Guess an entire passage in RC

Question

I have GMAT exam in 2 weeks and I am really confused about the RC section.
I am a non-native test taker and some RC questions are really hard for me. it happened to me time and time again that after spending too much time on a long tough passage finally I answered more than 75% of the questions wrong! (awful isn't it?)
Finally I decided to take the following strategy for RC:
Select a tough passage, and guess all the questions without reading it. in this way not only i can save more time on the other questions , including other time-consuming and difficult RC questions that require too much time, but also it will reduce my stress. 
I'd really appreciate it if you can guide me about this strategy.
moreover, if you think that it is a good idea to do o, how can i guess the entire questions of a passage in a way that i can reduce the probability of wrong answers?
Thanks for your help in advance.

Marcab · Answer

Can't say anythink about this strategy. But I won't recommend it unless you really own PearsonVUE.

souvik101990 · Answer

Did you come across this idea yourself or somebody pitched this in?
If somebody else did, do not talk to him/her till you are done with your GMAT.
If you came up with the idea, then grab some RC books and practice materials and study.
Practicing is the ONLY way to achieve better accuracy in RC. There is no magic formula or rules like SC or CR (CR is not much rule based as well).
You might have some different strategies about timing and reading the passage but practice remains to be the key!

Marcab · Answer

:lol:

KarishmaB · Answer

Before we discuss the wisdom of using this strategy, I have certain questions regarding its implementation.

How will you select the passage you will skip? (It's a computer adaptive test so all passages are not in front of you)
How do you know that 'this' passage will be the hardest? (though once you skip an entire RC passage, chances are your following passage(s) will be low level)
How do you know whether a passage is hard without reading it?

4 questions wrong in a row is not a good idea at all. You need to practice working on long tough passages. It's ok to guess on one question if you feel it is too complicated and will take too much time but skipping an entire passage is not a good idea. As for 'how can you reduce the probability of wrong answers?' There is no such strategy. The probability of any option being correct is 20%. Generally, if people want to skip a handful of questions in a row, they mark every question with the same option, say (B). The logic is that hopefully at least one question will have (B) as the answer. But we know that the answers may not be evenly distributed among the 5 options in a bunch of questions. In fact, in an entire section, you may have two or three predominant answer choices. Its impossible to say what will work.

souvik101990 · Answer

Adding to Karishma, 
GMAT is a test of well timed reasoning skills not manipulative guessing skills.
For the latter we have exams in India named Common Admission Test aka CAT.

ARASHFRX · Answer

Thanks for your response,
I came up with this strategy my self (not saying that too proud of it!!) . The reason that I think that it can improve my overall score in Verbal is that first of all, even if i spend too much time on the difficult passages (i will tell you later how can i distinguish them) finally most of the time many of them are not true (as i mentioned more than 75%). secondly, my experience is that if i spend enough time on each passage (average about 2 min and 20 sec for each question) i can answer more than 75% of the question correctly, obviously, in this way despite the acceptable outcome, i usually face lack of time for other questions and my overall performance will decrease. therefore if i guess all the questions of an entire passage, i would not lose too much score, because even if had spent time on them. on average only 1 out of four questions were correct. when generalizing this too all the passages, it would be a disaster! however by saving time with one passage and spend it with others, i can claim that i would do better on other passage (this time more than 75% CORRECT). besides that, consider that when guess, all the answers are not necessarily wrong. in addition, as a non-native test taker, i need more than standard time for other questions )specially CR which i can get a good score in them if i have enough time (about 2 min per question)
i have to say that i am not very optimistic for verbal section, all i need is a score about 35 (don't blame me, but now my average score in prep's is about 28!) so in your comments please consider this score.
Moreover, about the tough passages, some of them are obvious, the long passages with more than 50 lines are usually tough (isn't it?) also by reading first few lines of other passages you can define if they are tough (for example passages about lawsuits are deadly hard for me).
in addition, i think that if i consider my approximate performance on previous questions, i can guess that the current passage might be for example 700-800 score.
I am looking for an overall score more than 680, so with a score about 49 in quantitative section i need just a 34-35 in verbal.
sorry for too much words (and definitely too much annoying grammatical errors!) . again thanks for your generous guides, it really means a lot for me, especially in these less than two weeks to exam.

omidsa · Answer

Dear Arash;

your method may works sometimes but not under these situations:

1. you had supposed that Long Passages are always tough ones. I am referring you to V2.0 Page 30 passage, which is long passage but easiest passage in the book.
2. let us suppose that you are in the middle of the exam and in question 30 you will see one long passage with 3 questions and you will answer them by the chance (maybe "D" ). 
How do u know that you have chosen right answers to the questions: 28,29 ( which were before the passage ) and 33, 34 ( which will be after the passages.)
In case that you answer to all questions of the passage wrong and also for before OR after the passage questions wrong then GMAT will punish you immediately and will drop your score so much. Just consider the passage with 4 questions ( as you don't know about the count of questions by seeing the first one) and answering 2 before the passage questions and the 2 after the passage questions wrong. you have 8 wrong answers in a row. clearly, the hell will come in result!

Believe it or not, I have done this mistake before In my first attempt in GMAT real exam and It did no worked. If you use Manhattan CATs you will see exactly what will happen in the case of going by chance for RC. Because Manhattan shows the score level of each question and ILI score of you for each question.

Also the main question is : Who have told you that scoring V35 does not needs to solve 700-800 questions? This is totally wrong! if you need Q35 which means 80% in verbal so you need to solve many 700-800 questions true. you can check it with Manhattan Cats.

Finally, I think RC questions are worth to try and spend time on them. Suppose that you need 4 (5) min to read the passage and answering 3-4 question each in 1 min means you need at least 7 min (3 question passages ) or 9 min (for tough, long and 4 questions). I think it is worthy to spend time on RC besides the risks I have mentioned.

Yours 
Omid

ARASHFRX · Answer

Dear Omid,
kudos for your guide and also for sharing your real test experience, considering your comments and that of other friend, i convinced that it is better to spend enough time on RC and answer them even if it takes more than standard time, and if i want to buy more time, just go over CR questions and 100% underlined SC questions and make scientific guess for them throughout the verbal section. PLZ correct me if i am wrong

omidsa · Answer

Off course, If you have time problem then it is better to kill RC/SC questions .Deciding the question type is your decision.

Just about fully underlined SC questions : I think these types are mainly modifiers. In many modifiers questions if you look after "," in the ACs you can find what is going to be modified and then eliminating wrong answers with "touch" technique.

Carcass · Answer

once upon a time, there was the common sense...............

Marcab · Answer

hahahaaha....carcass you rock dude.

sa2222 · Answer

lol <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_smile.gif" alt=":)" title="Smile" />

GMATPill · Answer

Not exactly something you should do --- Improving your reading skills takes time. If you have limited time, you may find some of the techniques shown in this video helpful: https://www.gmatpill.com/practicequestio ... tions.html

You may get lucky with guessing - but at least put in some work and give an honest effort. You've got to hold yourself to a higher standard.

Guess an entire passage in RC

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