Sometimes Quant can't get you there [750 Q43, V51]

OK guys, after thinking about it, here is what I can offer up to you. Obviously it worked out pretty well for me, and I think if you give yourself a few weeks/month or two of practice, even nonnative speakers can get here.

Here is my general strategy:

Bottom Line Up Front: Everything hinges on your ability to conquer any SC question (except those that are truly brutal) in around 60 seconds max.

1. Attack SC questions quickly and efficiently, aim for no more than 60 seconds per question. Obviously you will have 2-3 per test that are real tricky and require 60-120 seconds to analyze, break down, and compare answer choices. Think about it - you will get 4 RC passages per test, each with 4 questions. Therefore you're left with 25 CR/SC questions. Assuming you get about 10 CR and 15 SC, you can make up close to 30 seconds per SC question. Assuming you have the 2-3 that require a full 90 or even 120 seconds, you will still be ahead of schedule by about 6 minutes. This is key. It all starts here.

2. Now that you are working with a full extra 5-6-7 minutes of head-scratching, nail-biting POE time, you can really dig into those tough CR and RC passages. Everyone swears by the MGMAT SC guide, but most fail to tout the MGMAT CR and RC guides! These are GOLDEN. You have GOT to use MGMAT CR and RC if you want to score high 90 percentiles on Verbal. A lot of people claim that the "Diagramming" and "Highlighting" Techniques for CR and RC are time consuming and not feasible on the real GMAT due to time constraints. Let me tell you right now: I diagrammed every single CR question and highlighted all four RC passages when I took the GMAT. How was I able to do this? Yes, I worked efficiently and quickly, but I also had those extra 5 or so minutes I had made up by knocking out SC questions in a timely manner. See how it is all related?

3. Early in my prep, I noticed trends in my verbal test-taking. I never had significant problems with SC, but often got tough CR or RC questions incorrect. I couldn't figure out why until I attempted diagramming and highlighting. As it turns out, I was taking TOO MUCH TIME ON SC, leaving me insufficient time to process the barrage of information thrown at you in an RC passage, or leaving me too rushed as I analyzed CR, which often led to careless errors. REMEMBER: for BOTH CR and RC, the key to ascertaining the correct answer is COMPREHENSION of the passage. The best way to do this is make "highlight" or "diagram" notes as you are reading! This way you are literally reading and writing it simultaneously, which maximizes your brain's ability to truly process the meaning behind the words. Yes, this is difficult to do with an average of 2 mins per question, but if you are ahead of pace with good SC skill, you will have more along the lines of 2:15-2:20 average for RC and CR. These extra seconds are CRUCIAL because they allow you the opportunity to really think about the information, and then seriously consider how it relates to what the question is really asking.

Bottom line - first establish your skill with SC. This will gently ease you into verbal in general. Become more familiar with subject-verb agreement, parallelism, and modifiers. These are the things the GMAT will beat you with the most. Once you are at the 700+ level, you will see questions with all three of these issues at fault within the prompt. Read the sentence over once, and cross off the first option as soon as you know it's wrong (or leave it if a possible correct answer). Then read through the other four choices and place them back in the original sentence, looking for those key elements of SV agreement, parallelism, and modifier placement. Obviously this is overly broad, but if you have read the MGMAT SC guide, you'll know what I'm talking about.

Hope this helps you out, guys. Sorry if I was rambling a little bit. I'm willing to answer any other questions you might have. Thanks and take care!

What I would really recommend for anyone, native or nonnative speaker, is to spend lot of time reading well-written literature. If you have several months before your planned GMAT date, read a variety of books to become comfortable and familiar with verbal. I am a pretty active reader myself, and I found this to be very beneficial. Lots of people recommend Mark Twain. I'd also say try some other classics, such as To Kill a Mockingbird, Moby Dick, and others. For more modern reading, look at nonfiction authors like Stephen Ambrose - his books are very interesting and have a very vibrant and expressive writing style that will help you recognize changes in grammar.

Let me quantify this thought a little more:
I've noticed a trend GMAT Club and some of the other GMAT forums. A lot of individuals who are having a harder time with verbal but seem to be completely good to go on quant often post questions and solicitations for advice on how to improve Verbal score. Often, with these individuals, you will look at their posted test scores and they will look something like this (this is an example I am just making up):

GMAT Prep 1 710 Q50, V33
MGMAT 1 690 Q51, V30
MGMAT 2 720 Q50, V34
GMAT Prep 2 720 Q51, V35

For people like this, you clearly have a very firm and solid grasp of the quantitative skills required for the test. I was the opposite, I have always been comfortable with verbal, but math was a bit more of a struggle for me. I got to an acceptable level, in fact I would even say I underperformed on the actual GMAT in quant. Were it not for my perfect verbal score, I probably would have considered retaking.

But for those of you lucky individuals, whether you are an Indian IT Male, Finance guy/gal, or belong to another demographic that typically performs well in quant, I cannot recommend enough that you simply devote more of your free time to reading English lit, both fiction and nonfiction. If your test is tomorrow or next week - ok, got it, you might not be able to use this technique to raise your score by a significant amount. But if you have a few months, I'd recommend perhaps easing back on your goal to do every question in 1000 SC or all of RC99. Obviously you need these tools to hone and refine your proficiency. If you spend all your time and energy on endless repetition of CR/RC/SC questions, sure your score will probably improve, but you will likely reach a plateau at some point that cannot be broken without a more refined and thorough grasp of the mechanics of the English language. Put another way, you may be "missing the forest for the trees."