The Most Common GMAT Verbal Training Mistake and What to Do Instead

Question

People often contact me to find out what to do to get their GMAT verbal scores to increase. Often, they have learned many verbal concepts and answered dozens, or even hundreds, of verbal practice questions but haven't come close to hitting their verbal score goals, and they are wondering why.

So, in case, you are experiencing something similar, here's what I have seen is the most common theme in these situations.

These people are doing pretty much everything they need to do in order to ace GMAT verbal except for one ultra important thing. They aren't nailing down their final answers when they do practice questions.

I'll ask them how they go about answering practice questions, and they'll say things like, "A lot of the time, especially when answering easy questions, I'll see the correct answer pretty quickly, but other times, I'll end up with two possible choices and basically guess between them."

That last part, the "guess between" the last two choices part, is what's keeping these people from acing GMAT verbal, and here's why.

Much of mastering GMAT verbal is about developing skill in execution. In other words, you could know every possible verbal concept and still not score high on GMAT verbal if you haven't learned to execute.

So, what happens when people guess between the infamous "last two choices" is that they never learn to execute. There's a HUGE difference between guessing or vibing or sort of liking a choice and then reading an explanation to find out what you needed to see in order to nail down the correct answer and actually nailing down the correct answer in the first place. So, people who do the former generally don't learn to do the latter.

In fact, when I first started to do GMAT coaching, I had a student who asked me to explain verbal question after verbal question. I was so excited to be seen as an expert, LOL, and I expected his verbal score to be stellar, but what actually happened is that his verbal score did not increase at all. I was mystified until I figured out that what was going on was that, by asking me to explain each question, he wasn't learning to execute himself.

So, what's the move?

The move is to follow all the way through when practicing GMAT verbal. Rather than guess between the last two choices or go with the one that "seems better," stick with each question until you KNOW which choice is correct, even if doing so sometimes requires working on one question for a half hour or more. Working this way, you may answer only ten practice questions in a day, but executing well ten times in whatever amount of time it takes to do so is infinitely more valuable than answering a thousand questions without getting the entire way to knowing which choice is correct.

By following through and nailing each verbal practice question you do, you'll develop the execution skills you need for hitting your verbal score goal and rock GMAT verbal on test day.

For more GMAT verbal preparation ideas, see this post on  How to Score High on GMAT Verbal .

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The Most Common GMAT Verbal Training Mistake and What to Do Instead

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