More in-depth on Verbal or leave it alone??

[jn3792]

I took the GMAT over 5 years ago and now need to take it again. Originally, I scored in the 96th percentile on the verbal section and 65th on quant. After some study, I just took my first GMAT Prep test and scored in the 95th percentile on Verbal (I think my score was 42) and 79th percentile on Quant (score of 46).

My good scores on the verbal make me a bit uneasy, because I don't know many of the grammatical rules for Sentence Correction and I don't know the specific Critical Reasoning strategies. Somehow I guess I just have a natural aptitude there.

My question is - at this point, is there the possibility that it would actually screw me up to start studying more in-depth on SC and Critical Reasoning? I hate to just continually go on 'feel' with these questions, but my test date is in exactly 4 weeks and I think learning a lot of the rules at this point might hurt me in the short term. Any thoughts from you SC and Critical Reasoning geniuses?

[xperience]

Originally Posted by jn3792

I took the GMAT over 5 years ago and now need to take it again. Originally, I scored in the 96th percentile on the verbal section and 65th on quant. After some study, I just took my first GMAT Prep test and scored in the 95th percentile on Verbal (I think my score was 42) and 79th percentile on Quant (score of 46).

My good scores on the verbal make me a bit uneasy, because I don't know many of the grammatical rules for Sentence Correction and I don't know the specific Critical Reasoning strategies. Somehow I guess I just have a natural aptitude there.

My question is - at this point, is there the possibility that it would actually screw me up to start studying more in-depth on SC and Critical Reasoning? I hate to just continually go on 'feel' with these questions, but my test date is in exactly 4 weeks and I think learning a lot of the rules at this point might hurt me in the short term. Any thoughts from you SC and Critical Reasoning geniuses?

I guess rather than giving you advice, I would like tyo ask you what you have done to get to the 95th percentile. I mean what could be the strategy for someone like me to reach that pedestal?

Secondly, for advice on SC, well this is something that you can improve with a few days of hard work. Pick up the latest edition (4th edition) of Manhattan sentence correction SC and browse through the 310 pages in it. All said and done, that should suffice your quest for inderstanding the SCs rather than feel for it.

For critical reasoning, I believe since you are already there, you need not delve much into the basics but just try and solve more questions for practice sake. You could go through the forumsfor this or buy the OG12 and go through it. That should be sufficient.
What you could do to gain that extra edge could be to go a little in-depth on quant and bring it up to somewhre around 85+%ile.

[mad_dy]

Hi jn3792,

You can take Mock tests from thebigcd.com (or a lot of other resources are also available online) to know your strengths and weaknesses & then make a study plan accordingly.

Hope tht helps.

mad_dy

[mad_dy]

Hi jn3792,

I realised that you would have completed your exam by now. Hope you did well.

Nevertheless, others who are in his position can take help from my previous post.

Regards,
mad_dy