GMAT Verbal

Read this article to learn valuable insights I uncovered about the GMAT verbal, including recommendations for three extra-curricular readings that will send your score through the roof.

The GMAT Verbal is where I spent most of my time studying. For whatever reason, I was put in the “regular” (as opposed to “honors”) English track when I entered 9th grade. This may have played a part in my perception that my verbal skills were a weakness. Perhaps as a result, from ages 14-18, I never spent any time reading or writing, and even in college I did as little as possible. So naturally I never got any better!

However, in October 2005 I decided I wanted to go to business school. I was living in Shanghai at the time, doing some interesting work for a leading distributor of luxury bathroom fixtures. I had also started a small business exporting electronic massage chairs back to the U.S. Between these roles and my 3.5+ GPA as an economics major at UC Berkeley, I figured I would have decent shot at some top programs.

At the same time, I really felt like an outsider to the whole process of applying to the MBA programs. I really never knew anybody who had gone to business school, so I didn’t know where to turn for advice on taking the GMAT, writing essays, getting letters of recommendation written, and all the rest of it.

At that time, I decided that if I was going to get into business school, and excel after I got in, then I should develop a ferocious reading habit. I didn’t even know what was on the GMAT at this point. But I figured, if its a good test of what you really know about the world, then reading a lot will help.

It did. From October 2005 to March 2006, when I took the test, I read 35 books, the longest one being the Prize at 1000+ pages. This was the foundation of my GMAT studying, and underlies the basic principle I applied to Mastering the GMAT. There is no better way to excel at the GMAT verbal sections than simply reading a lot. And work on speed reading too. Tim Ferriss has a few slides on speed reading in this manifesto that I highly recommend. Actually, I recommend his entire lifestyle, but that’s another matter.

You don’t have to read as much as I did–you probably won’t have time unless you learn a bit of speed reading or start working few hours (I did both). But you should start reading A LOT more than you do now about six months before this test. When you are doing all this extra reading, keep a small notebook in which you write down all the words you don’t know, and go look them up from time to time. You can just type “Define:word” in google and it will give you the definition of whatever word you want. Dramatically increasing your reading is the number one piece of GMAT verbal advice I can give. It’s also the best life advice too, but that’s not what you came here for.

Make this reading fun with material you enjoy. But also include at least a few non-fiction books about a subject that really interests you. These will help you get used to reading for the content, not just the style. This will be very important when you start reading books about grammar, logic and critical reasoning later in the program.

I posted reviews of the books I read in 2006 to my main blog. My all-time top non-fiction choices: The Prize, Fabric of the Cosmos, Against the Gods, Origin of Wealth, Complexity, the Discoverers and Web of Life. If you read one of these books all the way through and not change your world view, please contact me.

So for the first 4 months of the program, reading more was all I did in terms of studying for the GMAT. With about two months to go before the test, back in the US now, I decided to turn my newfound thirst for reading material on the GMAT test guides. I started with Cracking the GMAT from the Princeton Review because it was the first book on the subject I could find. Once I had done this, with all its practice questions, I went to the public library and got the Kaplan GMAT Book.

It was at this point that I realized that both books were essentially teaching the same principles for doing well on this test, and I felt like in many cases it was a cop-out. They seemed to be emphaszing methods of learning the material that would take the minimal possible effort, rather than those that would lead to the most possible retention. It may be that the average GMAT test taker is actually just looking to expend the minimum possible effort. But I was looking to do MUCH better than average. And so are you.

For example, Kaplan and Princeton Review both cover “GMAT logic” as if it were some alien kind of reasoning, seemingly suggesting that you just learn how the test writers use logic just to appease them. But we are talking about a system of analytical reasoning that lies at the very foundations of western knowledge. This is something worth knowing, I thought, and the GMAT is the perfect excuse for me to start learning it.

So I again went to the public library and found a book called, “Logic Made Easy: How to Know When Language Deceives You.” I loved the title. What are GMAT test writers trying to do more than anything else, on every single question? They are looking for ways to trick you into intentionally picking the wrong answer. And your lack of a solid understanding of the principles of logic is the easiest way to catch you. However, once you’ve read this book, you’ll laugh at some of the inane tricks they try to pull on you–some of the same tricks that were killing you in the practice tests: obvious in hindsight, but impossible to sight during the test.

If there’s one thing that GMAT test writer’s love to take advantage of, its the fact that humans do not have an intuitive grasp of statistics. It’s not our fault, our species grew up on the pleistocene savannah’s of East Africa, where a fight or flight strategy dominated the types of analytical brain functioning required to really digest statistical data. But we do have it in us, if we can just learn to coax it out.

A good example of our lacking in this area is in problems like this: A certain rare disease appears in 1 out of every 10,000 people. A test for this disease exists that is accurate 99.9% of the time–that is, 1 of every 1000 people will get a false positive test. How likely are you to have this disease given that you’ve test positive?

When researchers showed a question like this to a large sample of doctors, the majority thought you were 99.9% likely to have the disease. In reality, however, 10 people from any sample of 10,000 will get false positives, while only 1 in 10,000 will get a true positive. So you’re likelihood of actually having this disease, given that you test positive, is 1/11. How can a test that is 99.9% accurate be wrong 90% of the time? It just doesn’t make intuitive sense. And it makes GMAT test writers job so easy.

Fortunately, you can fight back. In my stats class at Berkeley we were assigned to read “How to Lie with Statistics,” a classic text from the 1960s about how easy it is to be deceived with statistical falacies. This is a fabulous book for your GMAT preparations. It is only about 120 pages long, with big type and lots of cartoons. You can devour it in one long sitting, or maybe two sessions at the most. Once you have these common tricks of deception under your belt, the GMAT test takers pathetic attempts will become laughable. Although the probability and statistics formally falls under the math section, the use of these tricks appears equally in the verbal.

The last major piece of extra-curricular GMAT verbal reading I read was the most boring of the three, I’ll be honest. However, I truly believe that Crtical Thinking: An Introduction to Analytical Reading and Reasoning did more to help me reach the 97th percentile on GMAT Verbal than any other resource I used. This is the textbook that the test writers used when they themselves were first learning the material behind the sentence correction, reading comprehension, and critical reasoning sections of the GMAT.

You don’t think these test writers learned it from Kaplan and Princeton Review, do you? No, they went to college, and used textbooks, just like you would for any other subject. Go get this book–or textbooks for other subjects that are casuing you trouble–and spend a few days really working through the problems. Your score will improve dramatically.

One last note: if you are going to limit yourself to the GMAT guidebooks in your studying, you should really invest in the Manhattan GMAT Subject Guides for those areas where you are weakest. I learned some valuable insights and strategies from these guides, particularly on the critical reasoning section. Unfortunately they don’t come with practice questions, but rather reference specific questions from the Official Guide for GMAT Review.

As promised, there are no secret tricks or shortcuts to true knowledge here. Just advice for people who are willing to work harder to beat everybody else.