SC score getting worse after studying. Advice?

Sorry to hear that you're having a rough time with SC! I think that jedit is on the right track here. You obviously have really good verbal instincts, mtnginger, and those will ultimately help you a ton on SC. But it’s not weird to have some growing pains as you try to apply grammar rules to SC. You’re abandoning your instincts and doing a completely different kind of analysis, and it makes sense that you’re going to struggle at times as you figure out the right balance between trusting your ear and being methodical and mechanical with the grammar.

At the same time, I wonder if you’re also struggling to prioritize the SC rules. I think the MGMAT book is really good in some ways, but the trouble is that it’s a firehose: it feels like there are about 100 different grammar and usage rules in there, plus a few hundred idioms. That’s great, but then when you look at an actual sentence correction question, which of those 100 rules are you supposed to be thinking about? That might be the root of some of your struggles: you know the rules, but you’re not yet awesome at prioritizing them.

I honestly doubt that you need to learn more grammar from more books. Instead, my hunch is that you might need to really dig into some of your results from official(!) questions, and figure out which of those grammar and usage rules are really causing the trouble. Are you missing the parallelism? Pronouns? Verb tenses? Comparisons? Modifiers? Something else? Have you stopped thinking about the meaning of the sentences because you’re so jacked up about the grammar rules?

I obviously don’t know exactly where you’re going wrong, but I do know this: if you can crush CR and RC, you can DEFINITELY crush SC. It’s just a question of figuring out which things need to be at the front of your mind, and which things can safely take a backseat.

Good luck with your studies, and feel free to tag me anytime if you have questions about anything!

Thanks for he help guys. I went over my test and even my last test back in January before I took it the first time. So far my big weaknesses are verb agreement and idioms so I guess I was doing better with idioms by using my ear and now that I'm thinking more I'm questioning myself.

I'm gonna just do a set of problems from the verbal review each day hopefully I'll see an improvement by my next prep test.

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A drop to 38 from 42 in your initial tests is not as big a problem as you might think (42 to 38 means going from 96% to 85%). Both are good scores. Just keep at it to reduce the variability of your scores.

I think going through concepts from a reputed Verbal course would probably help you more so than practicing more. Am I missing anything, have you already gone taken a SC course?
I also practiced through questions for a long time but things did not improve at all. Lately, I have been going through the verbal SC concepts and found out I have just been relying on a general sense and no practical rules which govern formal English. GMAT is precisely designed to hit such individuals hard. Go through concepts and you will see how much there is to know about SC rules.