How to go to V40 from V30 : General GMAT Questions and Strategies

How to go to V40 from V30

There are a lot of threads already about verbal study plans, but I planned to address a particular “getting plateaued” issue that a lot of students (myself included) faced during their preparation to ace the GMAT.

Assumptions

You are consistently achieving V30 or above.
You have almost finished 80% of the verbal syllabus (if you have planned any) that you intended to cover in the course of your GMAT preparation.

Most Likely Reasons for Lower Scores:

There might be a couple of reasons to why your score is always hovering around the V30 range (V28-V35). I would like to address almost all of them below. (Please post comments if you think of something else)

1. You have covered your verbal books such as MGMAT SC/CR/CR, Powerscore, Veritas, Kaplan books and the available question banks but often on a practice test you see a lot of questions, which seem to test something else.
   
2. You have not understood some of the concepts written in certain books (sometimes, as it happens, you think you have understood a certain concept such as pronoun ambiguity but it becomes harder to apply in certain questions as the concept is a little abstract in itself).
   
3. You have not timed yourself when you practiced from question banks.
   
4. Some of the absolute strategies that have been advised by the authors of the books you are referring to are not working for you. This is most common for Reading Comprehension.
   
5. You seem to answer the questions correctly when you review the practice CATs but somehow you answer them wrong while taking the test.

How to Improve:

FANBOYS
A lot of prep companies adopt the rule of FANBOYS which says
Independent clause, independent clause is a run on sentence.
o to make it correct we use the construction:
Independent clause, FANBOYS independent clause; FANBOYS stands for “For, And, Not, But, Or, Yet, So”.
However, the converse is not necessarily true. Two clauses separated by comma and FANBOYS do not necessarily mean they need to be independent clauses.
E.g My brother loves to drive so fast that his co passengers often fear being headlined in the newspapers the following day, and hates to wear seat-belts.
The sentence without the punctuation would become haywire.
Also, the punctuation rules are not tested on the GMAT.
This question tests meaning/prepositions/clarity. Unless you analyze every single question in this way, you will never get the bang for the bucks you spent in buying all the official guides.

ING
Face it, the ING words are messy. So are pronouns in grammar and paradoxes in critical reasoning. That is exactly why we created the GMATClub verbal advantage. Remember to use Thursdays with Ron as it is one of the best resource out there for verbal and quant.
https://gmatclub.com/forum/gmat-club-ver ... 33953.html

Timing
Timing yourself while attempting the questions is crucial in the later part of your preparation. You can always use the gmatclub forum timer when you answer questions in the forum. Remember to use a stopwatch when you revisit the official guides or any question bank you are working on (the gmat toolkit comes with a built in OG Tracker with timer for the iphone)

Strategies
Your strategies should not be iron clad. Figure out what exactly works for you. However, if you think reading through the passage for every detail is a better idea follow the strategy from here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ubn35hL ... ature=plcp . Remember that the main point questions will probably be on your test for more than one time with a 90% chance. So, make sure you have that concept and strategy internalized.

Break
Make sure you take a break in the practice tests after the quant portion. Also, sentence correction is your weapon when your brain starts to wear. Sentence correction mostly does not involve a lot of brainwork and often acts as a refresher after a heavy RC. So make sure you work hard on SC strategies and practice (including getting a 90%+ accuracy in official questions) so that you take less time in solving sentence corrections and dedicate the balance to offset for the reduced functioning of the zombie brain.

Use OG for Verbal.
Make sure you buy and use extensively the official guide to supplement your GMAT preparation. Trust me when I say that the official guides are the most underrated books in the GMAT world. Sure, almost everyone buys them but you cannot deny that the relative importance the official guide gets compared to other “prep books” is quite on the lower side. The real blasphemy in the GMAT world is the statement “Official Guide is a question bank”. I could not stress more on the importance of the official guide, especially for your verbal preparation, for it is the only book which has all the information you need. You just need to learn to look for them. Don’t just answer the questions on the official guide. Review extensively as to what was particularly tested on that question. For example if you are studying modifiers and you are having a go at the modifiers questions in the official guide make sure you understand why exactly the other options are incorrect (awkward/wordy are NEVER good explanations). Refer to GMAT club resources on every single question and look at the expert replies and the discussions. I know it sounds very tedious but this is the most important step in boosting your verbal score. See the two questions at the bottom as an illustration.

Download GMAT Club's Grammar Book
https://gmatclub.com/grammar

Specific Tips for Each Section

• Sentence correction is ideal to guarantee a steep improvement in a relatively short period of time (you have to review the official questions in excruciating details).
  
• Critical Reasoning can be a little more difficult to improve upon, but certain strategies do come in handy. I have my own views about prethinking. For strengthen and weaken, prethinking can be a great idea as strengthen and weaken questions test logic that is already there in your brain. For example when your dad used to say “you must have been the one who broke the glass windowpane while playing cricket”, you instantly used to reply “It was not me but the kid from the next block.” You were, in fact, weakening your dad’s conclusion. But, trying to find out assumptions in convoluted arguments can be extremely tedious and you should be careful in not wasting a lot of time. For inference/bold face questions let your common senses take the back seat and rely solely on the premises and facts in the argument.
  
• You can review official CR questions in the same way as you did for SC questions. For every strengthen/weaken questions try to figure out an alternate answer choice which would be just as good. This might not be entirely possible for every single question but it will definitely set the right direction for you in such questions.
  
• Reading Comprehension is a bit crucial when it comes to improvement, for if you do not comprehend a passage well you will end up making repeated mistakes, which we all know can be pretty detrimental with that Verbal score of yours. Make sure you follow a strategy that works for you and then go on a mission to solve official questions. Simplify the question set into specific sets such as main point/inference/detail and work on them. It is up to you whether you want to make notes, but make sure they are as brief as possible. Main point/primary purpose questions are the most important one to crack on RC so make sure you get them internalized.
  
  
• Books are as good as you make out of them. I, for instance, started my verbal preparation with MGMAT SC and took a MGMAT CAT after I was finished with it. I scored a 680 with Q49 V34. I was pretty devastated as people who did well in their verbal prep said MGMAT books are more than enough. Believe me they are. But as it happened, being a non native, I was pretty out of shape in my verbal skills and even though I “knew” all the concepts of grammar for the GMAT, I failed to apply all of them in the test.
  For example, I knew that in case of a bilateral doubt in a sentence we use “whether” and not “if”. But I did not know whether it was supposed to be “whether” or “whether or not”. There, I also used a whether in the sentence .
  
• MGMAT SC and Powerscore CR contains almost everything there is to sentence correction and critical reasoning. For example participial phrases and ING phrases are very well explained but I often failed to comprehend what the statement “ING phrases modify the entire preceding clause” actually means. I seemed to have read the whole book. Twice. However, with fewer examples on specific concepts I did not master them.
  
• Verbal timing is incredibly crucial in getting a good verbal score. Initially I would be looking at the clock every 5 questions and spend 10-15 seconds on mental calculation as to how many minutes per question I have left. This folly brings a variety of problems. If I am not doing that great I would be incredibly tensed if I realize that I have less than average minutes per question left. Even if I am doing well with my time, the useless mental calculation takes a relatively considerable amount of time itself.
  
• In RC you skim. Well, if I am skimming and looking back all the time am I not wasting a lot of time anyway? Also, if I spend a lot of time reading every detail, most of which do not even appear in the question set of that RC, I am wasting considerable time as well. This is an inherent question in Reading Comprehension. Similar confusion appears in the much debated “pre thinking” concept in critical reasoning.
  
• After writing an essay, trying to solve 12 excruciating “not so integrated” reasoning questions, your brain closely resembles that of a zombie (no offence zombies) during the last 10-15 questions in verbal. No matter how much of that disgusting red bull you have tried for the first time in the break, your brain just refuses to function at the near end of the verbal portion.

Practice Questions to Try it Out

Joachim Raff and Giacomo Meyerbeer are examples of the kind of composer who receives popular acclaim while living, often goes into decline after death, and never regains popularity again.

(A) often goes into decline after death, and never regains popularity again
(B) whose reputation declines after death and never regains its status again
(C) but whose reputation declines after death and never regains its former status
(D) who declines in reputation after death and who never regained popularity again
(E) then has declined in reputation after death and never regained popularity.
Let’s analyze the question in detail.
Concept tested: Redundancy, preposition, parallelism, modifiers.
Difficulty: 700
Illustration: Carefully examine the following sentence
My sister, who is a teenager, and whose street play was appreciated by all, won the local talent award yesterday.
This is a perfectly correct sentence as “who is a teenager” and “whose street play was appreciated by all” both modifier the subject “My sister”.

Now let’s look at the options.
A is wrong because the composer does not go into decline after his or her death, but his or her reputation does.
B is incorrect because it uses redundant construction “regains its status again”.
D and E are wrong for the same reason we eliminated A i.e. the composer himself does not go into decline after death.
C is correct (option C breaks the FANBOYS rule, which a lot of prep companies advocate to eliminate answer choices. Please see below for clarification.).
_________________

Really usefull, I am in that situation right now...

Do you have any further advice? I am exactly at 30 in verbal (47/48 in quant) and I do not know how to efficiently improve my score!

I shelduled my test for the 27th of january ==> in one month. Can I do it in one month?

thanks!

happy new year to all of you!

Very helpful post, souvik.

I am currently on 70% accuracy in SC. Any specific pointers to improve on that? I do know about my own silly mistakes, but anything that I can use to overcome those?

@coolredwine

You should print out all such “silly mistake” questions you answered wrong and re-read them each and every day. This will help to keep them in mind and apply the correct SC concept in similar questions. This will result in a better score.

If you do not have a way to manage your wrong answers you give away a lot of your full potential because it is one of the most effective ways to improve your final GMAT score at test day!

If there is one advice I can give you then it is to focus on your weaknesses AND NEVER EVER GIVE AWAY POINTS!!!!

Best regards,

Melanie

OPTIMUS PREP

OptimusPrep wrote:@coolredwine

You should print out all such “silly mistake” questions you answered wrong and re-read them each and every day. This will help to keep them in mind and apply the correct SC concept in similar questions. This will result in a better score.

If you do not have a way to manage your wrong answers you give away a lot of your full potential because it is one of the most effective ways to improve your final GMAT score at test day!

If there is one advice I can give you then it is to focus on your weaknesses AND NEVER EVER GIVE AWAY POINTS!!!!

Best regards,

Melanie

OPTIMUS PREP

Thanks for the reply, Melanie.

As of now, I am keeping a mental note of all the questions that I get wrong in SC. I have figured Modifiers to be the pain area (specially when they are combined with pronouns). Also, while I am solving from the book, I keep on scribbling alongside the question the error I made so that I can come back to it.

I will almost be done with RC by the end of next week, and then CR. Will be trying to solve as many questions in a period of 1 hour everyday.

Any other specific pointers you can give to improve my accuracy from 70%? How much should I target?

And shall I keep taking the tests from the book itself, or should I shift to an online version?

Repetition is the mother of all skill !!!

You should practice and practice and practice. That is the best tactic once you are familiar with all concepts. I would recommend online versions. We have great and very accurate GMAT simulations. You have to be a client to get access though...

Keep learning and good luck!

souvik101990 wrote:

How to go to V40 from V30

There are a lot of threads already about verbal study plans, but I planned to address a particular “getting plateaued” issue that a lot of students (myself included) faced during their preparation to ace the GMAT.

Assumptions

You are consistently achieving V30 or above.
You have almost finished 80% of the verbal syllabus (if you have planned any) that you intended to cover in the course of your GMAT preparation.

Most Likely Reasons for Lower Scores:

There might be a couple of reasons to why your score is always hovering around the V30 range (V28-V35). I would like to address almost all of them below. (Please post comments if you think of something else)

1. You have covered your verbal books such as MGMAT SC/CR/CR, Powerscore, Veritas, Kaplan books and the available question banks but often on a practice test you see a lot of questions, which seem to test something else.
   
2. You have not understood some of the concepts written in certain books (sometimes, as it happens, you think you have understood a certain concept such as pronoun ambiguity but it becomes harder to apply in certain questions as the concept is a little abstract in itself).
   
3. You have not timed yourself when you practiced from question banks.
   
4. Some of the absolute strategies that have been advised by the authors of the books you are referring to are not working for you. This is most common for Reading Comprehension.
   
5. You seem to answer the questions correctly when you review the practice CATs but somehow you answer them wrong while taking the test.

How to Improve:

FANBOYS
A lot of prep companies adopt the rule of FANBOYS which says
Independent clause, independent clause is a run on sentence.
o to make it correct we use the construction:
Independent clause, FANBOYS independent clause; FANBOYS stands for “For, And, Not, But, Or, Yet, So”.
However, the converse is not necessarily true. Two clauses separated by comma and FANBOYS do not necessarily mean they need to be independent clauses.
E.g My brother loves to drive so fast that his co passengers often fear being headlined in the newspapers the following day, and hates to wear seat-belts.
The sentence without the punctuation would become haywire.
Also, the punctuation rules are not tested on the GMAT.
This question tests meaning/prepositions/clarity. Unless you analyze every single question in this way, you will never get the bang for the bucks you spent in buying all the official guides.

ING
Face it, the ING words are messy. So are pronouns in grammar and paradoxes in critical reasoning. That is exactly why we created the GMATClub verbal advantage. Remember to use Thursdays with Ron as it is one of the best resource out there for verbal and quant.
https://gmatclub.com/forum/gmat-club-ver ... 33953.html

Timing
Timing yourself while attempting the questions is crucial in the later part of your preparation. You can always use the gmatclub forum timer when you answer questions in the forum. Remember to use a stopwatch when you revisit the official guides or any question bank you are working on (the gmat toolkit comes with a built in OG Tracker with timer for the iphone)

Strategies
Your strategies should not be iron clad. Figure out what exactly works for you. If you like like skimming this is for you. . Remember that the main point questions will probably be on your test for more than one time with a 90% chance. So, make sure you have that concept and strategy internalized.

Break
Make sure you take a break in the practice tests after the quant portion. Also, sentence correction is your weapon when your brain starts to wear. Sentence correction mostly does not involve a lot of brainwork and often acts as a refresher after a heavy RC. So make sure you work hard on SC strategies and practice (including getting a 90%+ accuracy in official questions) so that you take less time in solving sentence corrections and dedicate the balance to offset for the reduced functioning of the zombie brain.

Use OG for Verbal.
Make sure you buy and use extensively the official guide to supplement your GMAT preparation. Trust me when I say that the official guides are the most underrated books in the GMAT world. Sure, almost everyone buys them but you cannot deny that the relative importance the official guide gets compared to other “prep books” is quite on the lower side. The real blasphemy in the GMAT world is the statement “Official Guide is a question bank”. I could not stress more on the importance of the official guide, especially for your verbal preparation, for it is the only book which has all the information you need. You just need to learn to look for them. Don’t just answer the questions on the official guide. Review extensively as to what was particularly tested on that question. For example if you are studying modifiers and you are having a go at the modifiers questions in the official guide make sure you understand why exactly the other options are incorrect (awkward/wordy are NEVER good explanations). Refer to GMAT club resources on every single question and look at the expert replies and the discussions. I know it sounds very tedious but this is the most important step in boosting your verbal score. See the two questions at the bottom as an illustration.

Download GMAT Club's Grammar Book
https://gmatclub.com/grammar

Specific Tips for Each Section

• Sentence correction is ideal to guarantee a steep improvement in a relatively short period of time (you have to review the official questions in excruciating details).
  
• Critical Reasoning can be a little more difficult to improve upon, but certain strategies do come in handy. I have my own views about prethinking. For strengthen and weaken, prethinking can be a great idea as strengthen and weaken questions test logic that is already there in your brain. For example when your dad used to say “you must have been the one who broke the glass windowpane while playing cricket”, you instantly used to reply “It was not me but the kid from the next block.” You were, in fact, weakening your dad’s conclusion. But, trying to find out assumptions in convoluted arguments can be extremely tedious and you should be careful in not wasting a lot of time. For inference/bold face questions let your common senses take the back seat and rely solely on the premises and facts in the argument.
  
• You can review official CR questions in the same way as you did for SC questions. For every strengthen/weaken questions try to figure out an alternate answer choice which would be just as good. This might not be entirely possible for every single question but it will definitely set the right direction for you in such questions.
  
• Reading Comprehension is a bit crucial when it comes to improvement, for if you do not comprehend a passage well you will end up making repeated mistakes, which we all know can be pretty detrimental with that Verbal score of yours. Make sure you follow a strategy that works for you and then go on a mission to solve official questions. Simplify the question set into specific sets such as main point/inference/detail and work on them. It is up to you whether you want to make notes, but make sure they are as brief as possible. Main point/primary purpose questions are the most important one to crack on RC so make sure you get them internalized.
  
  
• Books are as good as you make out of them. I, for instance, started my verbal preparation with MGMAT SC and took a MGMAT CAT after I was finished with it. I scored a 680 with Q49 V34. I was pretty devastated as people who did well in their verbal prep said MGMAT books are more than enough. Believe me they are. But as it happened, being a non native, I was pretty out of shape in my verbal skills and even though I “knew” all the concepts of grammar for the GMAT, I failed to apply all of them in the test.
  For example, I knew that in case of a bilateral doubt in a sentence we use “whether” and not “if”. But I did not know whether it was supposed to be “whether” or “whether or not”. There, I also used a whether in the sentence :P.
  
• MGMAT SC and Powerscore CR contains almost everything there is to sentence correction and critical reasoning. For example participial phrases and ING phrases are very well explained but I often failed to comprehend what the statement “ING phrases modify the entire preceding clause” actually means. I seemed to have read the whole book. Twice. However, with fewer examples on specific concepts I did not master them.
  
• Verbal timing is incredibly crucial in getting a good verbal score. Initially I would be looking at the clock every 5 questions and spend 10-15 seconds on mental calculation as to how many minutes per question I have left. This folly brings a variety of problems. If I am not doing that great I would be incredibly tensed if I realize that I have less than average minutes per question left. Even if I am doing well with my time, the useless mental calculation takes a relatively considerable amount of time itself.
  
• In RC you skim. Well, if I am skimming and looking back all the time am I not wasting a lot of time anyway? Also, if I spend a lot of time reading every detail, most of which do not even appear in the question set of that RC, I am wasting considerable time as well. This is an inherent question in Reading Comprehension. Similar confusion appears in the much debated “pre thinking” concept in critical reasoning.
  
• After writing an essay, trying to solve 12 excruciating “not so integrated” reasoning questions, your brain closely resembles that of a zombie (no offence zombies) during the last 10-15 questions in verbal. No matter how much of that disgusting red bull you have tried for the first time in the break, your brain just refuses to function at the near end of the verbal portion.

Practice Questions to Try it Out

Joachim Raff and Giacomo Meyerbeer are examples of the kind of composer who receives popular acclaim while living, often goes into decline after death, and never regains popularity again.

(A) often goes into decline after death, and never regains popularity again
(B) whose reputation declines after death and never regains its status again
(C) but whose reputation declines after death and never regains its former status
(D) who declines in reputation after death and who never regained popularity again
(E) then has declined in reputation after death and never regained popularity.
Let’s analyze the question in detail.
Concept tested: Redundancy, preposition, parallelism, modifiers.
Difficulty: 700
Illustration: Carefully examine the following sentence
My sister, who is a teenager, and whose street play was appreciated by all, won the local talent award yesterday.
This is a perfectly correct sentence as “who is a teenager” and “whose street play was appreciated by all” both modifier the subject “My sister”.

Now let’s look at the options.
A is wrong because the composer does not go into decline after his or her death, but his or her reputation does.
B is incorrect because it uses redundant construction “regains its status again”.
D and E are wrong for the same reason we eliminated A i.e. the composer himself does not go into decline after death.
C is correct (option C breaks the FANBOYS rule, which a lot of prep companies advocate to eliminate answer choices. Please see below for clarification.).

Souvik ,

You mentioned regarding use of FANBOYS ...!!

I would like to share with you that I am making this mistake more repeatedly than any other mistakes.

As you have mentioned that 2 clause seperated by FANBOYS does not necessarily require IC

Plz elaborate !!!

REgards
ST

Hello,

My GMAT is on the 20th of Aug.Now,I have taken a few GMAT Mocks and clearly I am coming short on the Verbal part.
I am scoring in the range of 35-39.Amazingly the test where I got V39,I messed up my QA and could only get 620.

After reviewing my Verbal scores,I understood that I was doing badly in SC.
I wanted to know from all GMAT Clubbers,if there could be a level of accuracy in SC,that could be targeted.For example,one can expect a 100% accuracy in 600+ questions while,maybe a 70-80% accuracy for 700+ might be enough.

Also,I have been practising from the OG as well as the OG for Verbal Review 2nd Ed.Is there any way of segregating the SC questions based on difficulty in those books,so that i practice more of the 700+ questions.

Hopefully if I can reach this accuracy level,I can cross V40,as I feel I am doing reasonably well in RC and CR.
Waiting for your comments on this

DebWenger wrote:Hello,

My GMAT is on the 20th of Aug.Now,I have taken a few GMAT Mocks and clearly I am coming short on the Verbal part.
I am scoring in the range of 35-39.Amazingly the test where I got V39,I messed up my QA and could only get 620.

After reviewing my Verbal scores,I understood that I was doing badly in SC.
I wanted to know from all GMAT Clubbers,if there could be a level of accuracy in SC,that could be targeted.For example,one can expect a 100% accuracy in 600+ questions while,maybe a 70-80% accuracy for 700+ might be enough.

Also,I have been practising from the OG as well as the OG for Verbal Review 2nd Ed.Is there any way of segregating the SC questions based on difficulty in those books,so that i practice more of the 700+ questions.

Hopefully if I can reach this accuracy level,I can cross V40,as I feel I am doing reasonably well in RC and CR.
Waiting for your comments on this

This aint stated anywhere, but in each section questions at the end are comparatively difficult then those at the start. So basically if you will start each section from the end in OG, then the difficulty level will come down as you reach Q1.

I took my GMAT 2 weeks ago and I got 660 (q:50;v28). I hope I will get v+35 next time. Thanks for advices.

I have done thorough reading from Veritas and MGMAT books for SC. But still finding difficult to score in SC with accuracy more than 50% .
I am making small mistakes. But not able to avoid it
Any steps to improve ?

Hi suresh8055,

Since you're asking about SC, we can focus on that for now - but how are you performing on RC and CR when you take your CATs?

To score at a high level on SCs, you need the proper mix of knowledge (grammar rules, idioms) and pattern-matching/style (using the answers to your advantage, learning to recognize the common wrong answers the GMAT writers use, etc.). If you're having trouble scoring above 50% on SCs, then we need to figure out how strong your skills are in all of those areas.

1) How long have you been studying overall (and studying SCs specifically?)?
2) What resources have you been studying with?
3) How have you scored on your CATs (including the Quant and Verbal Scaled Scores)?

GMAT assassins aren't born, they're made,
Rich

Excellent post . Much needed article. I am exactly at the same level. RC is a pain area for me. Many a times it takes my score to a downward trajectory, especially when RC pops up within the first 10 questions. Can you suggest any ways to improve RC ? I need to improve in SC and CR as well, currently I am scoring in and around 70-75% in both of them. Can you help me with some suggestions to further improve SC and CR.

varmashreekanth wrote:Excellent post . Much needed article. I am exactly at the same level. RC is a pain area for me. Many a times it takes my score to a downward trajectory, especially when RC pops up within the first 10 questions. Can you suggest any ways to improve RC ? I need to improve in SC and CR as well, currently I am scoring in and around 70-75% in both of them. Can you help me with some suggestions to further improve SC and CR.

Hi varmashreekanth,

I’m glad you reached out, and I’m happy to help. Although I’m unsure of your study routine, you want to ensure that you are learning linearly, such that are you able FIRST to learn the concepts and strategies related to Sentence Correction, Critical Reasoning, and Reading Comprehension, and SECOND to practice with a large number of realistic questions.

For example, let’s say you begin studying Critical Reasoning. You need to ensure that you fully understand the essence of the various Critical Reasoning question types. For instance, do you know the importance of an assumption within an argument? Can you easily spot a conclusion? Do you know how to resolve a paradox? Do you know how to properly evaluate cause and effect? Do you know how to properly weaken or strengthen an argument? These are just a few examples. You really need to take a deep dive into the individual Critical Reasoning topics so that you develop the necessary skills to properly attack any Critical Reasoning questions that you encounter.

As you learn each Critical Reasoning problem type, do focused practice so that you can track your skill in answering each type of question. If, for example, you incorrectly answered a Weaken the Argument question, ask yourself why. Did you make a careless mistake? Did you not recognize the specific Critical Reasoning question type? Were you doing too much analysis in your head? Did you skip over a keyword in an answer choice? You must thoroughly analyze your mistakes and seek to turn weaknesses into strengths by focusing on the question types you dread seeing and the questions you take a long time to answer correctly.

When practicing Reading Comprehension, you need to develop a reading strategy that is both efficient and thorough. Reading too fast and not understanding what you have read are equally as harmful as reading too slow and using up too much time. When attacking Reading Comprehension passages, you must have one clear goal in mind: to understand the context of what you are reading. However, you must do so efficiently, so you need to avoid getting bogged down in the details of each paragraph and focus on understanding the main point of each paragraph. That being said, do not fall into the trap of thinking that you can just read the intro and the conclusion and comprehend the main idea of a paragraph. As you read a paragraph, consider how the context of the paragraph relates to previous paragraphs, so you can continue developing your overall understanding of the passage. Furthermore, as you practice Reading Comprehension, focus on the exact types of Reading Comprehension questions with which you struggle: Find the Main Idea, Inference, Author’s Tone, etc. As with Critical Reasoning, analyze your incorrect answers to better determine why you tend to get a particular question type wrong, and then improve upon your weaknesses. You can perfect your reading strategy with a lot of practice, but keep in mind that GMAT Reading Comprehension passages are not meant to be stimulating, so to better prepare yourself to tackle such passages, read magazines with similar content and style, such as the Economist, Scientific American, and Smithsonian.

Sentence Correction is a bit of a different animal compared to Reading Comprehension and Critical Reasoning. There are three aspects to getting correct answers to GMAT Sentence Correction questions: what you know, such as grammar rules, what you see, such as violations of grammar rules and the logic of sentence structure, and what you do, such as carefully considering each answer choice in the context of the non-underlined portion of the sentence. To drive up your Sentence Correction score, you likely will have to work on all three of those aspects. Furthermore, the reason that your Sentence Correction performance has not improved is likely that you have not been working on all three of those aspects.

Regarding what you know, to be successful in Sentence Correction, first and foremost, you MUST know your grammar rules. Let's be clear, though: GMAT Sentence Correction is not just a test of knowledge of grammar rules. The reason for learning grammar rules is so that you can determine what sentences convey and whether sentences are well-constructed. In fact, in many cases, incorrect answers to Sentence Correction questions are grammatically flawless. Thus, often your task is to use your knowledge of grammar rules to determine which answer choice creates the most logical sentence meaning and structure.

This determination of whether sentences are well-constructed and logical is the second aspect of finding correct answers to Sentence Correction questions, what you see. To develop this skill, you probably have to slow way down. You won't develop this skill by spending under two minutes per question. For a while, anyway, you have to spend time with each question, maybe even ten or fifteen minutes on one question sometimes, analyzing every answer choice until you see the details that you have to see in order to choose the correct answer.

As you go through the answer choices, consider the meaning conveyed by each version of the sentence. Does the meaning make sense? Even if you can tell what the version is SUPPOSED to convey, does the version really convey that meaning? Is there a verb to go with the subject? Do all pronouns in the sentence clearly refer to nouns in the sentence? By slowing way down and looking for these details, you learn to see what you have to see in order to clearly understand which answer to a Sentence Correction question is correct.

There is only one correct answer to any Sentence Correction question, there are clear reasons why that choice is correct and the others are not, and those reasons are not that the correct version simply "sounds right." In fact, the correct version often sounds a little off at first. That correct answers may sound a little off is not surprising. If the correct answer were always the one that sounded right, then most people most of the time would get Sentence Correction questions correct, without really knowing why the wrong answers were wrong and the correct answers were correct. So, you have to go beyond choosing what "sounds right" and learn to clearly see the logical reasons why one choice is better than all of the others.

As for the third aspect of getting Sentence Correction questions correct, what you do, the main thing that you have to do is be very careful. You have to make sure that you are truly considering the structures of sentences and the meanings conveyed rather than allowing yourself to be tricked into choosing trap answers that sound right but don't convey meanings that make sense. You also have to make sure that you put some real energy into finding the correct answers. Finding the correct answer to a Sentence Correction question may take bouncing from choice to choice repeatedly until you start to see the differences between the choices that make all choices wrong except for one. Often, when you first look at the choices in a Sentence Correction question, only one or two seem obviously incorrect. It may take time for you to see what you have to see. Getting the right answers takes a certain work ethic. You have to be determined to see the differences and to figure out the precise reasons that one choice is correct.

To improve what you do when you answer Sentence Correction questions, seek to become aware of how you are going about answering them. For instance, are you being careful and looking for logic and details, or are you quickly eliminating choices that sound a little off and then choosing the best of the rest? If you choose an incorrect answer, consider what you did that resulted in your arriving at that answer and what you could do differently in order to arrive at correct answers more consistently. Furthermore, see how many questions you can get correct in a row as you practice. If you break your streak by missing one, consider what you could have done differently that would have extended your streak.

As with your Critical Reasoning and Reading Comprehension regiments, after learning a particular Sentence Correction topic, engage in focused practice with 30 questions or more that involve that topic. As your Sentence Correction skills improve, you’ll then want to practice with SC questions that test you on skills from multiple SC topics.

Ultimately, if you are unable to learn and practice in the manner described above, you may consider looking for additional verbal prep resources. If you are unsure of which resources to choose, check out some reviews here on GMAT Club.

You also may find my article with more information regarding
how to score a 700+ on the GMAT helpful.

Feel free to reach out with any questions.

Good luck!
_________________

Thanks Scott for the detailed section wise explanation and suggestions. I will surely work on these areas as per your suggestion.

Thank you! Very interesting, and it will help me

Thanks for posting. Looking forward to trying these out.