Stuck at V38 (total 720)...Need Help

Question

Hello,
I have been preparing for about 2 months. I gave my first GMATprep test today and scored a 720 (Q49 V38). Although I have improved my verbal (started with a dismal V28) but I still want to reach that V40 level. I have tried almost everything. 
I got 11 questions wrong in verbal 
5 SC
4 CR
2 RC

I have used Manhattan SC guide and have completed all the question in OG and Verbal review 2. Please tell me how to increase my verbal score to V40 and above.
Thanks

Ergenekon · Answer

I am almost in similar condition. Very difficult to improve beyond 40. I practice with 4 reading passages a day for RC. Bought almost every official material out there.

EMPOWERgmatRichC · Answer

Hi mohitgupta1994,

With these current scores, you're performing really well. At this level though, the GMAT becomes really "sensitive" to little mistakes, so you're going to have to nitpick your work to figure out WHY you're getting questions wrong and then fix those problems. With a V38, you do NOT have a 'weak' category in Verbal, but you might be consistently missing out on some points in certain sub-categories (for example, certain grammar rules or CR question types).

That level of research/review is what you have to do next. While you have a greater opportunity to pick up points in the Verbal section, you do have a small opportunity in the Quant section as well.

I have a few questions about this CAT:

1) Did you take the ENTIRE CAT (including the Essay and IR sections)?
2) What time of day do you take this CAT and what time of day is your Official GMAT?
3) Did you have to rush to finish any of the sections (and guess on some questions)? Did you finish any sections early?

4) When are you planning to take the GMAT?

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

alexau · Answer

As Rich mentioned, you probably do not have one weak area, as you seem to be pretty strong in verbal.

For SC, I would just keep reading the MGMAT SC guide. Personally, I just read this guide until the SC questions and errors felt as if they were second nature. What I mean by this is that for certain quant questions, you probably have a pretty clear of exactly what you want to do to get the answer. Try to force yourself to have this mentality for SC. As you read a sentence, you should be able to identify potential errors right off the bat. If you can do this, you will be much stronger at SC. I also made a SC guide for myself (attached in debrief, link at bottom). I felt that this helped a ton. I always found it more helpful to make guides, rather than just reading text that was prepared by someone else. If you force yourself to make a guide, you are actively learning the material.

For CR, definitely focus on predicting the answers and finding logic gaps. The more you can "predict" the answer before actually reading the choices, the better you will get at CR.

For RC, you are going to use a lot of the same skills as for CR. I would make sure to take notes on each paragraph and personally I feel that the most important things are to understand the main idea of the passage, understand the purpose of each paragraph, and then be able to spot the details. If you can do this within a 2 minute - 2 and a half minute read through, you should be able to identify the correct answers much easier.

Remember for verbal, there are 4 fatally flawed answers for each question. Verbal can be much more formulaic that one anticipates, especially for SC.

While it is hard to score consistently above the V40 level (just due to the small change in percentile for each point increase), if you can identify the 4 flawed answers, you can do this consistently. I would recommend going back through your entire exam and trying to understand why each answer is correct. For every question, you should have three tasks: understand why the correct answer is incorrect, understand why the incorrect answers are incorrect, and understand why the incorrect answers are tricky. The GMAT will try to trick you with answers that are half correct and half incorrect, but if this is the case, you know that it is 100% wrong.

Even though you already went through the OG and Verbal review, I would go through it again just so you can explain each question and answer in detail.

How much longer do you have until your exam?

mohitgupta1994 · Answer

Thank you for your replies they were very helpful. As to answer some questions
 
1. I took the exam along with IR and AWA.
2. I still have 1 month before my actual exam.
3. I finished well in time (finished 2 min before in Quant and 4 min before in Verbal)
4. I took the CAT at the same time of the day as my real test.

EMPOWERgmatRichC · Answer

Hi mohitgupta1994,

It sounds like you've made your CATs reasonably 'realistic' so all that's left now are the 'little things' that I mentioned earlier.

Here's something that you might want to consider:

Post each of the questions that you got wrong on this last CAT (put each into the proper Forum) and I'm sure you'll receive plenty of insights and suggestions from the Experts and other Users on the site. You might learn something new, find an error in your logic or pick up some 'pointers' that will help you in subtle ways.

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

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