Target Test Prep Representative
Joined: 24 Nov 2014
Status:Chief Curriculum and Content Architect
Affiliations: Target Test Prep
Posts: 3480
Given Kudos: 1431
GMAT 1: 800 Q51 V51
Verbal Prep Tip - Treat Every Verbal Choice as if It Were a Question
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12 May 2021, 04:23
The Issue
Increasing your GMAT verbal score can be pretty challenging. Whereas just learning a new concept may be enough to generate an increase in your expected quant score, what it takes to drive up your verbal score often seems to be a mystery. While learning new verbal concepts certainly makes a difference, people generally find that learning concepts alone is not sufficient for achieving their verbal score goals.
So, what else does it take to master GMAT verbal? Effective training.
So, let’s take a look at one key aspect of effective GMAT verbal training: treating every answer choice as if it were a question.
A Difference Between GMAT Quant and GMAT Verbal
If you think about it, often, when we answer a GMAT quant question, we’re concerned with only one answer choice, the correct answer. For example, if we’re looking for the number of 5-member teams that can be created from an 11-player pool, as soon as we find that number, 462, we select that choice and ignore the others.
Verbal is a different kind of game because, typically, to confidently answer a verbal question, we have to eliminate four incorrect choices. In fact, since, especially in Sentence Correction, when we answer a verbal question, we are looking for, not the perfect answer, but the best answer, as much as we’d like to simply find the correct answer without considering all the choices carefully, we have to pay attention to all the choices.
So, what does this information mean to us?
A Key Aspect of Training for GMAT Verbal Mastery
What it means is that, when we train for GMAT verbal, we’ll get the most use out of every verbal practice question, develop the most skill, and best position ourselves for verbal success if we treat each answer choice we see as a question to be carefully and thoroughly answered. In other words, even if we are pretty sure that one of the choices in a question is the correct answer, we’ll do our best training if we stick with the question until we are super clear about why the other four choices are not correct.
For instance, in answering a practice Sentence Correction question, for best results, we’ll stick with the question until we have identified and clearly defined the issues in every choice. Deciding that a choice is off somehow without really being clear why and arriving at the correct answer is not going to result in SC mastery. We can instead treat every SC choice as a question to be thoroughly answered, and stick with a question until we know exactly why every choice is incorrect. Meanwhile, if the question we’re working on has longer choices, preferably we’ll clearly identify two or more issues in most choices. Will we work that way when we're taking the test? Probably not, but when we’re training, for best results, we’ll stick with a question until we see everything going on, partly because the first things we’ll see will be the issues that are obvious to us. So, if we leave the question without fully analyzing the choices, we won’t have learned to see the issues that are not obvious to us, we won’t have taken full advantage of the question, and we will have missed our most valuable training opportunity.
We can take a similar approach when answering CR practice questions. Rather than be clear about why some choices are wrong but eliminate some other choices for vague reasons such as that they “don’t seem to have anything to do with the passage,” we can treat every choice as a question to be thoroughly answered and determine exactly how each choice is logically related to the passage. You can see how much more powerful this approach is than being satisfied with eliminating some choices for vague reasons. By operating in this way, we train ourselves to see the logical relationships that we have to see to answer CR questions confidently every time.
We can also take a similar approach to answering RC questions, carefully analyzing every choice to figure out how the choice is related to what the passage says.
Working Untimed
Of course, we won’t do all this work in two minutes per verbal question. In fact, we’ll sometimes stick with a question for 20 minutes or more until we have “answered” every choice. Spending that much time on a question is not an issue. We’ll develop skill and end up answering questions super fast when we take the test.
In Conclusion
By treating every verbal answer choice we see as a question to be carefully and thoroughly answered, we can become total GMAT verbal ninjas and ace the verbal section.