If you’re planning to take the GMAT to apply to MBA programs, you’re likely aware that, to have a competitive score, you need to score relatively high on the Verbal section. Even if your scores on the other sections of the GMAT are high, business schools want the confirmation that you have management-level verbal reasoning skills that a strong Verbal score provides. So, in this article, I’m going to discuss how to prepare for GMAT Verbal. I’ll cover exactly what you need to know to learn the material, practice effectively, and master the Verbal section.
Here are the topics we'll cover:
Let’s start by discussing what’s at the foundation of GMAT Verbal success, understanding what the Verbal section is all about.
Understanding the GMAT Verbal Game
To prepare for GMAT Verbal effectively, you need to know what you’re dealing with. So, let’s be clear regarding what the Verbal section is. GMAT Verbal is a fairly sophisticated reasoning game. Here’s why understanding that matters.
It’s easy to get the impression that GMAT Verbal is a game of using hacks to find correct answers. For instance, many GMAT test-takers have heard of the strategy of eliminating “extreme” choices to answer Verbal questions.
Let’s think about something though. The GMAT is an entrance exam for graduate business school. Does it make sense that you could score high on the GMAT exam and get into a top business school by doing something gimmicky like eliminating extreme answer choices? No, right? The truth is that, since GMAT Verbal is a fairly sophisticated reasoning game, gimmicky Verbal strategies will get you only so far.
So, to score high on GMAT Verbal, you need to focus on something other than learning gimmicky strategies. You need to develop skill in doing the type of sophisticated reasoning the section tests.
PRO TIP:
To prepare for GMAT Verbal effectively, treat it as a fairly sophisticated reasoning game.
Let’s now discuss what the Verbal section of the GMAT tests in more detail so we know exactly what skills we need to develop.
What the GMAT Verbal Section Tests
The GMAT Verbal Reasoning section tests the following skills:
Comprehension of Written Material – To have the information necessary for answering Verbal questions, you need to understand what you read.
Logical Analysis – To get GMAT Verbal questions correct, you need to be skilled in analyzing statements and seeing their implications and in making logical connections between facts or ideas.
Noticing Details – Noticing key details in passages, questions, and answer choices is essential for GMAT Verbal success.
Execution – To perform at a high level in GMAT Verbal, you need to execute well to answer questions efficiently and arrive at correct answers consistently.
Accordingly, when preparing for GMAT Verbal, much of what you’ll be doing is developing skill in comprehension of written material, logical analysis, noticing details, and execution.
KEY FACT:
GMAT Verbal tests skill in comprehension of written material, logical analysis, noticing details, and execution.
Now that we understand what the Verbal section tests, let’s discuss the best way to prepare for it.
The Best Way to Prepare for GMAT Verbal
People often try to master GMAT Verbal by getting the Official Guide or another resource and just answering practice questions. However, that approach often leaves test-takers without the results they want and wondering how to achieve their Verbal score goals. So, what’s a better Verbal study plan?
The most effective way to prepare for GMAT Verbal is to master one question type at a time. To master a question type, you can take the following steps:
Learn Concepts – For each GMAT Verbal question type, there are concepts you can use to get the questions correct. For instance, learning about the parts of arguments can help you to master Critical Reasoning Weaken questions. Likewise, learning about structural markers can help ensure that you get Reading Comprehension Primary Purpose questions correct.
Learn Strategies – For each type of GMAT Verbal question, there are one or more strategies you can use to answer the questions efficiently and correctly.
Practice – To learn to apply the concepts and strategies you’ve learned and execute effectively, you need to practice by answering questions of each type until you’re getting them correct consistently.
PRO TIP:
The most effective way to prepare for GMAT Verbal is to master it one topic at a time by learning concepts and strategies and then practicing.
You can learn Verbal concepts and strategies from a good GMAT prep resource or a tutor.
Then, practicing will take you from just knowing about GMAT Verbal to being skilled in getting questions correct. Accordingly, knowing how to practice for GMAT Verbal effectively is essential to GMAT Verbal success. So, let’s next discuss how best to practice GMAT Verbal.
How to Practice GMAT Verbal Effectively
How you practice will make or break the results of your GMAT Verbal preparation. In fact, the way people practice is often the weak link in their test prep that keeps them from achieving their target scores. So, how can you make your practice a strong aspect of your prep and get the results you want? Let’s see.
Practice Untimed at First
When practicing each GMAT Verbal question type, you’ll get the best results by practicing untimed at first. GMAT students often get the impression that always practicing with a timer works better than practicing untimed. However, having seen what has worked, and what has not, for hundreds of GMAT students, I can say with confidence that starting off practicing untimed works much better. Here’s why.
Answering Verbal Reasoning questions correctly involves applying concepts and strategies and carefully analyzing passages, questions, and answer choices. When you’re first learning to answer GMAT Verbal questions, the approximately two minutes per Verbal question you’ll have on test day just isn’t enough time to do all those things effectively and become skilled. So, if you do all your practice timed, you’ll likely find it virtually impossible to improve your GMAT Verbal ability.
In contrast, if you start off practicing untimed, you’ll have time to apply newly learned concepts and strategies and learn to get questions correct.
So, one of my most powerful GMAT Verbal tips is simply to start off practicing untimed.
PRO TIP:
For best results from your GMAT Verbal preparation, start off practicing untimed.
Analyze Every Answer Choice Thoroughly
A key aspect of getting GMAT Verbal questions correct is telling trap choices from correct answers. Accordingly, to master GMAT Verbal, you need to learn to analyze answer choices. So, when you’re practicing, much of what you need to be doing is thoroughly analyzing every answer choice you see.
In fact, you can treat each answer choice you see as a question to be answered. Your answer for each choice can be a clear explanation for why that choice is incorrect or correct.
PRO TIP:
When practicing for GMAT Verbal, analyze every answer choice thoroughly and explain why it’s incorrect or correct.
Learn to Be Aware of Whether You’ve Solidly Supported Your Answer
A key challenge of GMAT Verbal questions is that of being aware of whether you have solidly supported your answer. In Quant, we don’t have this challenge since it’s pretty clear when we’ve done all the work necessary for answering a Quant question. However, in Verbal, you can easily decide that you have support for your answer before you really do.
For instance, an answer choice could have wording similar to wording in the passage or just seem right for some vague reason. So, seeing that wording or having that vague reason, you could decide that you’ve done the work necessary for answering the question. However, neither of those things is really solid support for an answer.
Solid support for an answer will involve clear, logical reasons why one choice is correct and the others are not that you could explain to someone else. To become skilled in GMAT Verbal, you need to learn to be aware of whether you’ve found that type of support.
Before you develop that awareness, you may find that you miss many Verbal questions because you settle on a choice before you find solid support. Once you develop that awareness, you can stick with each question until you have solid support for your answer and get the vast majority of Verbal questions correct.
PRO TIP:
To master GMAT Verbal, develop awareness of whether you’ve solidly supported your answer.
Don’t Guess Between the Last Two Choices
Speaking of solid support, if you choose an answer by guessing, you clearly don’t have solid support for your choice. Nevertheless, people practicing GMAT Verbal often guess between the last two choices after eliminating the other three.
Don’t do that!
If you guess between the last two choices when doing a Verbal practice question, you may as well have never done the question. Why? Because choosing between the last two choices is a key part of the GMAT Verbal game.
It’s often relatively easy to eliminate three choices. Then, choosing between the last two is the final important step in which whether you’ll get the question correct is determined. So, if you just guess between the last two choices, you won’t be practicing the key thing you need to learn to master GMAT Verbal.
So, if you eliminate three choices, have two left, and feel stumped, my best advice is, don’t guess. Stick with the question and seek to see what you need to see to choose one choice over the other. Figure out how to find solid support for your choice and get the question correct.
PRO TIP:
When practicing GMAT Verbal, don’t guess between the last two choices.
Emphasize Thorough Understanding and High Accuracy
Overall, when practicing GMAT Verbal, emphasize understanding the questions and what makes each choice incorrect or correct, and shoot for high accuracy.
And by high accuracy, I don’t mean just “getting most official questions correct.” You can get 50 percent of Verbal questions correct by just guessing between the last two choices of each question. So, even getting 60 to 70 percent correct is not much better than guessing. Accordingly, to be in control on GMAT Verbal on test day and score relatively high, you need to be able to consistently achieve practice question accuracies along the lines at least of the following:
- 90 percent on easy questions
- 80 percent on medium questions
- 70 percent on hard questions
And, if you want to achieve a top Verbal score, you have to achieve even higher practice accuracies along the lines of the following:
- Close to 100 percent on easy questions
- 90 percent on medium questions
- 80 percent on hard questions
PRO TIP:
Achieving high accuracy on practice questions is a key aspect of effective GMAT Verbal preparation.
So, let’s now discuss ways to achieve high accuracy on GMAT Verbal.
Ways to Improve GMAT Verbal Accuracy
You can increase your accuracy on GMAT Verbal using the following approaches.
Make Sure You Understand What You’re Reading
As we discussed earlier, GMAT Verbal tests comprehension of written material. So, one way to increase your accuracy in GMAT Verbal is to make sure you understand what you’re reading.
You don’t always have to fully process every detail of what you read in a Reading Comprehension passage. At the same time, you do need to understand the passage’s main points.
To perform at a high level in Critical Reasoning, you need to fully understand the passages and their details, the question stems, and every answer choice. In fact, I’ve seen someone’s Critical Reasoning accuracy increase from around 50 percent to over 80 percent in one coaching session just because she started to emphasize fully understanding the passage before she went to the answer choices.
So, make sure that, when you read GMAT Verbal passages, you’re truly understanding what you’re reading and not glossing over key points or filling in gaps in understanding with your own ideas.
If you’re having trouble understanding what you’re reading, one approach you can use to address the issue is the following. Go through passages slower and read them sentence by sentence, moving from one sentence to the next only once you understand what you’ve read so far. Then, you can speed up as you develop better reading skills.
PRO TIP:
You can increase your Verbal accuracy substantially by making sure you’ve understood what you’ve read.
Execute Better
You’d be amazed at how much you can increase your GMAT Verbal score by just executing better. In other words, you can improve your results significantly just by being careful and seeking to perform each step of answering a question properly. Some examples of things you can do to execute better are paying closer attention to details, making sure you answer the question asked, and reading answer choices in their entirety.
PRO TIP:
Doing each little part of answering Verbal questions better can add up to a big score increase.
Increase the Sophistication of Your Thinking
To a large degree, your score on GMAT Verbal will reflect the level of sophistication of the thinking you use when answering the questions. The more sophisticated your thinking, the higher you’ll score.
You can sometimes answer easier Verbal questions using basic thinking or hacks. However, to get harder questions correct and consistently achieve high accuracy, you have to think about the questions in more sophisticated ways. So, a powerful way to increase your accuracy in GMAT Verbal is to increase the sophistication of your thinking about the questions.
Here’s an example that illustrates what I’m talking about. I was working with a student who had strong reading and analytical skills. However, she wasn’t thinking about Verbal questions in sophisticated ways. Instead, she was choosing answers for simplistic reasons. Consequently, even though her basic verbal skills were strong, she wasn’t scoring very high on the Verbal section. However, once she started to think about Verbal questions in more sophisticated ways, her Verbal score jumped to the upper percentiles within a week.
PRO TIP:
To increase your GMAT Verbal accuracy and score, increase the sophistication of the thinking you use when answering questions.
Since increasing the level of sophistication of your thinking is super important, let’s see what constitutes less sophisticated and more sophisticated thinking about Verbal questions.
Examples of Less and More Sophisticated Thinking
An example of less sophisticated thinking about a Critical Reasoning answer choice is considering simply whether the answer choice is relevant to the argument. Sure, in some cases, we can eliminate a choice because it’s irrelevant. However, the fact that a CR answer choice is relevant doesn’t mean it’s correct. After all, a choice can be relevant but not do what the correct answer must do. So, considering whether choices are relevant will get us only so far in CR.
More sophisticated thinking about Critical Reasoning answer choices would involve considering their implications. What’s the choice’s relationship with the scenario in the passage? Where does it take things? By thinking about the implications of a choice, we can see much more clearly whether it’s incorrect or correct.
An example of less sophisticated thinking about a Reading Comprehension answer choice is simply comparing the wording of the choice with the wording of the passage to see whether they match. More sophisticated thinking is considering whether statements in the passage support the choice logically even if the choice says something new that the passage doesn’t say.
PRO TIP:
Less sophisticated thinking about Verbal questions often involves looking for what seems to match whereas more sophisticated thinking involves considering logical implications and connections.
Avoid Trap Choices by Using More Sophisticated Thinking
As I mentioned earlier, getting GMAT Verbal questions correct is to a large extent a matter of telling the difference between trap choices and correct answers. So, here’s something to keep in mind.
Trap choices are designed to seem correct if we’re using thinking that’s relatively unsophisticated. For instance, a Reading Comprehension incorrect choice could be written to sound just like what the passage says. So, if we’re using simplistic thinking and considering only how much a choice resembles the passage, we can easily fall for such a trap. If we’re using more sophisticated thinking, we’ll see that such a choice doesn’t really answer the question asked and avoid choosing it.
So, increasing the level of the sophistication of the thinking we’re using is key to avoiding trap choices.
PRO TIP:
More sophisticated thinking leads to avoiding trap choices.
How to Increase the Level of Sophistication of the Thinking You’re Using
To increase the level of sophistication of the thinking you’re using, as you practice, consider the implications of statements in passages and answer choices. For instance, you can consider which direction an answer choice takes things. Does it mean things are getting better? Getting worse? Increasing? Decreasing? What does the choice indicate?
Also, you can seek to make common sense connections. For instance, if a question is about education and an answer choice is about economic growth, perhaps there’s a logical connection between the two topics that you need to see to answer the question.
In general, ask yourself, “What do I need to see to get this question correct?” and often, answering that question will require some sophisticated thinking.
PRO TIP:
To increase the sophistication of your thinking about Verbal questions, practice considering implications and looking for logical connections.
Identify Reasons Why You Miss Questions and Address Them
A final way you can improve your GMAT Verbal accuracy is to identify why you missed any question you miss and address the issue.
For instance, you may have a gap in concept knowledge. You may have used a flawed strategy. Perhaps, you just didn’t execute carefully enough. So, any time you miss a question, figure out what happened and then address what you found.
If you have a knowledge gap, fill it by reviewing what GMAT Verbal preparation materials say about the topic. If your strategy was flawed, adjust your strategy or learn a new one. If you didn’t execute well enough, figure out how to do better next time.
By addressing the issues that cause you to miss questions, you can get to a point such that you get virtually every question correct.
“By addressing the issues that cause you to miss questions, you can get to a point such that you get virtually every question correct.”
Now, with all this discussion of untimed practice, understanding, and accuracy, you may be wondering about the speed you’ll need to complete the Verbal section on time. So, let’s address speed.
Achieving Speed in GMAT Verbal
One of the major challenges of the Verbal section is time management. Test-takers often have trouble answering questions quickly enough to complete the section on time. So, what can we do to achieve the speed we need?
One key thing to realize is that all the things we’ve talked about so far, such as learning concepts and strategies, untimed practice, sophisticated thinking, and achieving high accuracy, result in speed. The reason is that the main factor that causes speed in GMAT Verbal is skill. Thus, by developing skill by doing the things we’ve been talking about, you’ll develop speed as well. So, through preparing as we’ve been discussing, you’ll likely become fast enough to complete the Verbal section on time.
If you’re consistently achieving high accuracy untimed but still aren’t fast enough, you can look for ways to answer questions more efficiently and speed up. For instance, you can learn how to get through RC passages faster by not fully processing all the details. Or you can learn to answer CR questions faster by being more methodical in how you go through the answer choices.
If your average time per question is 3 minutes, find ways to reduce it to 2:45, then 2:30, and so on. Keep working the time per question down.
Also, you can do timed practice or take practice tests and push yourself to get questions correct quickly.
PRO TIP:
With a combination of continuing to develop your skills, looking for ways to answer questions more efficiently, and doing timed practice, you’ll get to the point of answering Verbal questions at test pace.
Let’s now wrap up our discussion with some general thoughts on mastering GMAT Verbal.
Achieving a High GMAT Verbal Score Can Be a Significant Undertaking
What we’ve seen as we’ve discussed how best to prepare for GMAT Verbal is that mastering GMAT Verbal is not a matter of finding shortcuts or cheat codes. Rather, achieving a high Verbal score requires thorough learning of GMAT Verbal concepts and strategies and developing strong skills. So, you can expect the process of mastering GMAT Verbal to involve significant self-development.
Mastering GMAT Verbal Often Takes Becoming Comfortable With Discomfort
It’s also helpful to be aware that the process of preparing for GMAT Verbal often involves moments of discomfort.
For instance, if you’re pondering a question and three answer choices seem equally correct to you, you may feel pretty uncomfortable about the fact that you aren’t sure what to do next. So, you may feel like just selecting one of those choices and moving on. However, you’ll get much better results by sticking with the question no matter how uncomfortable you feel and fighting your way to the answer.
The truth is that when you feel the most uncomfortable is often also when you’re learning the most. So, learning to be comfortable with discomfort and keep making progress can be a key aspect of your GMAT Verbal success formula.
Effective GMAT Verbal Preparation Works!
As you’re preparing for GMAT Verbal, at times you may wonder whether you’ll ever achieve your goal. So, it’s good to keep in mind that effective GMAT Verbal Verbal preparation works.
In other words, if you learn concepts and strategies, practice, increase the level of sophistication of your thinking, and do the other things discussed in this post, your Verbal score will increase. So, you can be confident that, by preparing effectively, you’ll get results.
Let’s now answer some common questions related to GMAT Verbal preparation.
How Difficult Is GMAT Verbal?
GMAT Verbal is fairly difficult, as we might expect since it’s part of an entrance exam for graduate business school. So, although mastering GMAT Verbal doesn’t require learning many concepts and formulas as mastering GMAT Quant does, many GMAT test-takers still find GMAT Verbal challenging. In fact GMAT students often find the Verbal section the hardest section of the GMAT to master. However, with effective preparation, any business school applicant can improve in GMAT Verbal.
Why Is My GMAT Verbal Score Not Improving?
Effective GMAT Verbal preparation works. So, if you’re preparing for GMAT Verbal and your score isn’t improving, there’s something about the way you’re preparing that isn’t effective.
Often, the reason someone’s GMAT Verbal score isn’t improving is that the person isn’t spending enough time on each practice question to develop strong skills. Other common reasons are use of flawed strategies or misconceptions about how types of Verbal questions work.
The good news is that, by adjusting the way you’re preparing to make it more effective, you can get your Verbal score to increase.
How Can I Ace GMAT Verbal?
To score high on GMAT Verbal, you can do what we’ve discussed in this post:
- Understand the Verbal section of the GMAT and what it tests.
- Focus on one Verbal question type at a time.
- Build a strong foundation by learning concepts and strategies for each question type.
- Practice untimed and focus on understanding, developing skills, and achieving high accuracy, and then work on speeding up to test pace.
- Increase your accuracy by making sure you understand what you’re reading, executing better, increasing the sophistication of your thinking, and addressing issues that cause you to miss questions.
- Be aware that mastering GMAT Verbal can be a significant undertaking that can involve moments of discomfort.
Finally, keep in mind that effective preparation works. So, get pumped to prepare, develop yourself, and get results!
