I understand that this person’s test date has passed, but I wanted to share some tips for things you can do to improve your verbal score in a short amount of time!

The good news is that Verbal generally relies on less content and more strategy than does the Quant section. Of course, on the verbal section you do need a good command of English and a strong vocabulary. However, even test-takers who know more than 75% of the vocabulary words do tend to miss Text Completion and Sentence Equivalence questions with distressing frequency. Why? Because of a lack of strategy.

The same is true for Reading Comprehension and the shorter Reading Comprehension that is Critical Reasoning.

In this post I will note some things you can do in the short term for “Vocab” questions and in the next post I will talk about Reading Comprehension and then finally Critical Reasoning.

Text Completion (TC) and Sentence Equivalence (SE): First, do a set of 10 TC or SE questions. Before you begin each question note how many of the words in the answer choices that you know and how many you do not know. Fort the questions where you know 60% + of the words, you should get most of those question right! If you are missing questions even though you know 60% + of the words then you need to look to your strategy.
Three things to really concentrate on in terms of strategy:

1) Treat TC and SE as a form of “GRE Critical Reasoning.” At Veritas Prep we refer to it this way because this type of question is about so much more than just a “vocabulary” question. By understanding what the LOGICAL meaning of the sentence is you can anticipate what the meaning of the word in the blank needs to be. Pay particular attention to transition words and, of course, to any words that can allow you to fill in a blank. Too many test takers do not place enough emphasis on this understanding of the logic and the meaning of the sentence.

2) Use Process of Elimination correctly. This means that you focus on the words that you do know before you spend time trying to puzzle out a meaning for the words you do not really know. If you know 3 of 5 words on a single-blank text completion the correct answer should be one of the words that you do know about 60% of the time. So that means in most cases you will not even need to speculate on the words that you do not know. If none of the words that you do know is a good fit for the sentence, THEN you can look to the words that you do not know and start to work on getting an idea of which of the words might be correct.

3) Trust yourself. It does no good for you to practice a great strategy if you are not willing to stick to it on the practice tests and the exam. Commit to using process of elimination: focus on the words you know and only worry about the other unknown answer choices if you must. Be diligent in understanding the logic of the sentence.

4) Study groups of word (i.e. synonyms). It is nice to know the definition of a word. But it is better to know several synonyms for that word. Knowing the definition of a word is like sending a single man out to look for a lost wallet. If he happens to stumble on the wallet you will be very happy. But if you send another 10 people out to systematically search an area there is a better chance you will get your wallet back. Knowing the word “loquacious” is great but knowing 10 other words that mean “talkative” is even better!

You will not be able to do everything that you want to do in a short period of time, like a week. But you can make some positive changes and see some real improvement in your score in a short period of time. Don't feel as if you have no hope because time is short - you always have hope!