Need Guidance On Verbal, Specially RC

[me.prasanna]

Hello,

I need some advice and directions on how to proceed with my Verbal Section in GMAT.

Right now I am able to score around 33(maximum) and around 30 on average in my Verbal Section. Until last night I was very positive about my progress because I was getting these scores from Manhattan and Kaplan test series. I was working on my mistakes and was adjusting time. This progress was motivating me to get a good verbal score on the final day.

But last night I took one out of two practice tests from Official GMAT Prep and the Verbal section was really a disaster for me, I could score only 17 in Verbal and 47 in quant.

The RC section went horribly wrong because I only paid attention to 1st passage and all 3 questions went wrong. I was clearly running out of time for 7-8 Questions

I know this is very hopeless situation for me and even helpless for anyone who will think about helping me in some or other way.

Some of my average scores during my practice tests are:
MGMAT : 610
The Princeton Reviews: 650
Kaplan: 530

My biggest concern is Verbal and Specially RC. How shall I manage the RC. What should I do if I am not at all getting the passage? Is it even worth reading Questions and Answers Choices if I am not at all in pitch with the passage?

I agree that strategies provided in RC red book enhances my comprehension up to 60-80% but I can not afford so much time on strategies provided in the book at least on the final exam.

I would be really helpful if someone like Stacey or other from MGMAT staff can provide any guidance for the same.

I have around one Month before the exam.

Thanks

[StaceyKoprince]

You mention running out of time on the last 7-8 questions. Can you give me some more detail? Did you just have to speed up and work more quickly? Did you guess randomly on the last 7-8 questions? Did you completely run out of time and leave any blank?

If you did have to guess randomly on the last 7-8 or even leave some blank, did you have to speed up on any additional problems before the last 7-8?

So, we've got (at least) two big problems to address: timing and RC. Let's start with timing. First, I want to make something very clear: if you don't fix this timing problem, it is going to be very difficult for you to improve your verbal score.

Your timing is obviously problematic and that is costing you LOTS of points, because if you're running out of time with so many problems left, then you're getting lots of problems wrong in a row at the end. The absolute worst thing for your score is to have a string of wrong answers in a row, especially towards the end.

You are ALWAYS going to get questions wrong on this test, and you are ALWAYS going to have to let some questions go because you can't answer them in the expected time. That's just the way the test works. Most people have to guess on 5-7 questions per section and that's going to apply to you, too, no matter how good you get.

The problem right now is that you are (a) hanging on to a question too long when you really don't know how to answer it (and then you probably end up having to guess anyway, and (b) because of that extra time you spent, you then have to work too quickly or guess on a bunch at the end, some of which you could probably do, but you don't have the time to do them.

As I said above, you're always going to be offered some questions that are too hard for you. So the remedy to your time problem is not to get faster at *everything* but to recognize when a problem is just too hard and let it go before you have spent too much time on it.

Here are the guidelines you should be following:
SC - about 60-75 sec; max of 90 sec
CR - about 2m; max of 2.5m
RC - about 2.5m (short) to 3.5m (long) to read; about 1 min for general purpose questions; about 1.5 to 2 for everything else

In general, on any problem, don't spend more than 30sec beyond the guidelines. And, really, you should only go over the guidelines at all if you actually do know how to do the problem, but it's just a longer or harder problem and that's why it will take a little more time. Never go over the guidelines if what you're thinking is, "I don't know, but if I just spend some more time, maybe I'll figure it out..."

On RC, you mention that the strategies have helped you to improve your comprehension but not your timing. It sounds like you need more practice, actually - it typically takes quite a lot of time for someone to improve here because you have to improve your comprehension first before you can improve your timing. You mention that you have only one month until the test; this may or may not be enough time - you'll just have to see.

For RC, I'd like you to try an exercise.  Go back to problems / passages you've already done from OG and go over them again with your notes from when you first did these.  Now that you've done the problems, checked your answers, and generally know how things were supposed to work, go back and look at (a) what you initially wrote down on your first read-through and (b) what your understanding of the passage was before you started answering questions.  How well do (a) and (b) match what you knew of the passage and questions after you'd done the questions and gone back to correct your answers and analyze everything?  Probably not very well.  Where are the disconnects?  Did you misunderstand the main point of the passage?  Or did you understand the main point but fall into a trap when reading the answers to the question?  Did you misunderstand the detail for a specific question?  Or did you concentrate on the wrong detail?  Or did you examine and understand the right detail but fall into a trap when reading the answers?  Etc.  Basically, you need to figure out more detail about WHY this area is tough for you so that you can do something about it.  What, specifically, is causing you to get these wrong?  Then you can tackle whatever that is (and if you need advice about how to tackle the issue once you figure out the WHY, come back here and ask!).

Also, when you first read through the passage, I want to make sure that you are not trying to comprehend too much. You should NOT understand everything from the passage on your first read-through. You should only understand:
a) the overall main idea / main point
b) the main point of each individual paragraph
c) any major changes in direction / conflict that occur throughout the passage

You should also have an idea of the kind of details given in each paragraph, but you should NOT know / understand in any depth what those details are. For example, I might have these kinds of notes about a passage (though I would use abbreviations - I wouldn't spell everything out completely as I do below):

P1 Farmers use pesticides for better crop yields
P2 Pesticides = bad for "good" insects such as butterflies **main point of author**
--> detail: bad effects of pesticides
P3 specific birth defects in butterflies due to specific pesticides

Now, there would be all kinds of names of certain pesticides and descriptions of the specific, negative results, etc. But I would just skim over that detail - the only thing I would note (in my head and on my paper) is what kind of detail is in each paragraph, but I absolutely would NOT bother to read it carefully and learn all about it on my first read. This is because I'm not going to get questions about all of the detail in the passage; I'm only going to get asked about some of the detail. So I only want to learn the details I have to learn in order to answer the questions I'm given.

Because I can't see all of the questions before I read the passage, that means that I don't bother to learn any of the detail at first. I just know where the different kinds of detail are located so that I can go back and learn what I need to learn IF I see a specific question about that detail.

[me.prasanna]

Hi Stacey,

Thank you so much for providing so much information.

Coming back to my exam, I think I had around 10 minutes left for my last 10 questions, and I made blind guess on 3 RC questions. For remaining questions I was trying to make sure that I could read at least SC questions and make them right. So with an eye on time, I was reading the SC questions, checking the options and just clicking on what was looking good to me at that time. I did not leave any question unmarked.

Here is a brief summary of my last 10 questions:


Q.No - Type - R/W

31 - SC - W
32 - SC - R
33 - RC - R
34 - RC - W
35 - RC - W
36 - SC - W
37 - SC - R
38 - RC - W
39 - RC - W
40 - SC - W

Please let me know if you need any other information from me.
Once again thank you so much.

Thanks

[StaceyKoprince]

The verbal section goes through problem #41, but you only list through problem #40 above. Did you just accidentally omit #41 on your list, or did you only answer 40 questions?

From #34 on (ignoring the missing #41 right now), you missed 6 of 7, so you definitely lost ground there. In other words, your score was higher prior to #34 and your score went down as a result of that string of wrong answers. So that lack of time at the end definitely pulled your score down. Did you have any similar strings of wrong answers (4+ in a row wrong, or a sequence of 5+ in which you had only one right)? Take a look at your timing during those sections - too much, too little, about right?

What typically happens is that there are some problems, earlier on, on which you spend too much time (and look at your percentages there - typically, people get a lot of those "too much time" problems wrong even though they spent extra time!). Then, you run out of time later on, and you get additional questions wrong due to that lack of time - but some of those later ones were problems you could have gotten right if you'd had the time.

The first big thing to do: get those really hard ones wrong faster. Chances are you're getting them wrong anyway - they're really hard, right? And then you cost yourself even more points by taking too much time. If you hadn't taken the extra time to get them wrong, then you wouldn't have lost all that ground at the end.

You need to learn about how long one minute is without looking at a watch or stopwatch. If you don't have one already, buy yourself a stopwatch with lap timing capability. When you go to do a set of problems, start the stopwatch but turn it over so you can't see the time. Every time you think one minute has gone by, push the lap button. When you're done, see how good you were - and whether you tend to over or underestimate. Get yourself to the point where you're within 15 seconds either way on a regular basis (that is, you can generally predict between 45 sec and 1min 15 sec).

Now, how do you use that when doing problems? If you're not on track by one minute, make an educated guess and move on. (The general idea is that if you're not on track by the halfway mark, you're unlikely to figure out what's holding you back AND have time to do the whole problem in the 1 min you have left.)

On verbal, once you've narrowed down to two choices, give yourself permission to examine each choice ONCE more. Then pick something and move on. Agonizing back and forth between the two choices doesn't help - it just wastes time.

As I mentioned before, you're always going to have to guess on some questions. You might as well guess on the super-hard ones so that you don't have to guess (due to lack of time) on problems at the end that you could actually do!

Okay, so you've got some things to work on in terms of both timing and RC. Go try the above suggestions out and come back and let us know how it goes.