verbal prep stratergy,2+2 Programs

[ayushsood19]

Hello everyone!
I just appeared for the GMAT. I scored a total of 660, 50 in quantitative and 30 in verbal.The verbal score was disappointing since i had prepared thoroughly for about a month.I had studied the Manhattan GMAT sentence correction guides,practiced material form the Official Guide as well as form the Manhattan GMAT question banks and additional material from the internet.Moreover, i was consistently scoring above 75 percentile in the Manhattan GMAT simulation tests.
But during the actual test, the sentence correction just bamboozled me. There were no grammatical splits in the options and all the options seemed right.I had practiced meaning based questions too, but somehow got a lowly 57 percentile in verbal in the actual test.
I would be grateful if any of the instructors could point me in the right direction.
My primary purpose was to submit my scores to the Indian School of Business for their 2+2 (YLP) program.But since my score is not up to the mark, I highly doubt that i will make it through the second round.It would be really helpful if anyone could suggest a few other 2+2 programs.(I am in the final year of my graduate studies.)
Really long and boring query!!!But any information would be much appreciated.
Thank you!

[ayushsood19]

If any of the instructors could reply to my query, it would be a big help!
Thanks!

[StaceyKoprince]

Please remember to read the forum guidelines before posting. Please don't "bump" your own post. We respond to all posts in order, oldest first, and the date of your post is based on the date of the last post in the thread, not the first. If you bump your own post, you will wait longer for a response. (In this case, I would have gotten to you about 2 days ago if you hadn't bumped your post.)

Please also note that the forums are a free service, open to the public. Because of the volume of traffic we receive, it is not unusual to wait a week from the date of the last post (sometimes longer) for a response. If you see that older posts in the same folder have not yet been answered, then you know that we haven't missed you - we just haven't gotten to your question yet.

Great job on the quant. For the verbal, you mentioned that you prepared for about a month - that's not very much time, not for your weaker area. :) Most people prepare for 3-4 months.

You mention working from our SC Guide but you don't mention any similar CR or RC materials - what did you use to study those question types? (Note: I don't mean OG or question banks - I mean materials that are designed to teach you how to do those question types.)

For SC, some questions do have split that are easier to see and some have harder splits. You do still have to have grammatical splits (splits = differences); if you didn't have any grammatical differences, then the questions couldn't actually test grammar! So they were there - but you weren't able to decode them.

Most of the time, that will happen on questions that are testing what we call global issues: Structure, Meaning, Modifiers, and Parallelism. Meaning is actually tied to grammar - mess up modifier placement, and you mess up meaning. Change structure and you might change the meaning. Use the wrong verb tense and you've just messed up the meaning. Etc.

So my guess is that you've got two things to work on here:
(1) brushing up on those global issues
(2) learning to deal with less-obvious splits

You aren't going to see as many "single word" splits as you saw in the past. You are going to see more answer choices that change structure and word order more substantially, so you're going to have to start learning to view sentences in "chunks" (modifiers vs. the core sentence structure, for example).

You can learn some techniques for this here:
http://www.manhattangmat.com/blog/index ... orrection/

There are many examples of these kinds of sentences in OG13, particularly at the higher question numbers. Work through the articles above first (that link above is to a compilation of articles), then go through old OG13 questions (ones you've already done) and look for similar issues.

Next, did any of this affect your timing? Well, actually - it certainly affected your timing. The question is how. Did you spend more time on some of these SCs and then go faster on other questions to stay on pace? Did you run low on time at the end of the section and have to rush to finish? Either way, you likely then made careless mistakes on questions you would have gotten right with normal timing... and that would also pull your score down.

Did you have any CR or RC issues in general? What can you improve there?

Finally, on the admissions query, I'd love to help... but I'm not an admissions expert. I hope some of your fellow students will see your question and respond.