GMAT Verbal Success Tips

Increasing verbal scores is frequently difficult for GMAT candidates. In order to get the GMAT Verbal scores they need to apply to business schools, they therefore search far and wide for strategies. This blog puts together a collection of effective GMAT Verbal suggestions in this blog to satisfy the demand for trustworthy advice on how to perform well on the test.

Tip 1: Learn a Strategy for Answering Each Type of Verbal Question

The first of my tips for GMAT Verbal section success is to learn an effective strategy for answering each type of Verbal question. Having a strategy for each type of question can be super-helpful for multiple reasons.

First, by having an effective strategy for each type of Verbal question, you’ll be more likely to get questions correct. For example, if you use the Yes/No test when answering Critical Reasoning Evaluate the Argument questions, you’re more likely to identify the correct answers than you are if you don’t use that strategy. The Yes/No test brings into sharp focus which choices actually help us to evaluate arguments. Second, a good strategy can help you answer a question faster. For example, in answering a Reading Comprehension Specific Purpose question, using the strategy of rereading the preceding sentence can help you quickly see which choice is correct. You’ll likely answer a Specific Purpose question faster if you know that strategy than if you don’t.

Tip 2: Do Much of Your GMAT Verbal Practice Untimed

Practicing untimed is essential to GMAT Verbal success. In fact, students who don’t do much untimed GMAT Verbal practice often find it difficult to increase their Verbal scores. Here’s why. When taking the GMAT exam, we have about 1 minute and 48 seconds to answer each of the 36 Verbal questions. Accordingly, when practicing GMAT Verbal timed, people usually give themselves about two minutes or less per question. The issue is that two minutes or less isn’t enough time to learn to answer a Verbal question.

When answering a Verbal practice question, we have to learn to apply concepts and strategies we’ve recently learned and carefully analyze the question choice by choice. In the beginning, doing all these things effectively will take longer than two minutes. In fact, doing them can take 15 minutes or more.

So, if we practice timed, we won’t do these things well, and we won’t learn to do them well. Rather, we’ll rush through answering the question. Even if we get it correct, we won’t have developed the Verbal skills we need for achieving our score goals.

Practicing untimed is essential to GMAT Verbal success. On the other hand, if we practice untimed at first, we’ll give ourselves time to learn to take the steps that lead to success.  

Tip 3: Achieve High Accuracy Before Practicing Timed

We can score in the upper 40s on GMAT Quant by getting two-thirds of the Quant questions correct. However, to score 38 on Verbal, we need to get around 75 percent of the Verbal questions correct. To score 35 on Verbal, we need to get over two-thirds of the questions correct. And to score 40+, we need to get at least around 80 percent of the questions correct.

So, to prepare to achieve a high Verbal section score, when practicing Verbal, we have to achieve high accuracy. In fact, ideally, we’d achieve accuracy close to 100 percent on easy, over 90 percent on medium, and over 70 percent on hard Verbal questions. We need to achieve such high accuracy on medium and hard questions because, if we’re scoring high on GMAT Verbal, we’ll see only medium and hard questions.

To achieve high accuracy when practicing, we can do a few things. One of them is to give ourselves time to develop skill by practicing untimed. Another is to stick with each question until we’re virtually certain we know which choice is correct. In other words, when answering practice questions, our first priority is to do whatever it takes for as long as it takes to achieve high accuracy. Once we’re achieving high accuracy untimed, we can work on speeding up to test pace.

Also, after answering practice questions, we can review questions we missed to determine what caused us to have trouble with those questions, such as knowledge gaps or execution problems. Then, we can address the issues we find, so that going forward we get similar questions correct.

Achieving High Accuracy Takes Care of a Lot

Shooting for high accuracy when practicing Verbal takes care of a lot. After all, when we shoot for high accuracy, we naturally focus on what matters for GMAT Verbal mastery. Most obviously, shooting for high accuracy when practicing prepares us to achieve high accuracy when we take the GMAT. However, there are other benefits as well. One benefit is that, in achieving high accuracy when practicing, we’ll reduce test anxiety by becoming confident that we’re ready to answer any Verbal question.

A second is that, in the process of achieving high accuracy, we’ll fill knowledge and skill gaps. Often, test-takers who achieve decent but not high accuracy when practicing score lower than they expected to on the Verbal section on test day. This type of outcome occurs because the knowledge or skill gaps that caused the test-taker not to get certain questions correct when practicing end up mattering a lot on test day. So, filling knowledge and skill gaps can help us to more reliably achieve our score goals.

Finally, shooting for high accuracy when practicing can make us fast at GMAT Verbal. The reason why is that much of what makes us fast at GMAT Verbal is precision, and in shooting for high accuracy when practicing, we learn to be precise. After all, in order to achieve high accuracy, we need to be precise. So, often, when students ask how to get faster at GMAT Verbal, it is suggested to shoot for higher accuracy when practicing.

So, we can see that shooting for high accuracy when practicing is a powerful way to master GMAT Verbal.

Tip 4: To Be Fast, Be Precise

Often people want to know how to speed up to complete the Verbal section of the GMAT on time. There are a number of ways to do so. To see how being precise helps us to be fast in GMAT Verbal, let’s consider how precision can affect how quickly we answer a Critical Reasoning (CR) question. Suppose, in answering a CR question, we quickly read the passage without noting key details or precisely identifying the elements of the argument. Then, we read the question and answer choices quickly without understanding exactly what they say.

You can see that we may end up going through the choices repeatedly because we won’t be sure what is correct or incorrect, since we don’t have everything clear. In other words, because we weren’t precise, it could take a long time to answer the question.

On the other hand, if we read the passage more carefully, precisely identify the elements of the argument, and make sure that we understand exactly what the question and answer choices say, we’ll answer the question more quickly. Why? Well, by being more precise, we’ll be better equipped to decide which choice is correct because we’ll have a more precise understanding of what is going on in the question.

Of course, what this example illustrates applies in Sentence Correction and Reading Comprehension as well. In general, even though being precise may seem to take longer, it actually helps us answer GMAT Verbal questions faster.

Tip 5: Don’t Focus on What GMAT Verbal Did in the Past

Often, GMAT Verbal tips and tricks involve “what the GMAT does.” For example, someone might say, “In a Critical Reasoning question about a city, information about another city is not relevant to the argument. That’s what the GMAT does.” Or someone might say, “In Sentence Correction, a pronoun referring to a possessive noun is incorrect. That’s what the GMAT does.”

Here’s the thing though: It’s true that the GMAT has done both of the things just mentioned. However, it’s also true that the GMAT has also done the opposite of those things. In other words, information about a city has been relevant in a Critical Reasoning question about another city, and a pronoun referring to a possessive noun has been considered correct in Sentence Correction.

So, what’s going on here? What’s going on is that, when people talk about “what the GMAT does,” they are often talking about what the GMAT did in the past. The issue is that what the GMAT did in the past isn’t necessarily what the GMAT will do on your test. This fact isn’t surprising since language is flexible, and what doesn’t work in one context may work in another. Furthermore, there are many ways GMAT Verbal questions can work. So, the Verbal questions you see on test day could be rather different from any past Verbal questions.

The takeaway here is the following. If your Verbal GMAT prep is too focused on what went on in past GMAT questions, you may get false impressions of what’s incorrect or correct. Also, you may not learn what you need to know to correctly answer the Verbal questions on your GMAT.

So, what should you do instead?

What to Do Instead

You can certainly learn from those questions, and some patterns that appear in past questions can be good to know. The point is that you’ll get better results by learning general, logical ideas that apply to answering any Verbal question than you’ll get by focusing on memorizing many specific patterns from past Verbal questions. For example, in SC, focusing on the fact that the word “having” appeared in incorrect choices in some past questions probably won’t do you much good. In contrast, learning the basics of how subject-verb agreement works in standard written English may prove valuable on test day.

Tip 6: Learn to Create Your Own GMAT Verbal Explanations

As you’re preparing for the Verbal section, you’ll read many answer explanations, and reading explanations can be helpful. However, reading other people’s explanations for the Verbal questions you see will get you only so far. In fact, there are GMAT students read literally hundreds of explanations without achieving increases in their Verbal section scores. Why? Because every Verbal question is different. So, you could carefully study many explanations and not master GMAT Verbal because you’ll see new questions to which the explanations you’ve studied don’t apply.

So, to really master GMAT Verbal, you have to learn to create your own explanations. In fact, in preparing for GMAT Verbal, your goal is essentially to learn to explain Verbal questions choice by choice. After all, to get Verbal questions correct consistently, you need to be able to articulate exactly why each choice in a question is incorrect or correct.

So, don’t be satisfied if you get Verbal questions correct but are not able to fully explain what is going on in them. Work on learning to explain Verbal questions as an expert would. Some students even type up thorough explanations for practice questions.

To learn to create your own explanations, read every component of each question carefully, and ask questions such as the following:

• What do I need to see to get this question correct?
• Why exactly is this choice incorrect?
• What exactly is the effect of this choice?

Then, using your concept knowledge, what you’ve learned from explanations, and careful choice-by-choice analysis, explain all the key aspects of the question.

By learning to fully explain questions, you’ll position yourself to rock GMAT Verbal on test day.

Tip 7: To Improve Your GMAT Verbal Score, Improve Execution

One powerful and relatively simple way to improve your GMAT Verbal score is to improve your execution in answering questions. You’d be amazed at how much of a difference improving execution can make. You may think that the only way to increase your Verbal score is to do something difficult or involved. However, while you can certainly increase your Verbal score by doing something difficult or involved, you can also increase your score significantly just by doing basic things better.

For instance, in Reading Comprehension questions, incorrect answer choices are often half right and half wrong. So, if you read only the beginning of a choice, you could easily decide that an incorrect choice is correct because you’ve failed to read the part of the choice that is not correct. In fact, test-takers choose incorrect RC answer choices for this reason all the time. So, by simply executing better by reading RC answer choices in their entirety, you can avoid making a common misstep.

For another example, in a Critical Reasoning question, there can be an incorrect choice that does the opposite of what the correct answer must do. At the same time, such a choice can be relevant to the argument in the question. So, if you lose track of what the question is asking, you could easily choose such an opposite choice. Test-takers often make this type of error. Of course, here again, by executing better, making sure that you answer the question asked, you can avoid making a common mistake and get the question correct.

Some other aspects of good execution are paying attention to the non-underlined portions of sentences in Sentence Correction questions and noticing details of Critical Reasoning passages, for example.

Simple Improvements Lead to a Higher Score

You can see that the types of moves we’re talking about here are not super hard to make. You don’t need to have special knowledge or amazing skills to, for example, read the question stem carefully. At the same time, these moves are very powerful. They can save you from making mistakes and lead to a significantly higher GMAT Verbal score. So, regardless of your current skill level or whether you’re a native English speaker, if you’re wondering how to improve in GMAT Verbal, it’s likely that you can score higher by simply improving execution, even in basic ways.

Tip 8: Don’t Guess Between the Last Two Choices

One of the most common pitfalls people encounter when preparing for GMAT Verbal is the urge to guess between the last two choices of a Verbal practice question. What happens is that a student eliminates three out of five answer choices relatively easily and is left with two that are harder to choose between. Then, having trouble deciding which is correct, the student basically gives up and guesses. Taking this approach can seriously undermine the effectiveness of our GMAT Verbal practice, and here’s why.

To get GMAT Verbal questions correct, we have to learn to choose between the last two choices. In fact, we could say that the GMAT Verbal game is all about choosing between the last two choices. After all, the other three choices are generally relatively easy to eliminate. So, most of what we do in answering Verbal questions is directed at choosing between the infamous last two choices.

Accordingly, if, when practicing GMAT Verbal, we guess between the last two choices, then we’re skipping what’s possibly the most important step in answering a Verbal question. In other words, if we guess between the last two choices, we’re almost not even practicing. We’re certainly not practicing doing what we need to do to master GMAT Verbal, and we’ll likely see little progress.

So, the next of my GMAT Verbal section tips is, don’t guess between the last two choices when practicing! Instead, expect it to be hard to choose between the last two choices, and stick with the question until you’ve figured out how to choose between them. By figuring that out, you’ll be learning to do what it takes to achieve your GMAT Verbal score goal.

If we guess between the last two choices, we’re almost not even practicing.

Tip 9: Treat GMAT Verbal Questions with Respect

This tip might sound funny to you, but the GMAT is a pretty sophisticated test. After all, it’s an entrance exam for graduate business school. The thing is, people often don’t treat GMAT Verbal as sophisticated. Rather, they seek to answer the questions using hacks or simple approaches that don’t fit the sophistication of the test. They may even choose Verbal answers by simply considering what sounds or feels right. In such cases, test-takers aren’t treating GMAT Verbal questions with respect. Rather, they’re acting as if GMAT Verbal questions are hackable or don’t require much in terms of reasoning. And the outcome of their acting that way is that they have trouble achieving their Verbal score goals.

Think about it: You wouldn’t treat GMAT Quant questions that way. You wouldn’t choose an answer to a Rates question by just going with what feels right. Rather, you’d do the math necessary for confidently choosing one of the choices.

So, a key part of mastering GMAT Verbal is treating the questions with respect. See them as sophisticated rather than things you can game without thinking much. Expect them to be challenging, and expect to have to use fairly sophisticated reasoning to answer them correctly. You’ll see how adopting such a view of Verbal questions helps you to do what it takes to master GMAT Verbal.

Tip 10: Foster a Growth Mindset

One more thing we can do to master the GMAT is foster a growth mindset. A growth mindset is a mindset that we can develop ourselves and improve our basic skills. Such a mindset can help us to master GMAT Verbal by giving us confidence that, whatever our current Verbal skill level, we can develop strong Verbal skills and achieve our score goals.

To foster a growth mindset, you can consider other things you’ve learned to do, and thus give yourself reason to believe that you can develop your GMAT Verbal skills, too. You can also consider cases of people who made substantial GMAT Verbal score increases. After all, they are people and you’re a person. So, it stands to reason that you can achieve something similar to what they achieved.