Real GMAT SC experience

This seems to be a great discussion and truly a topic that has touched many people. And I would have responded to this sooner than this had I known about this discussion. So here are my two cents regarding this topic.

GMAT SC is about application. In very simplistic terms one needs to understand what the author is trying to say and then communicate that in grammatically correct way through the correct answer choice.

But before I further explore this idea, I will make a claim - Official questions in OG13 and GMAT Prep question banks are representative of real GMAT SC. In fact one of our team members recently (Feb 20, 2013) took the GMAT and scored 770 with 44 on verbal. He found OG13 and GMAT Prep questions very representative of SC questions on the test.

Now that being said, a number of you felt that questions in the beginning were very difficult. So there must be something leading to this observation. Here is my hypothesis – I feel two factors play a role here – one that you are just starting out with the test and you are not as yet warmed up to attempt verbal questions. So while you are in the warming up phase, the other factor comes into play. Since the test wants to calibrate your level, it may throw difficult questions at you right at the onset. Now it’s my hypothesis that the combination of these two factors leads to your observation that initial SC questions are very difficult and are not representative of what you have seen in OG and GMAT Prep.

But in reality, these questions are no different from the official sources as I have already stated above. To reiterate my point – GMAT SC is all about application. In order to do well on GMAT SC you need to be well prepared not only with grammatical concepts but also with your approach to SC questions. Through e-GMAT SC course we drill down this process in your mind so that it becomes second nature to you and so that you do not get scared when you see these “seemingly out of the world” problems.

Now there are ways in which a question can be made more difficult than the others. One such way is that the original sentence can be written in a complicated fashion such that understanding the meaning may become difficult. How to do you combat this – you go back to the basic core skills of how to simplify the sentence structure to understand the meaning. At e-GMAT we teach this in detail through our sentence structure files and then apply this skill on all questions in the application files and practice questions. In fact this methodology should be used on all official GMAT questions as well.

Ok now the other way in which a question may be made more difficult is by creating answer choices such that there are fewer similarities among the 5 choices. How do you combat this – you do thorough analysis of the original choice so that you understand the intended linkages – parallelism, modifiers, verb tense, etc. Once you know these pieces, you should be able to discern the different errors in the answer choices. Once again, the grammatical conceptual knowledge and the process of conducting thorough error analysis are the other two core pillars of e-GMAT SC course.

Lastly, the answer choices may be grammatically correct but logically incorrect or the choice may change the intended meaning of the sentence. In this case, you go back to the original meaning analysis and you spot such meaning change and you reject the answer choice. Once again, e-GMAT’s SC process is based on meaning as that is the crux of SC section. Also, we conducted a thorough investigation of all official material and came up with 5 strategies that GMAC uses to change the meaning of the sentence.

So all in all – the available official material is representative of the actual questions that you will see on the test. In order to ace the test you need to prepare well for the same. E-GMAT SC course will equip you with all the skills that you need to ace GMAT SC. The most important thing is that you attempt the course by applying the best practices as detailed out here.

One last point – if it were really true that GMAT SC is nothing like what is seen in official resources, then we would not be seeing so many success stories of e-GMAT customers and non-e-GMAT customers. These success stories are of people who are just like you.
Marcab - unexpected-but-still-happy-after-all-there-is-no-such-rule-147145.html
Sanket Sharma - 760-ping-pong-did-the-trick-145833.html
Manish Mehta - 600-to-740-all-about-timing-and-fundamentals-147029.html

I will be happy to address any other questions that you may have.

Regards,
Payal