practice tons of questions directly. First focus on learning the right methods for each question. That plays a significant role in getting hard questions correct within 2 mins.

The importance of using a standard resource:

The only method to make sure that you invest your time, money and effort in an effective way is to use a standard resource which teaches you the concepts, strategies and also helps you work on your weaker areas. Studying using OG or a few random resources might help you to solve GMAT like questions but I’m afraid that they won’t be able to help you much from a strategy perspective.

I would suggest you to go for some standard course for your preparation which can help you prepare in a structured and efficient manner thereby increasing your productivity. It’s always better to spare some more time on your preparation until you are ready instead of missing out on your dream colleges/ b-schools in hurry.

You can check out how Mandar, an ex-TTP and eGMAT student, who particularly had issues with time management, improved his GMAT score from 670 (Q49,V32) to 750 (Q50,V41) in just over a month:


Feel free to reach out to me in case you have any more queries.

If you wish to discuss this over a call, you can schedule a free consultation call using the below link. Considering the effort you have put, I would really like to know the concerns and help you improve your score.

Hi TargetttGMAT720.

These posts cover in depth how to increase your verbal score. I'm sure that, in reading them, you'll get some insights regarding why you haven't reached your verbal score goal yet and what you can do to increase your verbal score to V37+.

How to Score High on GMAT Verbal

Three Key Practice Tips for Mastering GMAT Verbal

How to Get Faster at GMAT Verbal

Hi TargetttGMAT720

If possible, then see some verbal lessons of Jeff Vollmer from Gmat Prep Hour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3A9YyFw-UQ&t=841s

Thanks!

Hi TargetttGMAT720
Your quant is great, and you should more focus on verbal.bExplore the free SC and CR solution to OG problems from the link;
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKYf9p ... lhA/videos
https://gmatwithcj.com/resources/critic ... questions/
https://www.gmatninja.com/videos/gmat/verbal
Thanks!

Lots of great advice here, Mohan.

If you're looking for some free videos, check the link in my signature "The Getting Started on Verbal Starter Kit." It will take you through several concepts, strategies, and study habits designed to get you thinking about GMAT verbal in a way to see that score jump.

In my experience you are better off doing brute force practicing on LSAT questions first and then refining on challenging GMAT questions so closer to test day you are 100% GMAT.

What can work, if the level isn't there yet for LSAT, is to practice on easy and medium level GMAT and then LSAT and then back to hard GMAT.

Of course, if you do a bunch of LSAT sets on your own and get totally lost and demoralized then that is a signal that you may want to get back to more fundamental practice. Or maybe do shorter sets. Maybe do 5 LSAT questions a day so the review doesn't completely melt your brain.

Find a rhythm and difficulty level that works for you.

That is a fair addition to your earlier post, Andrew, in which it seemed as though you were advocating practicing LSAT LR questions in lieu of GMAT™ CR questions once a certain level of fundamental understanding was in place. When you mentioned the possibility of someone getting demoralized by going through too much tougher material, I was reminded of an old and lengthy debrief by a perfect scorer in which one of the few lines he wrote in bold was the following:


No, the person was not talking about LSAT questions in particular, but if someone at that level—or any level beyond the mid-700s—can lose confidence by practicing overly challenging material, then it can happen to anyone, and the lower the score a person may have at present, the higher I deem the probability of such a setback occurring.

I wrote earlier that, regarding the use of LSAT questions, I have confidence that someone under your guidance or under that of someone such as GMAT Ninja is in good hands. (I wrote in another recent post that despite my common advice against using such questions for practice, I think they are indeed of high quality, and I enjoy working through them myself.) For most people, however, I do not think wading through the sea of available LR questions is a good idea for GMAT™ preparation, not when so many official CR questions have been published. One more consideration that informs my view: there are only 8 counted CR questions on the exam, not all of which will likely be 700-level, even for someone who can answer all the questions in the Verbal section correctly. How much practice is necessary to increase the probability of answering all 8 of those questions correctly?

From the end of your post, I can see that we agree on another point: work at your own pace, at your own level. There is no one-size-fits-all method when it comes to GMAT™ preparation or, for that matter, just about any type of learning endeavor.

- Andrew

I think the Official GMAT materials situation has gotten MUCH better over the years. Still, if you want to practice hard questions then, it is still my feeling, that there aren't enough. But this really depends on the person and the goal.


There are a few things to think about here:

1. For some students, we want to prepare for those extremely tough 1 or 2 CR that can make the difference between low 40s and mid 40s+ verbal scores that make the mid 700s much easier to achieve (without having to hit 50+ on the quant)
2. Yes, not all test day CR will be super tough. Even if you get a perfect verbal score you will get medium level questions. But we want to make the medium ones even easier so they take less effort/time that you can then apply elsewhere on the section.
3. CR practice can make your general reading and reasoning skills better so that you get RC improvement and, potentially, even
quant can benefit.

Sometimes for verbal high achievers we'll just start with a few weeks of just LSAT to get general reasoning skills super sharp and ready to approach the rest of the test.

Some of these things are more on the advanced side in terms of preparation (I think this is part of what you are getting at) but I think it is still worth putting information out there for people to think about.

I think there is a lot that we agree on and it is clear that you are very thoughtful about these things, Andrew. I just wanted to fill out some details to address some of your points and maybe even find more common ground.

I appreciate the opportunity to have a nuanced discussion about this stuff!

A.

your 640 is a challenging score, and your verbal score is quite low, nothing to worry about just focus on your areas of improvement (i.e your time management for the verbal section and also what study material need to refer, focus on hard and smart work, to coming to your question you want some tips, I have attached video link for the verbal section , look into it and still you have doubts so you can contact with us.
Video link for verbal section : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HzA7xinDDk&t=29s

Hi Everyone,

Thanks for all your help. I gave my exam today and got a score of 710(Q48,V38).

I was hoping to get a Q50 in Quant again and was aiming at 740, a bit disappointed by 710 score. Any advise, if i have to take the exam again as i was scoring pretty high my in mocks(around 740-750).

Thanks again!

Hi Mohan,

To start, this 710/Q48 is a fantastic improvement over your prior 640 - and an outstanding overall Score - so you can comfortably apply to any Business Schools that interest you. As such, another retest might not be necessary. What are your current application plans - and have you reached out to any of the Admissions Expert?

If you took your Official GMAT at a Test Center, then you might also choose to purchase the Enhanced Score Report. While the ESR doesn’t provide a lot of information, there are usually a few data points that we can use to define what went wrong on Test Day (and what you should work on to score higher). If you purchase the ESR, then I'll be happy to analyze it for you.

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

Contact Rich at: Rich.C@empowergmat.com

Gratz on the 710. It's possible the exam was a bit of an outlier if you usually score around a Q49-Q50. Think back to the exam and whether there may have been some questions you might have made some careless errors on. Whether there were some things you did during the exam that you don't during mocks (i.e. spending more time reading the RC passages).

Hi,

First of all congrats on achieving 710, although you were expecting more.

I saw your post when you got 27. And now you scored 38 in verbal.

Could you please tell how you increased your score in verbal.

I just took my mock recently and scored 27 in verbal , although my quant is better, usually score 49.

I am planning to take test next month . So please guide .

Thanks and all the best !
Niwedita B

Posted from my mobile device

Sounds as though you could improve your GMAT score without too much effort. You have nothing to lose by giving the GMAT another shot.