Help:28 in verbal in second attempt after scoring 38 in the first

Hi Simbasim,

I’m glad you reached out, and I’m happy to help. The main question here is the following: Why did you score significantly lower on verbal on the real GMAT than you did on your most recent practice tests? While it’s possible that nerves affected your performance on the test, it's more likely that some of your verbal weaknesses were exposed when you took the GMAT.

Scoring high on GMAT verbal tends to involve using logic and noticing key details. However, it is possible to get some verbal questions right by looking for patterns that you have already encountered in your preparation. Looking for patterns will not always work though, and if the patterns with which you are familiar don’t show up in the questions that you see on the actual GMAT, your verbal score will not be very high.

So, one possible reason for the difference between your verbal scores on practice tests and your verbal score on the real GMAT is that, in your preparation, you did not really learn to do what you have to do in order to score high on verbal. Rather, you picked up on some patterns that were effective in getting you relatively high scores on practice tests.

To hit your verbal score goal, you probably have to adjust the way that you have been preparing, and focus your preparation on developing skills, such as use of logic, that you can use to correctly answer GMAT verbal questions regardless of what verbal tricks the test presents. In order to develop those skills, you may need to slow way down in your verbal preparation, and analyze questions and answer choices until you clearly see the logic of questions. In other words, your preparation has to be deeper and has to result in your clearly seeing what is going on in verbal questions.

For instance, to improve your Critical Reasoning skills, you would go beyond seeking to answer practice questions in under two minutes, and carefully analyze many Critical Reasoning questions to see what makes them work, what key details you have to notice in order to get Critical Reasoning questions correct, and how logic clearly defines differences between incorrect answers and correct answers. As it stands, it seems likely that you are getting tricked by trap answers. So, you have to slow down in your preparation and learn to see the clear differences between trap answers and correct answers. Only once you have developed more skill in recognizing what is going on in these questions should you seek to speed up and answer questions in under two minutes.

Also, I think you have to do some significant review of Sentence Correction basics such as subject-verb agreement and the use of modifiers.

You CAN get your score up. Just work hard! Reach out if you have questions.