RC help needed!!

Hi all,

I was wondering if anyone could give me some tips on how to prepare for RC section.
I have taken over 6 mocks including Varitas, Official Mock and Manhattan and almost all the time, I get CR and SC over 70% accuracy, and RC is around 20 to 30%, dropping my verbal score a lot.

I have an official exam coming up in three weeks.

Any help or tip much appreciated.

Thanks!

Hi, I teach an RC solving approach based on absorption. Feel free to reach out. A tip for RC would also be to get a sense of how INFERENCE and MAIN IDEA questions work on the GMAT.
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Hi there,

Take a look in my signature for the 'Studying for Verbal starter kit' link. There are a ton of RC videos to watch that will be helpful.

Pay close attention to the 'how to review RC and CR' link.

The thing about RC is that there aren't 'concepts' you need to know. It's a passage, a question, and your own thoughts. You have to figure out where things are going awry.

One huge, huge important habit to develop is to try to specify what words in the passage you are using to justify the answer you are choosing. This at least gives you a good place to start to review a question when it goes wrong. "Wait, I thought those words meant this answer is correct. Why don't they?"

Either you misinterpreted what the question was asking, what the words in the passage said, or what the answer choice meant.

Another big strategy when you study RC is to avoid reading explanations. Scour over the passage text until you have used it to tell you which answer is right. If you have a buddy who can help you, tell them what answer you think is correct and then just have them say 'right' or 'wrong.' If it's wrong, keep working.

The answers to questions are either thoughts implied by the language in the passage or directly stated by the language in the passage. Your job is to get good at finding those thoughts in the language!
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Hi Sivatorne,

We last discussed your studies approximately 4 weeks ago (and at that time, you had not taken any of the Official GMAC CATs/mocks yet), so before I can offer you any additional advice for this next phase of your studies, it would help if you could provide a bit more information about how you've studying since then:

1) Which CATs have you taken since then, when did you take them and how did you score on each (including the Quant and Verbal Scaled Scores for each)?
2) Have you been using any new study materials during this time?
3) When is your exact Test Date? Are you taking your GMAT at a Test Center or are you taking the At-home GMAT?

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

Mastering RC is a challenge faced by many students. There is one fundamental mistake that most students do, that is trying to read the passage fast. The trick to ace RC is not to understand WHAT is written, but to understand WHY it is written. Let me take you through the 3 step process that helped me master RC.

STEP 1: INVOLVED READING

While reading the passage, focus on the role played by each sentence and understand what purpose does it serve? Simple questions that you can ask could be - does it support an argument, weaken it, oppose a viewpoint, provide more data, or bring in a different perspective and so on. The idea is to understand the transition in thoughts and which side is the author taking.

STEP 2: EVOLVED READING

Once you’ve understood the intent of each line, you can then choose to ignore the detail and focus on summarising the paragraphs in a line. Then, focus on the intent of each para and think about the structure of the passage. I even believe in identifying (at a high level) what is the main point of the passage even if there is no main point question attached. It helps in having more confidence in marking Inference or Organization based questions.

STEP 3: ANSWER CHOICE ELIMINATION

If the above two steps are done properly, this step is the easiest. All you need to do is, look at each question one-by-one and eliminate the answer choices from your evolved understanding of the passage. Involved and Evolved Reading will help you eliminate 4 choices in most of the questions. In few tough ones, you might be confused between 2 choices, but those can be easily eliminated by focusing on the following aspects:

• Scope of the choice – shouldn’t be out of scope or too limited in scope
  
• Minute details – shouldn’t have half-truths and rest distortion
  
• Confusing words – shouldn’t have words which seem similar but are different. You can refer to this video to learn the difference:
  
  
  
• Opposite – is opposite of what you should be looking for

These 3 steps are simple and you need to ensure that you practice using this method and perfect it to get high accuracy.

IT’S TIME CONSUMING – ISN’T IT?

This is one argument, which I hear several times and the only thing that I’ve to say is “Yes it is time-consuming but not more than what GMAT provides you with”. Even if you spend 3-4 mins in Step 1, 30 secs on Step 2 and 1 min each on answering the 4 questions, you still complete 4 questions in 8-9 mins, which to me is good enough. Now, the tricky thing is to complete Step 1 in 3-4 mins, you should keep the time pressure out of your mind and give the passage its due time. Initially you might spend even 8-9 mins doing Step 1 alone, but that’s ok. That’s how we human beings learn a new skill. Moreover, you’re not writing GMAT tomorrow, so spend time today and keep following the method. Once you solve around 40 passages using this approach, you will find time per passage optimizing.

IS THIS IS THE ONLY METHOD?

For someone who hasn’t been a Bibliophile – this method works well. Shortcuts such as reading first few lines or the question first work for students who are already at a pretty good level, not for those who are struggling. So, I would highly recommend using this methodology.

Hope this helped and feel free to contact if you have any further queries.

You can always write back to me here or the better way would be to connect over a call and have a discussion. You can schedule a free consultation call using the below link.


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