Verbal Preparation Advice for a Non Native Speaker

[shankar245]

Hi Stacey,

I'm a Test taker from the South Asian region.
I have taken GMAT twice with poor scores of 460 (Q- 35 , V 20) and 580.(Q- 47 , V 23)

Clearly , Verbal has been my pain point on both the attempts.

The problem I would like to address here is that during preparation I understand/internalize the concepts , but during a mock exam or even a sample question exercise I fail to apply those concepts.
I realize that Oh yah i knew this! I knew that! but I just know it when it really matters in those 2 mts I'm not able to apply the SC concepts.

Things are okay with CR and RC.

I do have the SC mgmat and CR mgmat books,
They are the best .

What would i need to do to apply a specific rule from a ton of rules ,more efficiently in the stipulated 2 minutes?



I'm planning to retake gmat with a target score of 700 .
I know it sounds far fetched , but my competitive Indian pool demands that I perform at 90 percentile level even to be considered for any Bschool!


Your thoughts on where i lag would be really helpful.

thanks

[StaceyKoprince]

I can think of 2 general reasons for this. Which do you think it is? (Maybe it's a combination.)

1) You suffer from serious text anxiety and, on the real test, you're so anxious that you find it hard to think / recall the material that you studied. This would not happen in practice because you know that your practice isn't the real thing / doesn't count.

2) When you study, you mostly already know what you're looking at / doing at any given time. Eg, you do a bunch of practice CR Weaken questions or quant divisibility and prime questions - so you know what those questions are all about already. On the real test, the questions are all mixed up, so each time a new one pops up, you have to ask yourself "What is this?" before you can even start. If you don't know how to identify what something is testing (especially on quant and SC, which can sometimes be quite difficult to identify), then you're not going to know what techniques or lessons to apply.

Does one of those ring a bell? Or do you think that maybe elements of both are happening?

If anxiety is an issue, you'll have to work on stress management:
http://www.manhattangmat.com/blog/index ... anagement/

If you haven't actually been studying from the point of view of identifying what you've got, or knowing what clues tell you to take what actions in a problem, then you need to study from that point of view. Look in the How To Study section of this article:
http://www.manhattangmat.com/blog/index ... -the-gmat/

You mention SC as a particular problem. If I showed you a page of OG SC problems and covered up the original sentences, could you go through the answer choices alone and tell me which rules were being tested based upon the differences that you could see in the answers? If not, then you need to study that: what differences should clue me in that certain specific rules are being tested?

This will also help on more convoluted sentences where it's harder to tell what's being tested:

http://www.manhattangmat.com/blog/index ... orrection/