GMAT Strategy

Brian@VeritasPrep wrote:I'm glad you wrote about this, mrinal2100 - being able to narrow the choices down to two, but then not doing much better than 50% from there, is a pretty common frustration for students on the verbal section. Here's one reason why:

-By the time you've narrowed the answer choices down to two, four of the last five sentences you've read are incorrect answer choices - it's been a long time since you've read the question itself and the stimulus

-Much like sushi restaurants will give you ginger slices for between bites, or wine tastings offer soda crackers for between wines, to "cleanse your palate" of aftertaste, you may need to clear your mind of the "aftertaste" of the irrelevant information that you just read

-So, if you refresh the question as a new question with only two answers, you'll be much more able to focus on the important characteristics of the question and the remaining answer choices. Just re-read the important components of the question ("my job is to strengthen the argument that the government should raise taxes..."), and then look at the remaining answer choices as though they're new

-One added benefit to this strategy is that, often times when you pick incorrectly between the remaining answers, you're trying to apply the same thought process to those two as you were able to use to eliminate the other three (for CR questions, those other three are often "out of scope" of the conclusion). With the remaining two, however, it's fairly likely that the difference is not related to your initial thought process (after all, on your first pass you weren't able to eliminate a fourth choice), so a new process is going to be required. By treating that last decision as a new question, you're more likely to be able to adopt a new process, instead of just picking the answer choice that "feels right" based on what you've already read and thought.

Like papgust mentions, it's probably best to practice this new strategy without worrying too much about time, but I'd even argue that it can save you time. Rather than spending 15-20 seconds hemming and hawing over that final decision, if you know that you have a method to get there, you'll spend 10-15 seconds re-reading the question and answer choices, and make a much more decisive choice between the remaining two. It shouldn't cost you any time, and may actually be a bit quicker in the long run. Perhaps more importantly, if you're making confident decisions on questions, you'll approach the next question more confidently, too, and that positive energy will carry over to better pacing and accuracy on the next one.