Key to mastering GMAT Verbal is practicing effectively. In fact, often, when I talk with students who are having trouble increasing their Verbal scores, it turns out that the weak link in their prep is how they're practicing, and once they begin practicing more effectively they get much better results.
So, with that in mind, here are my five best tips for practicing GMAT Verbal in a way that will lead to great results.
Tip 1: Practice Untimed at FirstWhen practicing each GMAT Verbal question type, you’ll get the best results by practicing untimed at first. GMAT students often get the impression that always practicing with a timer works better than practicing untimed. However, having seen what has worked, and what has not, for hundreds of GMAT students, I can say with confidence that
starting off practicing untimed works much better. Here’s why.
Answering Verbal Reasoning questions correctly involves applying concepts and strategies and carefully analyzing passages, questions, and answer choices. When you’re first learning to answer GMAT Verbal questions, the approximately two minutes per Verbal question you’ll have on test day just isn’t enough time to do all those things effectively and become skilled. So, if you do all your practice timed, you’ll likely find it virtually impossible to improve your GMAT Verbal ability.
In contrast,
if you start off practicing untimed, you’ll have time to apply newly learned concepts and strategies and learn to get questions correct.
So, one of my most powerful GMAT Verbal tips is simply to start off practicing untimed.
Tip 2: Analyze Every Answer Choice ThoroughlyA key aspect of getting GMAT Verbal questions correct is telling trap choices from correct answers. Accordingly, to master GMAT Verbal, you need to learn to analyze answer choices. So,
when you’re practicing, much of what you need to be doing is thoroughly analyzing every answer choice you see.
In fact, you can treat each answer choice you see as a question to be answered. Your answer for each choice can be a clear explanation for why that choice is incorrect or correct.
Tip 3: Learn to Be Aware of Whether You’ve Solidly Supported Your AnswerA key challenge of GMAT Verbal questions is that of being aware of whether you have solidly supported your answer. In Quant, we don’t have this challenge since it’s pretty clear when we’ve done all the work necessary for answering a Quant question. However,
in Verbal, you can easily decide that you have support for your answer before you really do.
For instance, an answer choice could have wording similar to wording in the passage or just seem right for some vague reason. So, seeing that wording or having that vague reason, you could decide that you’ve done the work necessary for answering the question. However, neither of those things is really solid support for an answer.
Solid support for an answer will involve clear, logical reasons why one choice is correct and the others are not that you could explain to someone else. To become skilled in GMAT Verbal, you need to learn to be aware of whether you’ve found that type of support.
Before you develop that awareness, you may find that you miss many Verbal questions because you settle on a choice before you find solid support. Once you develop that awareness, you can stick with each question until you have solid support for your answer and get the vast majority of Verbal questions correct.
Tip 4: Don’t Guess Between the Last Two ChoicesSpeaking of solid support, if you choose an answer by guessing, you clearly don’t have solid support for your choice. Nevertheless, people practicing GMAT Verbal often guess between the last two choices after eliminating the other three.
Don’t do that!
If you guess between the last two choices when doing a Verbal practice question, you may as well have never done the question. Why? Because choosing between the last two choices is a key part of the GMAT Verbal game.
It’s often relatively easy to eliminate three choices. Then, choosing between the last two is the final important step in which whether you’ll get the question correct is determined. So,
if you just guess between the last two choices, you won’t be practicing the key thing you need to learn to master GMAT Verbal.
So, if you eliminate three choices, have two left, and feel stumped, my best advice is, don’t guess. Stick with the question and seek to see what you need to see to choose one choice over the other. Figure out how to find solid support for your choice and get the question correct.
Tip 5: Emphasize Thorough Understanding and High AccuracyOverall,
when practicing GMAT Verbal, emphasize understanding the questions and what makes each choice incorrect or correct, and shoot for high accuracy.
And by high accuracy, I don’t mean just “getting most official questions correct.” You can get 50 percent of Verbal questions correct by just guessing between the last two choices of each question. So, even getting 60 to 70 percent correct is not much better than guessing. Accordingly, to be in control on GMAT Verbal on test day and score relatively high, you need to be able to consistently achieve practice question accuracies along the lines at least of the following:
- 90 percent on easy questions
- 80 percent on medium questions
- 70 percent on hard questions
And, if you want to achieve a top Verbal score, you have to achieve even higher practice accuracies along the lines of the following:
- Close to 100 percent on easy questions
- 90 percent on medium questions
- 80 percent on hard questions
Happy studying, and may you enjoy the GMAT Verbal game!