Chossing wrong answer after nailing to final two choices

[NIKESH_PAHUJA]

Hi Stacey/Ron

I took Gmat Prep three times, and found a very annoying pattern on the questions I got wrong

On all the tree test, In verbal section, I got almost 8 questions wrong,2-3 of each of RC, SC and CR.

Every time, out of 8 questions, I got 5 wrong after nailing the questions down to two choices.

Thus approx on 5 questions in each verbal sections, I eliminated 3 wrong choices, nailed down to two choices ( i.e. probability of getting question right was 50% ), and selected the wrong answer.

I tried going to explanations thoroughly after each test, but not able to get rid of this pattern. This is kind of frustrating, because had it got those questions right, probably I would have got a better verbal score.Please let me know if there is some trick I can follow to choose correctly between the two final choices that I have nailed down to .

If you want, I can post the problems which I got wrong for your reference.

Thanks in advance for your time and effort.

Regards
Nikesh

[StaceyKoprince]

You also got some right after narrowing down to 2; you aren't getting them wrong EVERY time you narrow to two. You just aren't noticing the ones you got right because you're only looking at the list of problems that you got wrong. :)

So, first, it's a GOOD thing to get yourself down to 2 choices, including the right answer. That's probably the second-best situation (the best situation, obviously: narrowing to one!).

Next, when this happens, you have some work to do. And you should do this work regardless of whether you got the question right or wrong, so you should develop a symbol that you can use on your scrap paper to denote questions on which you narrowed to 2 and then weren't 100% confident of your choice. That way, you can find even the ones on which you did guess correctly.

Answer these questions:
- why was the wrong answer so tempting? why did it look like it might be right? (be as explicit as possible)
- why was it actually wrong? what specific words indicate that it is wrong and how did I overlook those clues the first time?
- why did the right answer seem wrong? what made it so tempting to cross off the right answer? why were those things actually okay - what was my error in thinking that they were wrong?
- why was it actually right?

[NIKESH_PAHUJA]

Thanks Stacey !!
I am working on your advise. Will post back with outcome soon.

[StaceyKoprince]

great - good luck!
:)