strategic guessing in verbal

[liory]

<warning this is a long one. sorry, im not an english speaker so i guess its hard for me to be succinct..>

Hi,
ive recently done the GMAT exam and got 650 when i expected 700-720. i expected such high grades since my last 4 exams (kaplan + PREP) where in that area (i did the essays - no artificial inflations :) ), but i disregarded the previous exams which had a tendency to flactuate. i should mention that my QUANT is pretty steady (49-50) and my VERBAL can go ape (42-29).

i thought i couldnt really understand what went wrong in test day, till i encountered the series of articles by Stacey. first, i wanna open with great thanks and admirations. these articles opened my eyes to new angles of the test, and i want thank you so much for sharing your tremendous knowledge.

second, after i started reading i realized i have a serious timing issues. my analysis shows that my strategy was to ACE the first 10, and struggle with the rest of the exam. I can reach an enormous cumulative time deviation (8-10 min- normally around Q20), and close it by guessing a CR question once in a while (to avoid consecutive mistakes) starting from Q20 (a total of 4-5 per CAT).

when this went wrong, i did not ACE the first 10. leaving me with a big time gap to close. it wasnt as easy for me to "climb up" the levels, and guessing in this stage would lead to mistakes in easier Q, and i read you dont want that...
thus, i finished those tests with a low verbal score.

i have some Questions:
1. the topic i spend the most extra time on is CR. what can i do to improve that? because my rates are good.... how can i get better in recognizing what to do? because i noticed that knowing what to look for and making a good prediction does infact work just as Stacey wrote..
2.since CR takes more time to everyone, it seems weird that guessing CR questions is penalized the same way as others (my assumption). is that so? would you not recommend doing that?

thanks a lot,
Lior

[StaceyKoprince]

Your English is very good. I hope someday I can speak French as well as you speak English. :)

The first thing to know is that the GMAT is a "where you end is what you get" test. You could lift your score to the 99th percentile in the middle of the section, but if you drop to 60th percentile at the end, then that will be your score.

So now you know that you don't want to prioritize the earlier questions. (You also don't want to prioritize the later ones, by the way. Your goal is to have a nice, steady performance across the entire section.)

Here is a CR resource:
https://www.manhattangmat.com/blog/inde ... reasoning/

That one article links to many others and will take you through the various question types and their strategies. You want to get to the point where you can:
1. Identify any CR sub-type within 15 seconds of it popping up on screen.
2. Know what you're supposed to be doing with each sub-type.
3. Know what to look for when reading the argument for that sub-type. (eg, some types use assumptions; some don't. Do you know which are which?)
4. Know the characteristics of a correct answer for that sub-type.
5. Know the common characteristics of trap answers for that sub-type.

Finally, for any verbal question type, do this:
- 1st pass through answers: place answers into 1 of 2 categories, definitely wrong or maybe. DO NOT decide whether something is right at this stage.
- 2nd pass through: look only at the "maybe" answers, compare, choose one
- When you are down to two answers on verbal, look at each answer ONCE more, then pick one and move on.

A lot of people waste time agonizing back and forth between answers, or trying to decide whether an answer is right when they haven't even looked at all of the answers yet. You can save yourself a bunch of time by breaking those habits.