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How to Score High on GMAT Verbal
Scoring high on the GMAT Verbal section is an important part of earning an impressive Total Score on the GMAT. Furthermore, business schools generally prefer to see “balanced” GMAT Quant and Verbal scores as opposed to wildly divergent ones, because both quantitative skills and management-level reading and analytical skills are necessary for success in business school. Particularly to be competitive at the top MBA programs, you probably need relatively high GMAT Verbal and Quantitative scores, not just one or the other.Fortunately, if you want to score high on GMAT Verbal, or you’ve been having trouble increasing your GMAT Verbal score, there are some highly effective steps you can take to get yourself on track to your goal.
The first thing to consider is that, to tame the GMAT Verbal beast, you have to understand its nature. Let’s talk about that now.
Understand the Game
While it is true that you need to know a number of English grammar rules and understand some other verbal concepts in order to perform well in GMAT Verbal — particularly in Sentence Correction — it would be a flawed strategy to assume that everything will simply fall into place if you memorize a ton of rules and concepts. Why is that the case? Because GMAT Verbal is a content game and a logic game.Just as you shouldn’t expect to earn a top GMAT Quant score by simply memorizing math concepts, you shouldn’t expect to earn a high Verbal score by doing nothing but, for instance, drilling grammar rules. Furthermore, GMAT Verbal is a bit different from GMAT Quant in that, in many cases, you can generate a Quant score increase by simply learning some new concepts, but your Verbal score may not go up just because you learned, for instance, how a participial phrase functions or how a Weaken question works. While concept knowledge is certainly an essential aspect of earning a good GMAT Verbal score, to master the Verbal section of the GMAT, you have to not only learn concepts but also develop skill in noticing what is going on in questions and using logic to arrive at correct answers.
So, learning the rules of the GMAT Verbal game is just the first step. Once you have learned the rules, you then must hone your skills at actually playing the game.
Now that we better understand what the GMAT tests in the Verbal section, let’s talk about how to proceed with your GMAT Verbal preparation.
Take a Topic-by-Topic Approach
Since, in preparing for GMAT Verbal, you have a considerable amount of content to learn, and you want to make sure that you don’t leave any gaps in your knowledge, your best move is to take an organized and methodical approach to your preparation. Otherwise, your GMAT prep will be inefficient, and at the end of the day, it may not get the job done. So, you will learn the most and learn the fastest if you take a topic-by-topic approach, starting with basic concepts and progressing in a linear fashion to more advanced ones. In fact, you can apply this tip to your GMAT prep in general.Learning just one Verbal topic at a time is the best way to ensure that you truly master each topic as you learn it and that you don’t leave any gaps in your knowledge or skip anything that could come back to bite you on test day.
Take Sentence Correction as an example. We know that there are dozens of concepts to learn for Sentence Correction. The thing is, if you start trying to learn this or that SC topic in whatever random order, you’re going to end up wasting time and feeling frustrated because you haven’t built up the proper knowledge base to move successfully from one topic to the next. It doesn’t make sense, for example, to try to learn about modifiers before you’ve mastered sentence structure.
Similarly, if you pile topics on top of each other, trying to learn, say, how to answer Weaken the Argument questions and Inference questions at the same time, you’re likely to experience a lack of progress and leave many gaps in your knowledge.
Taking a methodical, linear, topic-by-topic approach, allows you to follow a logical progression in your learning, so you can achieve real mastery of the concepts and keep your GMAT study moving at a steady clip. So, for Sentence Correction, work on one concept at a time, starting with foundational concepts, such as types of clauses, and then moving on to more complex topics, such as modifiers and comparisons. For Critical Reasoning, it works best to work on one type of question at a time. Similarly, Reading Comprehension involves a number of concepts and question types that you can efficiently learn about and master one at a time.
Keep in mind that, if your foundational knowledge is fairly strong, you may move through more basic topics relatively quickly. However, don’t completely skip over “easier” topics (for example, subject-verb agreement in SC). The GMAT can come up with some pretty tricky ways to employ basic concepts. So, even if you need only a quick review of some of the more basic topics, that review could still be quite valuable.
So, we know that learning one topic at a time is the best way to ensure you gain the knowledge you need to score high on GMAT Verbal. But what is the best way to learn each topic, and how can you ensure that when you learn a topic, you truly master it? Let’s take a look.
Don’t Just Run Through Practice Questions to Prepare for GMAT Verbal
Many GMAT aspirants — particularly native English speakers — underestimate the difficulty of the Verbal section. They figure that, if they’re generally well-spoken and well-read, they can simply answer a bunch of Verbal questions and be ready for test day. What could be so difficult? It’s just words. Right? This line of thinking is far from the truth.GMAT Verbal is no joke, even for native speakers. Increasing your Verbal score by, for example, 10 points can require a lot of work. So, unless your baseline Verbal score is already very close to your goal score, doing practice questions probably won’t be enough to close the gap.
You won’t likely learn the array of concepts and techniques you need to score high in GMAT Verbal by simply reading the explanations to Verbal practice questions you answered incorrectly. This is a popular but ineffective GMAT prep strategy. A student answers a couple dozen random practice questions with a timer going, gets many of them wrong, and then reads the answer explanations for the questions missed, in order to find out what they needed to do to answer the question correctly. I know of students who answered literally hundreds of questions in using such a “study plan” and didn’t see their Verbal scores budge.
How can that be? Well, reading an explanation that tells you what you did wrong and what you could’ve done right is not the same as actually knowing those things and then putting them into practice. And when you’re doing practice questions as a method of learning, you’re probably not going to immediately apply what you just learned from an explanation. Instead, you’re going to say, “OK, I’ve learned that now,” and move on to the next set of questions, without applying what you learned. As a result, there is a good chance that you won’t think to use that information by the time you see another question to which the information applies.
Furthermore, completing lots of practice questions before you’ve mastered the concepts and techniques necessary for efficiently identifying the correct answers to those questions can be similar to going to the driving range and hitting thousands of golf balls without ever having learned how to use a golf club. Will your game improve that way, or will you just be solidifying bad habits?
Of course, although simply answering practice questions is not an effective method of learning GMAT Verbal content, practice is an important part of preparing for the Verbal section of the exam. So, let’s discuss how to incorporate practice questions into your Verbal prep.
Learn Before You Practice
So, if simply running through practice questions is not an efficient or particularly effective approach to achieving your GMAT Verbal score goal, what is?For best results, first build strong foundations in both the concepts and techniques related to a Verbal topic, and then answer practice questions involving that topic. For example, for CR Weaken questions, you would learn what a premise is and how arguments can be weakened (concepts), and you also would learn to identify the conclusion before you answer the question (technique). Then you would practice by answering dozens of Weaken questions. Similarly, before practicing RC, you would learn the difference between the main point and the supporting points of a passage (concepts), and you also learn to eliminate answer choices from worst to best (technique).
So, to learn each topic individually, read all about a topic, watch videos, and put what you’re learning into your own words. After you feel that you have a thorough understanding of the topic, practice with a large number of realistic questions on the topic.
This order of events is important for a number of reasons. For one, you will have the tools you need to actually answer practice questions correctly, so you won’t just waste your time trying to answer questions without having a clear understanding of how to get them correct. Secondly, your practice will help solidify the knowledge and skills you just gained, so that what you learn “sticks.” Finally — and this point is very important — your practice will give you an accurate picture of whether you really learned the material you just studied and you’re ready to move on to the next topic.
With that last point in mind, you must review any questions you answer incorrectly and then, if necessary, go back to your study materials and further study the concept involved in those questions. In many cases, simply reading the answer explanations for the questions won’t be sufficient for reviewing concepts that you didn’t fully understand. Answer explanations can show you what you didn’t see or understand in a particular question, but they generally don’t explain concepts in much detail.
Additionally, as you’re reviewing your incorrect answers, take note of the reasons why you got the questions incorrect. For example, let’s say that you answer a question incorrectly in your CR practice. Did you make a careless mistake? Skip over a keyword in an answer choice? Did you not recognize the specific CR question type? By determining why you didn’t arrive at a correct answer, you can place your focus on what to do differently going forward to arrive at correct answers consistently.
Once you’ve understood the concepts related to a question type and learned to consistently answer questions of that type correctly, you’ll be ready to move on to the next Verbal topic. If you repeat this process for every Verbal topic — learn first, and then practice, review, and correct — by the time you finish your GMAT prep, you will be a machine in GMAT Verbal.
That said, you don’t want to try to go “from 0 to 60” as soon as you start doing practice questions. Let’s talk about that next.
Start Your GMAT Verbal Practice Untimed
To become better at playing the GMAT Verbal game, you have to develop skill in seeing what’s going on in Verbal questions, and untimed, careful, thorough analysis of questions is the most effective way to develop that skill. In fact, I always recommend that students complete their practice untimed in the earlier stages of their GMAT prep. I don’t want my students to even think about the clock when they first start doing Verbal practice questions, and here’s why.One problem with doing timed practice in the earlier stages of your Verbal prep is that two minutes per question is generally not enough time for a novice to fully analyze a question, understand what’s going on in the question, and arrive at the correct answer. So, what happens when people do timed practice is the following. Rather than learn how to analyze and correctly answer questions, they rush through questions, get many incorrect, and then either get the missed ones correct the second time around or learn from explanations what they needed to see and do in order to get them correct. Notice that this process does not reflect what you have to do in order to get questions correct when you take the GMAT. You won’t get second chances to answer the questions or have explanations to refer to. So, in doing timed practice in this manner, people don’t really develop their GMAT Verbal skills.
A second problem with timed practice is that it lets you off the hook. Rather than deal with the mental and emotional challenges of working your way — even fighting your way — to correct answers, you give yourself an excuse to say, “Oh well,” and move on to the next question. Your two or three minutes are up, so you’ll just have to guess and call it a day, right? With that kind of easy out, how will you ever train yourself to see what you need to see and do what you need to do to get to correct answers? How will you hone your analytical and logical reasoning skills, and build your stamina and mental toughness? How will you sharpen your eye for nuance and detail? You won’t!
So, the fact that you’ve learned about a topic doesn’t mean that you’re ready to answer GMAT Verbal questions on that topic in two minutes or less. A more accurate view is that, having learned the concepts related to a topic, how questions on that topic work, what kinds of traps appear in those questions, etc., you are ready to start training yourself to find correct answers to questions on that topic, in whatever amount of time is needed to accomplish that task.
For example, I would not consider it unusual for a GMAT student who is just starting to practice with Weaken the Argument questions to spend 30 minutes analyzing and gaining a full understanding of a single question. I would not be worried about that student’s prospects for earning a good GMAT Verbal score — or a perfect score, for that matter. That student could start off spending 10 minutes or more on each Weaken question, analyzing and working every which way to find correct answers, and I would not be the least bit concerned. In fact, this level of slow, methodical practice, without the pressure of a timer, is precisely what I recommend.
The truth is, if you can consistently answer a particular type of question correctly in 10, 20, 30, or whatever number of minutes, then you’ve developed the baseline skills necessary to get that type of question correct in a briefer window of time. Moreover, as you continue to correctly answer questions of that type, you will naturally speed up. However, if you never follow through with the difficult work of sticking with a question until you arrive at the correct answer, you won’t properly build those necessary skills. Thus, correctly answering questions of that type within a few minutes will always be somewhat of a struggle for you.
So, wait until you are consistently getting questions of a particular type correct, and then start practicing those questions under time constraints. In doing so, you will find that you’re much better equipped to manage the time pressure while maintaining your accuracy level.
Don’t put the cart before the horse! Accuracy first; speed will follow.
Now, you may be asking yourself, what could a person possibly be doing working on a single question for 10 minutes or more? Actually, this is some of the most important work you’ll do in your GMAT Verbal training. Let’s take a look.
To read the complete article, view my full article on Target Test Prep’s blog.
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