A Special Note on the New Verbal Portion

The verbal portion of the GMAT exam under the new administration, Pearson VUE, is tough and our task of conquering this new type of verbal portion has become tougher in view of the fact that there is no quality material available to prepare for it. I took my exam on April 28, 2006 and scored 35 in verbal. I have been getting a lot of questions about the new GMAT verbal portion and therefore, I decided to summarize my conclusions.

A lot of us who are in the middle of the preparation for this exam must have heard of GMAT SETS. If not, you can find these SETS at any other GMAT website. Kindly do not PM me to find these sets. Just do the search at testmagic.com or gmatclub.com and you will find several posts guiding you towards these SETS. With no disrespect to GMAT SETS, I believe that the verbal portion of GMAT SETS is little different from the real exam with RC being an exception.

In GMAT SETS and in majority of other material available in market, most of the SC errors are what I call STRUCTURED ERROS or SOLID GRAMMATICAL ERRORS. It is easy to pick such errors (modifier problem, subject verb agreement problems, pronoun problems, parallelism problems, run-on sentences, subordination & coordination problems etc). However, in the real exam, you will find that most of the concepts tested these days are not grammar-dependent but they are meaning-dependent. One may be able to narrow the available choices to final two choices but those two choices would be very close to each other with subtle differences. Those choices will be written slightly different from each other in such a way that the slight difference between them would change the original meaning of the sentence. In addition, you may find some sentences in which all 5 choices would be written poorly with couple of mistakes. New verbal portion is indeed a challenge!

I believe that the current verbal portion is designed by purpose to help native English speakers but that is OK. It is just matter of time and very soon non-native English Speakers will get a hang of current verbal pattern. Though, I really feel sorry for all those including myself who happened to get caught in this transitioning phase of GMAT.

Having said that, I have very solid reasons to claim that the type of SCs that you will find in GMATprep once you are scoring above 38 are very close to the type of SCs that you may face in the real exam. Therefore, don’t be discouraged! In addition, I also believe that all those questions in OG11 and OG10 which fall under logical predication + diction + rhetorical construction categories in conjunction with three CCs (clear, concision and clarity) present the most heavily tested concepts in the real GMAT as far as SCs are concerned. I would like to reiterate myself that the some of the SCs that I found at GMATPREP were very close to the real exam. So don’t worry.

CR questions in the new verbal exam are also tough. It is easy to comprehend the main stem but when you go and face the available answer choices, you do not have that “ahaâ€