Events & Promotions
|
|
GMAT Club Daily Prep
Thank you for using the timer - this advanced tool can estimate your performance and suggest more practice questions. We have subscribed you to Daily Prep Questions via email.
Customized
for You
Track
Your Progress
Practice
Pays
Not interested in getting valuable practice questions and articles delivered to your email? No problem, unsubscribe here.
Apr 2711:00 AM EDT
-12:00 PM EDT
Prefer video-based learning? The Target Test Prep OnDemand course is a one-of-a-kind video masterclass featuring 400 hours of lecture-style teaching by Scott Woodbury-Stewart, founder of Target Test Prep and one of the most accomplished GMAT instructors
Apr 2601:30 AM EDT
-02:30 AM EDT
Learn how Keshav, a Chartered Accountant, scored an impressive 705 on GMAT in just 30 days with GMATWhiz's expert guidance. In this video, he shares preparation tips and strategies that worked for him, including the mock, time management, and more.
Apr 2610:00 AM EDT
-11:00 AM EDT
The Target Test Prep course represents a quantum leap forward in GMAT preparation, a radical reinterpretation of the way that students should study. Try before you buy with a 5-day, full-access trial of the course for FREE!
Apr 2808:00 AM PDT
-11:00 AM PDT
Whether you are just beginning your MBA journey or fine-tuning your path to a 700+ score, GMAT Day is designed to give you a competitive edge.
Apr 2912:30 AM EDT
-01:30 AM EDT
Learn how Kamakshi achieved a GMAT 675 with an impressive 96th %ile in Data Insights. Discover the unique methods and exam strategies that helped her excel in DI along with other sections for a balanced and high score.
May 0111:00 AM PDT
-12:00 PM PDT
Free- full-length test + 15 concept videos + 150+ short videos + study plan!
May 0306:30 AM PDT
-08:30 AM PDT
Verbal trouble on GMAT? Fix it NOW! Join Sunita Singhvi for a focused webinar on actionable strategies to boost your Verbal score and take your performance to the next level.
16 Nov 2013, 01:20
Kudos
Bookmarks
Hi everyone,
I just finished my GMAT test yesterday (15th November 2013) and scored 710 (Q50, V 36). I have attempted the GMAT test for 3 times over the past 1 year. By the way, I am not a native English student but have some pretty solid engineering background and some international experiences during my undergraduate studies. My score is not that outstanding compared to many 750+ scores here but I would like to help people who are preparing for the GMAT and want to improve their scores.
Here are all my past GMAT scores:
First attempt: July(I'm not pretty sure about the exact month here though) 2012: 640 (Q49, V 26) AWA 5
I had only one week to prepare for the test since I just suddenly decided to apply for a master in management programme which requires the GMAT score and found out that that month was the last before the GMAC added the IR section in the GMAT. So I was studying from scratch- I knew nothing about the test, its format, strategy, tricks and tips. I barely finished the test prep materials, including the OG13 and the Verbal review. Apparently getting a 640 in the first time was truly because of luck.
Second attempt: May, 2013: 590 (Q49, V22) AWA 6, IR 6
I decided to pursue a second master degree in strategic management/ management science in top business schools. So I need a better GMAT score(much more than 640, of course). I was studying my master's degree in England and had to spend time during the night to prepare for retaking the GMAT because the coursework took most of my time at school and even in the evening I had to work with my groups and do some part-time internships. So I would say I spent some 2-3 months preparing for the retake but with low-quality preparations.
I spent most of my time for verbal, especially CR. I used to think that I was good at SC but I was wrong because my SC accuracy fluctuated a lot from 50% to 90%. But I was a bit dishonest with myself and didn't prepare much for the SC. So when I went to take my second GMAT, I stumbled with the meaning-based GMAT SC, wasted a lot of time on most of SC questions, and screwed other CR and RC questions. The result was shocking for me because I thought I had prepared a lot more than the first time. It was hard to recover my confidence in my ability to score over 700 in the GMAT but I DIDN'T GIVE UP.
Third attempt: November, 2013: 710 (Q 50, V 36) IR 7, AWA awaiting for score
This time, I had to stop and think about what went wrong in my second attempt. I personally think that SELF-REFLECTION and BEING EXTREMELY HONEST ABOUT YOUR OWN ABILITIES are key to improve my score. I tried to think about my past real GMAT test experiences and note down which parts were the most troublesome. For me, these were the SC and CR.
(1) Critical Reasoning
Even though I spent a lot of time studying CR before my second attempt, I discovered I was using wrong approaches to address CR problems. Indeed, I did comprehend what the premises and the conclusions are in the arguments but I knew little about the ROLE, APPEARANCE, AND THE SENSE of the correct CR answers and those of the CR traps. So I fell for the intelligently created CR traps last time. And this time, I began to search for ways to correct these problems. Manhattan GMAT's Stacey Koprince's articles which feature advice on detailed analysis of your step-by-step thought processes when you do a CR question are invaluable. And I would like to thank you many successful test takers who have posted so many excellent debriefs about how to improve performance on CR. Most of these debriefs give most common advice on ANALYSING WHY A CORRECT CHOICE IS CORRECT AND WHY THE OTHER CHOICES ARE WRONG, using the OFFICIAL GUIDE PROBLEMS (which I think are sufficient to score high in the GMAT). Though there are some good questions from test-prep companies, I would suggest that you avoid doing those problems if you have not exhausted the official questions (OG, Verbal review, GMATPrep question banks, and GMATPrep Question Pack -leave the GMATPrep Exam pack for your final assessments). Why I recommend you this? First, I found many test-prep CR questions are trying to mimic the official CR questions in terms of the logic but the style of their answer choices are quite different from the real GMAT's choices. Second, the length of the CR passages in the real GMAT are much longer than that of the test-prep companies (and even longer than the OG CR passages!). Third, the explanations of all correct and incorrect answers in the official guide are more than enough for you to recognise the PATTERN that the GMAC use to create all TRAPS that you may fall into in the real test. I have heard that someone think that the OG explanations are sometimes difficult to understand because they are quite short and concise. I would recommend you google the questions and find some really good explanations from GMAT experts such as RON and Stacey (MGMAT). They really drill down all choices in most tough CR questions very clearly. Sorry for writing this really long, in brief I would recommend these material to prepare for CR.
Material
1. OG13 (Make sure you analyse and truly understand ALL CHOICES IN ALL CR QUESTIONS)
2. Verbal Review (do the same detailed analysis as with the OG)
3. All GMATPrep CR questions (Thanks to GMATCLUB) + some analyses and great explanations from MGMAT, GMATCLUB websites.
4. GMATPREP Question Pack
5. Keep track of your errors and note some PATTERNS of the RIGHT and WRONG CR answers( for example, answer choice that basically says "X is the only cause/ factor for Y" or "X haven't significantly changed during the past Y years" are most of the time WRONG. What's challenging is the GMAC are really good at using different wordings and context in the CR passages to disguise these traps or to make the traps and the correct answers really close to each other and if you don't have a solid reason to eliminate the traps then you will (1) waste a lot of time (2) likely fell for those traps and (3) don't get your target score.
Focus on the PROCESS
I would definitely agree with some GMAT test takers that it is essential to develop your own problem-solving process that can be effectively utilised when you address CR problems.
These processes may be unique for different individuals but it is very important that you have your own. This is because you will likely reuse the process that you have used to answer questions correctly during the preparation in the real GMAT test and the process will help you REDUCE THE NUMBER OF DECISIONS you have to make during the test and therefore REDUCE YOUR MENTAL FATIGUE when doing the last 75-min Verbal. My process is this:
(1) Read the passage and simplify the argument into 1-2 very simple sentences that I can keep in my mind when I analyse all 5 answer choices.
remember very SPECIFICALLY what THE CONCLUSION says (I mean pay very close attention to keywords in the conclusion as well)
(2) Read the question stems and remind myself what role should the correct answer does? what are the characteristics of the incorrect answers?
For example, the question stem asks you to strengthen the argument. and the conclusion says X is better than Y.
So the correct answer should tell you about the DIFFERENCE between X and Y, but usually in a subtle way for difficult CR questions. For easier CR questions, the correct choice will explicitly say that X can do this but Y cannot. But for harder ones, the correct choices will sound like they explain only the info about X and do not mention Y at all. So it seems that these choices are wrong and so tempting for you to eliminate but the choices actually say that X is indeed different than Y if you STOP and INTERPRET the choices a bit FURTHER HOW DOES THESE CHOICES LINK TO Y?.
The wrong answers do the opposite. They DO NOT show differences but they give information about ONLY X or ONLY Y. Or they give information that APPLIES FOR BOTH X AND Y (which means the choices don't tell you why X is better than Y). With detailed analysis of official CR questions, you will develop and these processes will become your second nature. And you will be surprise on how much more quickly you can eliminate wrong answer choices and be more confident in selecting the correct choices.
(3) Use your solid simplified version of the argument(step 1) + your SPECULATION of the right and wrong choices (step 2) and analyse the answer choices.
Most of the time, there will be two final contenders for the correct answer. So I advise you DO NOT focus on finding the correct choices during your first pass through all 5 choices but FOCUS ON ELIMINATING DEFINITELY WRONG CHOICES. When you are left with 2 final choices, DON'T BE LAZY. REMIND YOURSELF OF YOUR SIMPLIFIED ARGUMENT AND THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE CORRECT CHOICE AGAIN!!. Because the wording in the choices can be quite complex to decode when you read some tough CR passages and if you are not being careful, it is easy for you to choose the choice that uses the same wording or vocabularies that appear in the passage, which sound good for you when you are experiencing time pressure to finish the question and then easy for you to FORGET what the right answer should do to address the argument.
With these 3 processes, I could bring my CR accuracy from 60% up to over 85-90%.
(2) Sentence Correction
This was the part that I was overconfident with and I was being dishonest that I actually need some fine-tuning. What I have learnt from my real GMAT SC experiences during the second attempt and third attempt is that "UNDERSTANDING THE MEANING OF THE ORIGINAL SENTENCE IS KEY". Being good at grammar is NOT SUFFICIENT. The real GMAT SC choices are difficult to eliminate and find splits because most of the time you will find 2-3 choices that are GRAMMATICALLY CORRECT but DISTORT THE MEANING OF THE ORIGINAL SENTENCE. How can the GMAC test creators do this? many ways:
(1) They can change from the to-infinitive (to show intention) to comma+Verb-ing (showing results)
(2) Change from restrictive modifier(especially THAT) to non-restrictive modifier (comma+which)
(3) Change the placement of modifiers (especially the prepositional phrases with comma) by moving the modifiers to the beginning of the sentence, the end of the sentence or even in the middle!!
(4) Change the subject of the original sentence (for example, original sentence says "In 1990, X was created" and the choice says "In 1990, the scientists created X"-obviously the original sentence does not emphasize the DOER of the creation of X but the other choice does EXPLICITLY says it is the scientists who did the creation. I hope you can begin to see how the GMAT can trick you if you focus on just grammar. AND I THINK THIS IS WHY MANY PEOPLE STRUGGLE WITH THE MEANING-BASED SC QUESTIONS.
I would credit my success in SC to e-GMAT's approach on focusing on the MEANING first. I didn't realise this till I did their SC meaning exercises which I feel are one of the most representative of the real SC-meaning based questions. What you can learn from these exercises is their process of decoding the meaning of the original sentence and KEEP THAT IN MIND!!. This is very important because when you see a choice that distorts the meaning from the original one then you can confidently eliminate that choice without hesitation about its perfectly correct grammar. And trust me, the MEANING ANALYSIS saved me in my third GMAT attempt. I saw a lot of choices that distort the meaning but are grammatically correct.
You might read this and panic because you have focused on grammar a lot when you do SC. I would say that THERE ARE many choices that CAN BE ELIMINATED BASED ON GRAMMAR but you will usually be left with 2-3 choices that have no GRAMMAR ERRORS but have MEANING ERRORS.
If you practice on the meaning and the grammar for SC consistently during your prep, you'll do just fine in the real SC. I personally think that it is about your perspective to SC. If you think that SC is meant to help you become an EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATOR IN THE BUSINESS SCHOOL rather than an expert GRAMMARIAN (thanks to this inspiring e-gmat quote), then you will be more motivated to do SC- you are not playing a game with lots of grammar rules but a game with the logic pathway that effectively guides you to the destination, effective communication through writing a sentence.
Finally, the material I would advice you to use for SC are:
(1) OG 13
(2) Verbal review
(3) SC-meaning exercises (e-gmat) (very valuable and representative of the real thing)
(4) All GMATPrep SC questions (You should also practice with questions with long underlined part as these questions tend to test you with the MEANING, LOGICAL STRUCTURE, AND TRICKY
COMPARISON AND PARAELLISM. These long underlined SC questions will cost you a lot of time if you are not prepared for them and especially if you don't focus on the meaning side but the grammar side.)
(5) MGMAT SC (if you're not very firm with the concepts)
(3)Reading comprehension
I would say that to do well in the RC, you have to have a good reading speed and a good strategy to read. You need to look for signposts (But,however, indeed,...) and some opinion words (X's hypothesis is FLAWED, Overly, impressive, fails to do...). I think most of the RC questions will rely on the content close to these words. So if you don't really understand some parts of the passage, then it is absolutely fine. But you need to understand a few sentences BEFORE and AFTER these signposts/opinion words, because you will need these to answer most RC INFERENCE and PURPOSE questions correctly. After all, doing well on RC depends on recognising the pattern in the traps in the answer choices just like what I recommend you to do in the CR. Practice a lot of passages and analyse how can the GMAT tricks you with (1) using similar wordings in answer choices but contradicting the core ideas of the choices with what is actually said in the passage (2) using the wrong ACTION verbs or NOUNs in the Purpose questions ( discuss, evaluate, criticise, suggest, debunk, revise...; assumption, hypothesis, theories, conceptions, generalisation...)
For RC, I think the OG passages are more than sufficient for practicing. I used the official comprehensive RC file that a GMATCLUB member posted in this website. I think you can just do all passages in the OG and in that file with careful analysis of patterns in the passage and in the answer choices and you will improve your RC accuracy a lot.
Sorry for writing quite a long debrief. Thank you for all contributions of the GMATclub members and some motivational debriefs that keep me fight to get a good score for the GMAT.
Thank you for reading my post and I would be happy to answer any questions about the GMAT preparation.
I just finished my GMAT test yesterday (15th November 2013) and scored 710 (Q50, V 36). I have attempted the GMAT test for 3 times over the past 1 year. By the way, I am not a native English student but have some pretty solid engineering background and some international experiences during my undergraduate studies. My score is not that outstanding compared to many 750+ scores here but I would like to help people who are preparing for the GMAT and want to improve their scores.
Here are all my past GMAT scores:
First attempt: July(I'm not pretty sure about the exact month here though) 2012: 640 (Q49, V 26) AWA 5
I had only one week to prepare for the test since I just suddenly decided to apply for a master in management programme which requires the GMAT score and found out that that month was the last before the GMAC added the IR section in the GMAT. So I was studying from scratch- I knew nothing about the test, its format, strategy, tricks and tips. I barely finished the test prep materials, including the OG13 and the Verbal review. Apparently getting a 640 in the first time was truly because of luck.
Second attempt: May, 2013: 590 (Q49, V22) AWA 6, IR 6
I decided to pursue a second master degree in strategic management/ management science in top business schools. So I need a better GMAT score(much more than 640, of course). I was studying my master's degree in England and had to spend time during the night to prepare for retaking the GMAT because the coursework took most of my time at school and even in the evening I had to work with my groups and do some part-time internships. So I would say I spent some 2-3 months preparing for the retake but with low-quality preparations.
I spent most of my time for verbal, especially CR. I used to think that I was good at SC but I was wrong because my SC accuracy fluctuated a lot from 50% to 90%. But I was a bit dishonest with myself and didn't prepare much for the SC. So when I went to take my second GMAT, I stumbled with the meaning-based GMAT SC, wasted a lot of time on most of SC questions, and screwed other CR and RC questions. The result was shocking for me because I thought I had prepared a lot more than the first time. It was hard to recover my confidence in my ability to score over 700 in the GMAT but I DIDN'T GIVE UP.
Third attempt: November, 2013: 710 (Q 50, V 36) IR 7, AWA awaiting for score
This time, I had to stop and think about what went wrong in my second attempt. I personally think that SELF-REFLECTION and BEING EXTREMELY HONEST ABOUT YOUR OWN ABILITIES are key to improve my score. I tried to think about my past real GMAT test experiences and note down which parts were the most troublesome. For me, these were the SC and CR.
(1) Critical Reasoning
Even though I spent a lot of time studying CR before my second attempt, I discovered I was using wrong approaches to address CR problems. Indeed, I did comprehend what the premises and the conclusions are in the arguments but I knew little about the ROLE, APPEARANCE, AND THE SENSE of the correct CR answers and those of the CR traps. So I fell for the intelligently created CR traps last time. And this time, I began to search for ways to correct these problems. Manhattan GMAT's Stacey Koprince's articles which feature advice on detailed analysis of your step-by-step thought processes when you do a CR question are invaluable. And I would like to thank you many successful test takers who have posted so many excellent debriefs about how to improve performance on CR. Most of these debriefs give most common advice on ANALYSING WHY A CORRECT CHOICE IS CORRECT AND WHY THE OTHER CHOICES ARE WRONG, using the OFFICIAL GUIDE PROBLEMS (which I think are sufficient to score high in the GMAT). Though there are some good questions from test-prep companies, I would suggest that you avoid doing those problems if you have not exhausted the official questions (OG, Verbal review, GMATPrep question banks, and GMATPrep Question Pack -leave the GMATPrep Exam pack for your final assessments). Why I recommend you this? First, I found many test-prep CR questions are trying to mimic the official CR questions in terms of the logic but the style of their answer choices are quite different from the real GMAT's choices. Second, the length of the CR passages in the real GMAT are much longer than that of the test-prep companies (and even longer than the OG CR passages!). Third, the explanations of all correct and incorrect answers in the official guide are more than enough for you to recognise the PATTERN that the GMAC use to create all TRAPS that you may fall into in the real test. I have heard that someone think that the OG explanations are sometimes difficult to understand because they are quite short and concise. I would recommend you google the questions and find some really good explanations from GMAT experts such as RON and Stacey (MGMAT). They really drill down all choices in most tough CR questions very clearly. Sorry for writing this really long, in brief I would recommend these material to prepare for CR.
Material
1. OG13 (Make sure you analyse and truly understand ALL CHOICES IN ALL CR QUESTIONS)
2. Verbal Review (do the same detailed analysis as with the OG)
3. All GMATPrep CR questions (Thanks to GMATCLUB) + some analyses and great explanations from MGMAT, GMATCLUB websites.
4. GMATPREP Question Pack
5. Keep track of your errors and note some PATTERNS of the RIGHT and WRONG CR answers( for example, answer choice that basically says "X is the only cause/ factor for Y" or "X haven't significantly changed during the past Y years" are most of the time WRONG. What's challenging is the GMAC are really good at using different wordings and context in the CR passages to disguise these traps or to make the traps and the correct answers really close to each other and if you don't have a solid reason to eliminate the traps then you will (1) waste a lot of time (2) likely fell for those traps and (3) don't get your target score.
Focus on the PROCESS
I would definitely agree with some GMAT test takers that it is essential to develop your own problem-solving process that can be effectively utilised when you address CR problems.
These processes may be unique for different individuals but it is very important that you have your own. This is because you will likely reuse the process that you have used to answer questions correctly during the preparation in the real GMAT test and the process will help you REDUCE THE NUMBER OF DECISIONS you have to make during the test and therefore REDUCE YOUR MENTAL FATIGUE when doing the last 75-min Verbal. My process is this:
(1) Read the passage and simplify the argument into 1-2 very simple sentences that I can keep in my mind when I analyse all 5 answer choices.
remember very SPECIFICALLY what THE CONCLUSION says (I mean pay very close attention to keywords in the conclusion as well)
(2) Read the question stems and remind myself what role should the correct answer does? what are the characteristics of the incorrect answers?
For example, the question stem asks you to strengthen the argument. and the conclusion says X is better than Y.
So the correct answer should tell you about the DIFFERENCE between X and Y, but usually in a subtle way for difficult CR questions. For easier CR questions, the correct choice will explicitly say that X can do this but Y cannot. But for harder ones, the correct choices will sound like they explain only the info about X and do not mention Y at all. So it seems that these choices are wrong and so tempting for you to eliminate but the choices actually say that X is indeed different than Y if you STOP and INTERPRET the choices a bit FURTHER HOW DOES THESE CHOICES LINK TO Y?.
The wrong answers do the opposite. They DO NOT show differences but they give information about ONLY X or ONLY Y. Or they give information that APPLIES FOR BOTH X AND Y (which means the choices don't tell you why X is better than Y). With detailed analysis of official CR questions, you will develop and these processes will become your second nature. And you will be surprise on how much more quickly you can eliminate wrong answer choices and be more confident in selecting the correct choices.
(3) Use your solid simplified version of the argument(step 1) + your SPECULATION of the right and wrong choices (step 2) and analyse the answer choices.
Most of the time, there will be two final contenders for the correct answer. So I advise you DO NOT focus on finding the correct choices during your first pass through all 5 choices but FOCUS ON ELIMINATING DEFINITELY WRONG CHOICES. When you are left with 2 final choices, DON'T BE LAZY. REMIND YOURSELF OF YOUR SIMPLIFIED ARGUMENT AND THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE CORRECT CHOICE AGAIN!!. Because the wording in the choices can be quite complex to decode when you read some tough CR passages and if you are not being careful, it is easy for you to choose the choice that uses the same wording or vocabularies that appear in the passage, which sound good for you when you are experiencing time pressure to finish the question and then easy for you to FORGET what the right answer should do to address the argument.
With these 3 processes, I could bring my CR accuracy from 60% up to over 85-90%.
(2) Sentence Correction
This was the part that I was overconfident with and I was being dishonest that I actually need some fine-tuning. What I have learnt from my real GMAT SC experiences during the second attempt and third attempt is that "UNDERSTANDING THE MEANING OF THE ORIGINAL SENTENCE IS KEY". Being good at grammar is NOT SUFFICIENT. The real GMAT SC choices are difficult to eliminate and find splits because most of the time you will find 2-3 choices that are GRAMMATICALLY CORRECT but DISTORT THE MEANING OF THE ORIGINAL SENTENCE. How can the GMAC test creators do this? many ways:
(1) They can change from the to-infinitive (to show intention) to comma+Verb-ing (showing results)
(2) Change from restrictive modifier(especially THAT) to non-restrictive modifier (comma+which)
(3) Change the placement of modifiers (especially the prepositional phrases with comma) by moving the modifiers to the beginning of the sentence, the end of the sentence or even in the middle!!
(4) Change the subject of the original sentence (for example, original sentence says "In 1990, X was created" and the choice says "In 1990, the scientists created X"-obviously the original sentence does not emphasize the DOER of the creation of X but the other choice does EXPLICITLY says it is the scientists who did the creation. I hope you can begin to see how the GMAT can trick you if you focus on just grammar. AND I THINK THIS IS WHY MANY PEOPLE STRUGGLE WITH THE MEANING-BASED SC QUESTIONS.
I would credit my success in SC to e-GMAT's approach on focusing on the MEANING first. I didn't realise this till I did their SC meaning exercises which I feel are one of the most representative of the real SC-meaning based questions. What you can learn from these exercises is their process of decoding the meaning of the original sentence and KEEP THAT IN MIND!!. This is very important because when you see a choice that distorts the meaning from the original one then you can confidently eliminate that choice without hesitation about its perfectly correct grammar. And trust me, the MEANING ANALYSIS saved me in my third GMAT attempt. I saw a lot of choices that distort the meaning but are grammatically correct.
You might read this and panic because you have focused on grammar a lot when you do SC. I would say that THERE ARE many choices that CAN BE ELIMINATED BASED ON GRAMMAR but you will usually be left with 2-3 choices that have no GRAMMAR ERRORS but have MEANING ERRORS.
If you practice on the meaning and the grammar for SC consistently during your prep, you'll do just fine in the real SC. I personally think that it is about your perspective to SC. If you think that SC is meant to help you become an EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATOR IN THE BUSINESS SCHOOL rather than an expert GRAMMARIAN (thanks to this inspiring e-gmat quote), then you will be more motivated to do SC- you are not playing a game with lots of grammar rules but a game with the logic pathway that effectively guides you to the destination, effective communication through writing a sentence.
Finally, the material I would advice you to use for SC are:
(1) OG 13
(2) Verbal review
(3) SC-meaning exercises (e-gmat) (very valuable and representative of the real thing)
(4) All GMATPrep SC questions (You should also practice with questions with long underlined part as these questions tend to test you with the MEANING, LOGICAL STRUCTURE, AND TRICKY
COMPARISON AND PARAELLISM. These long underlined SC questions will cost you a lot of time if you are not prepared for them and especially if you don't focus on the meaning side but the grammar side.)
(5) MGMAT SC (if you're not very firm with the concepts)
(3)Reading comprehension
I would say that to do well in the RC, you have to have a good reading speed and a good strategy to read. You need to look for signposts (But,however, indeed,...) and some opinion words (X's hypothesis is FLAWED, Overly, impressive, fails to do...). I think most of the RC questions will rely on the content close to these words. So if you don't really understand some parts of the passage, then it is absolutely fine. But you need to understand a few sentences BEFORE and AFTER these signposts/opinion words, because you will need these to answer most RC INFERENCE and PURPOSE questions correctly. After all, doing well on RC depends on recognising the pattern in the traps in the answer choices just like what I recommend you to do in the CR. Practice a lot of passages and analyse how can the GMAT tricks you with (1) using similar wordings in answer choices but contradicting the core ideas of the choices with what is actually said in the passage (2) using the wrong ACTION verbs or NOUNs in the Purpose questions ( discuss, evaluate, criticise, suggest, debunk, revise...; assumption, hypothesis, theories, conceptions, generalisation...)
For RC, I think the OG passages are more than sufficient for practicing. I used the official comprehensive RC file that a GMATCLUB member posted in this website. I think you can just do all passages in the OG and in that file with careful analysis of patterns in the passage and in the answer choices and you will improve your RC accuracy a lot.
Sorry for writing quite a long debrief. Thank you for all contributions of the GMATclub members and some motivational debriefs that keep me fight to get a good score for the GMAT.
Thank you for reading my post and I would be happy to answer any questions about the GMAT preparation.
Moderator:
