RC STRATEGY

Question

Can someone kindly share how to score more in RC and maintain a good accuracy in RC questions

bb · Answer

Hi. Would you be interested in getting the wisdom of the GMAT Club's best minds who put RC guides together?
If so, here is where all the RC Guides and Strategies are located: https://gmatclub.com/forum/search.php?s ... ag_id=1223

In particular, you want to check out these 2:
https://gmatclub.com/forum/gmat-club-s- ... 83101.html
https://gmatclub.com/forum/how-to-destr ... 30247.html

KrishnanTN · Answer

HI  bb ,

Thanks for this. While I have your attention, how many Official RC passages have been released by GMAC and are in public domain please ?
Would you have a rough estimate of the number of passages and questions ? I know, I am probably nitpicking here - but, if you do have an estimate, do let me know.

Thanks
Krishnan

bb · Answer

I am not really sure. I have never counted them

I will probably guess that between all of the official guides and GMAT prep and whatever else, they probably should be at least 150 and likely 200 passages out there. There were 27 passages in the latest official guide plus another 12 in the verbal OG and you can probably multiply it times 3 plus 6 GMAT prep tests with 4 passages so that’s 24 plus there’s some additional ones in test one and two, probably another 10. There are also practice questions one and practice questions 2. We may be close to 200…. This means 1000-1500 questions because many of the passages have more than four questions. Why do you ask? Posted from my mobile device

KrishnanTN · Answer

Oh.., RC has been tripping me up. So I was thinking of just working my way through all the RC official passages. Guess that is a lot of effort for probably little gain. Thanks for replying though.

ScottTargetTestPrep · Answer

Hi nithinvinayak,

Here is a great article you can check out:

GMAT Reading Comprehension Tips: Top 8 DOs and DON’Ts

Feel free to reach out with any questions.

bb · Answer

Traditionally the best recommendation is to focus on quality rather than quantity. What I mean is that you focus on a few mistakes and you never make that mistake again. That is hard to do on reading comprehension. Possible if you agonize about every passage and every question but hard.

On the other hand, it is much easier to go through tens or hundreds of passages and questions, hoping that you will learn some thing from that experience but not actually digesting or spending the time to analyze mistakes and improve.

Usually have so much time during the day, and I would argue that you probably have about two hours of the best quality time which you should use on learning new things and potentially practicing those new things. The rest of the time is not very valuable for high performance. You can use it for memorizing things or studying vocabulary or doing some refresh work. The least valuable time, after work, after dinner, when you’re tired, my suggestion is to read books. It will be really hard for you to make out anything from a reading comprehension passage but you could enjoy a great book and you would be gaining valuable reading practice. It is probably the best bang you can get for your buck for that mindless time at the end of the day.

Back to your idea, I don’t think you need to go through hundreds of passages. I think if you can spend more time for passage and get comfortable with questions and you spend maybe 30 minutes analyzing every single question you feel super confident about it and you know why are you made every mistake and how not to make it again, that would be more valuable. And it only takes one passage per mistake so to speak and after 20 passages, you should pretty much cover most patterns and the situations. The challenges reading speed but we’re not talking about that here, we’re talking about practice. Once your master accuracy, you can focus on speed

Posted from my mobile device

nithinvinayak · Answer

Will i get hurt if my RC accuracy is about 50% in actual GMAT Exam?

bb · Answer

It is not a straightforward answer to predict the score based on the number of incorrect answers… but it likely won’t be a high score if you’re planning to make seven or eight mistakes in just RC.

Posted from my mobile device

Posted from my mobile device

GmatKnightTutor · Answer

3 RC Tips

RC can be fun to work on. Try to adopt/develop a method that allows you to absorb the passage better. It may sound hard to do but learning one may not take too long. I had a student for RC this quarter whom I only did 2 sessions with, for example.

All the best.

vv65 · Answer

A score with 90% RC accuracy is expected to be higher than a score with 50% RC accuracy, right?
So you will be hurt, almost certainly.

Still, if your SC and CR are practically perfect, you could score 40+ in Verbal even with 50% accuracy in RC: as long as you do better in the easier RCs. 
An accuracy of 50% even in easier RC will pull down your score considerably. RC is just too large a chunk of the exam.

Posted from my mobile device

GMATWhizTeam · Answer

Hi nithinvinayak,

Mastering RC is a challenge many students face and I’ve faced it myself. As a student, I remember trying various methods including Reading only first para and last para, reading question first, reading only first few lines, reading online articles, maintaining a gaze span while reading, skimming through the passage and what not. Nothing helped much. In the end, while waiting for the score to flash, I never had confidence that I’ve done well. All I could do was pray that I somehow got the questions right.

I’ve been through the trouble and I know how it feels. There is one fundamental mistake that most students do, that is trying to read the passage fast.  The trick to ace RC is not to understand WHAT is written, but to understand WHY it is written . Let me take you through the 3 step process that helped me master RC.

STEP 1: INVOLVED READING 
 
While reading the passage, focus on the role played by each sentence and understand what purpose does it serve? Simple questions that you can ask could be - does it support an argument, weaken it, oppose a viewpoint, provide more data, or bring in a different perspective and so on. The idea is to understand the transition in thoughts and which side is the author taking.

STEP 2: EVOLVED READING 
 
Once you’ve understood the intent of each line, you can then choose to ignore the detail and focus on summarising the paragraphs in a line. Then, focus on the intent of each para and think about the structure of the passage. I even believe in identifying (at a high level) what is the main point of the passage even if there is no main point question attached. It helps in having more confidence in marking Inference or Organization based questions.

STEP 3: ANSWER CHOICE ELIMINATION 
 
If the above two steps are done properly, this step is the easiest. All you need to do is, look at each question one-by-one and eliminate the answer choices from your evolved understanding of the passage. Involved and Evolved Reading will help you eliminate 4 choices in most of the questions. In few tough ones, you might be confused between 2 choices, but those can be easily eliminated by focusing on the following aspects:

1.Scope of the choice – shouldn’t be out of scope or too limited in scope 
2.Minute details – shouldn’t have half-truths and rest distortion 
3. Confusing words – shouldn’t have words which seem similar but are different. 
4. Opposite – is opposite of what you should be looking for

These 3 steps are simple and you need to ensure that you practice using this method and perfect it to get high accuracy.

You can go through the links below to understand the process in a better way:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQl95zpCLKI  
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjZUplucYeM

Hope this helped and feel free to contact if you have any further queries.

You can always write back to me here or the better way would be to connect over a call and have a discussion. You can schedule a free consultation call using the below link.

Click here to schedule a call

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