hi i'm erica one of the senior curriculum managers here at magoosh and a gmat expert and in today's
video i'm going to give you three solid tips to help you get a 40 plus on the verbal section
let's jump right in my first tip for scoring high on the gmat verbal section is to prioritize
your weakest question type now the reason for this is that the algorithm on the gmat works
across an entire section so every single quant question is going to help determine the level
for every other quant question and every single verbal question is going to help determine the
level for every other verbal question so that means that the test isn't going to give you
one difficulty level for sentence correction one difficulty level for critical reasoning and one
difficulty level for reading comprehension it's going to give you one difficulty level for verbal
so that means if you're performing significantly worse in one of the question types it's going
to pull down your difficulty level for the other question types as well
now this typically manifests in missing fewer questions overall which seems like a good thing
but actually what it means is that your difficulty has been pulled down almost artificially in these
other question types resulting in a lower score overall so takeaway here focus on bringing your
weakest question type up and then once it's at the same level as your other question types
work on bringing them all up together and this will result in the highest score tip number
two for a high gmat verbal score is to base your timing strategy on question type now on the verbal
section you average out to just under two minutes per question but that doesn't mean that you should
be dedicating just under two minutes per question to every single question on the verbal section
in fact that's definitely too much time for some questions and definitely too little time for
others a better call is to have preset time limits or time estimates for the different question types
so let's start with sentence correction since sentence correction is the question type with
the least text and the least comprehension those are typically going to be your time savers
i recommend somewhere between a minute and a minute and a half per question
on sentence correction critical reasoning on the other hand is going to be one of your time eaters
so because each of these questions has its own passage and its own scenario to process these
typically take a little bit more time i typically recommend somewhere in the realm of two and a half
to three minutes per question and then reading comprehension is gonna be right in the middle
at two minutes per question however this is going to be a little bit trickier to time because some
of that two minutes per question needs to go to the passage before you even get to the questions
so my recommended timing breakdown here is to spend half of that time on the passage and then
half of that time on the questions so a really good move here is to get familiar with about
how long a shorter three question passage is and about how long a longer four question passages
so just by sight you can tell whether you should be spending three or four minutes on the passage
then once you do that you've got one minute for each of the remaining questions
now it's worth noting here that this doesn't mean you should be looking at the clock after
every single question in fact that's actually going to slow you down so these are really useful
in practicing getting these timings down but you're going to want to have kind of an internal
clock to be able to tell whether you've spent too long or too short on a given question let me know
if you'd like a video on how to time across the section as a whole and when you actually should
look at the clock because this is a strategy that a lot of test takers don't have down and if you're
interested in learning more about why it's so important to nail down your timing strategy check
out my video on how to avoid an average gmat score where getting your timing strategy right was one
of my top five tips and then my third and final tip for scoring high on the gmat verbal section
is to base your question strategy on question type and specifically to have one strategy for sentence
correction and one strategy for critical reasoning and reading comprehension so let's start with
sentence correction on sentence correction one of the very best moves is to use the answer choices
to your advantage by looking at the differences between them you're going to be able to see the
possible things that the question could be testing or the possible things that will either make an
answer right or make it wrong so using the answer choices is actually going to help you get through
that problem faster and focus your energies on the other hand on critical reasoning and reading
comprehension the answer choices are full of traps and mind games that the test maker is playing with
you to try to get you to consider things that you would never think of otherwise things that
you would never come up with if this was a fill in the blank test so instead of letting the test
maker play those mind games with you instead don't look at the answer choices and predict your own
answer first now this seems like it's going to take significantly more time but because it
helps you trust yourself someone who's on your side rather than the test maker someone who is
actively trying to trick you it's actually going to help you have a road map for dealing with those
answer choices and get through those traps more effectively more efficiently and more confidently
and those are three of my top tips to help score a 40 plus on the gmat verbal section now of course
all of my tips for overall on the gmat are going to help you on the verbal section specifically
so i really recommend checking out in particular my video on never making the same mistake twice
for one of my other top tips on how to score high on gmat verbal but also on gmat quant let
us know by liking if this video helped you and subscribe for more videos for me and the other
experts at magoosh and as always if you have suggestions for future videos or questions
leave them in the comments below thanks for watching and i'll talk to you soon