GMAT Verbal: Getting it Right Between the Last Two
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You’re working through a GMAT Verbal question, following your process, eliminating wrong answers, doing everything right. You get down to two, they both sound good, so you choose one and move on. Check the answer, and it was actually the other one! Sound familiar?
Choosing wrongly between the last two on GMAT Verbal is one of the most common wrong answer patterns, and it can be very frustrating to try to fix because you’re basically doing everything right and understanding the questions, just not quite finishing off. The good news is that there is hope and you can get better in this area!
First, you need to realize the value of improving in this particular area of GMAT Verbal. One of the reasons Verbal scores often stagnate is because studying Verbal is not quite as cut-and-dry as studying Quant. When you get a Quant question wrong, you often know it and feel it because you feel completely lost. These GMAT Verbal “wrong between the last two” questions don’t feel nearly as bad, because you basically understand them, but they’re still just as wrong! So if you can make concrete improvements on your choice between the last two, you can actually see a bump in your GMAT Verbal score.
So, how do you actually improve? The big idea is pretty simple, actually…
Pause and Re-Focus
When you get down to the last two, the combination of generalized time pressure (whether you’re actually behind on time or not) and a little bit of tiredness from working through the problem so far conspire to push you to just choose and move on. In addition, sometimes you get a little fuzzy on what exactly the question was by the time you’ve eliminated the first three, and then you end up making a bad choice.
Instead of rushing through, train yourself to take an explicit pause before you make your final choice. In that pause, you can re-focus on exactly what you’re looking for and make a good decision. Sometimes when you take that step back, the answer becomes very clear; sometimes it’s still murky and you’ll need to take a sensible guess.
On Sentence Correction, pause and re-focus by fully reading the last two answer choices in the context of the sentence. Look for the differences between them. Sometimes this re-focus will show you a clear grammatical error in one of them, but very often, neither will have a clear grammatical error. In that case, be cautious about “making up a grammar rule” (i.e. “it needs to be a participle rather than an infinitive” or “it must be this word instead of that word”). Instead, consider the meaning; very often, the key to choosing between the last two is a meaning difference.
On Critical Reasoning, pause and re-focus by re-stating the goal (step #3 of the Manhattan Prep 4-step CR process). This helps you focus on exactly what you’re looking for and clarify between the last two. If you’re still not sure, the rule of thumb is guess the weird answer. Often there is one answer that is fairly clear in what it means, but it’s kind of a stretch to make it fit. The other answer is one that is just weird. You basically know the clear one is wrong, so choose the weird one!
On Reading Comprehension, pause and re-focus by re-checking the language of the question and the specific proof in the passage (if it’s a detail question). If that doesn’t clarify things, you can guess the wishy-washy answer. By “wishy-washy,” I mean the answer that requires the lowest standard of proof (i.e. “it’s possible that there is an alternative explanation” is more likely than “the scientists’ theory was wrong”).
So on your next GMAT Verbal problem set, make an explicit effort to pause and re-focus on your last two and see what happens! ?
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James Brock
is a Manhattan Prep instructor based in Atlanta, Georgia. He holds a B.A. in mathematics and a Master of Divinity from Covenant Seminary. James has taught and tutored everything from calculus to chess, and his 780 GMAT score allows him to share his love of teaching and standardized tests with MPrep students. You can check out James’s upcoming GMAT courses here.