GMAT® Focus Verbal — What You Should Know in 2024 and Beyond

Welcome to the GMAT® Strategy Podcast. You're here because you believe there's a better way to study for the GMAT® and so do we.

We created the GMAT® Strategy to maximize your results and minimize your efforts so you can get to the fun parts about business school and life as quickly as possible.

My name is Isaac Puglia and I've been teaching GMAT® classes and tutoring privately for the GMAT® for almost a decade and I've achieved a 99th percentile score on the GMAT® and helped thousands of students get into the business schools of their choice.

I'm excited to be a part of your MBA journey since we all at TGS think our world can benefit from the best possible business leaders that we can find.

If this show is bringing you value, please share it with your friends and family who are studying so that together we can make this process as easy and as painless as it can possibly be.

Let's go!

Today we want to talk about GMAT® verbal. This is a section that gives a lot of people a lot of trouble every single year.

There's a brand new version of the GMAT® verbal section because of the brand new edition of the GMAT® that's just come out called GMAT® Focus, and so here's what you need to know in 2024 and beyond.

Number one, what is the verbal section? It's 23 questions in 45 minutes, which is slightly more time per question than we've seen in the past, which is a nice thing.

The section used to be a lot longer, and the way that GMAC — the people who write the GMAT® — have shortened the section is by completely eliminating a question type called sentence correction that used to test grammar.

That's gone. And so for virtually all of us, the prep timeline has been significantly shortened because you don't have to learn or relearn any of the grammar content that folks in the past have had to, which is fantastic by the way.

So the section is designed to test your verbal reasoning skills, and that's a term that the GMAT® defines in a very specific way. We're going to help you understand exactly what that means as we go.

What's Tested on GMAT® Verbal

There's two question types. The first is called critical reasoning. This tests logic. It's not formal logic like you might have learned if you were a philosophy major in undergrad or a rhetoric major or something like that.

It's more of a type of logic where the GMAT® makes its own rules. And we're going to help you figure out exactly what to do about that in a moment. But just so that we don't get bogged down in the details — that's the first type of question you'll see on GMAT® verbal: critical reasoning.

The second type is called reading comprehension, and as expected, this tests your ability to comprehend a reading passage. It's very straightforward once you understand it, but it can be a little bit counterintuitive depending on your reading skills.

Some people can use a very intuitive approach on reading comprehension and get phenomenal results. Other people need a major strategic shift. But it's definitely not rocket science, and we're going to give you a can't-fail approach to reading comprehension in a little bit.

But that's it. Those are the only two types of questions that you're going to see on GMAT® verbal. It's roughly split about half each, but there can be a little bit of variance in how many reading comp you see versus how many critical reasoning you see, just depending on the day and what the algorithm decides to serve you.

How the Section Works

It is adaptive. There's a great deal of strategy involved in how to take a test like the GMAT® because it's scored totally differently than tests you've taken in the past.

Accuracy is not the only thing that determines your score on the GMAT®. So let that blow your mind for a second if you're not familiar with that concept yet.

If you want to understand how it's scored and how you can optimize your strategy, just check out the video on our website — theGMATStrategy.com. It's totally free and in 40 minutes we'll walk you through everything that you need to know about the GMAT® scoring algorithm. This is something that was missing back in the day and it cost many, many months of super hardcore pain and frustration, and we want to save you that.

The punchline of how the GMAT® scoring algorithm works for now is: you can still miss some questions and get an amazing score. It's a situation where you don't need perfection — which we think is really, really great news.

Goal Scores for Verbal

The minimum score for a top school — let's call this a top 10 program in the United States, really worldwide — is going to be around an 80 out of 90 possible points in the verbal section, give or take. 78 is probably doable at most schools, but 80 or better should be your goal from the beginning because we don't want to create friction in the application process.

After 80, it's more of a strategic decision for you personally about which score is going to be easiest for you to move in order to move the overall three-digit score.

Roughly, a one point gain on the quant, the verbal, or the data insights sub-scores is going to translate to about a 10 point gain on the overall score. Now that's in the middle part of the bell curve. As you get to the higher or lower parts of the bell curve, it might take more sub-score points — like one and a half to two — to move the overall three-digit score 10 points.

If you're aiming outside the top 10 or top 20, then you can scale that goal down. A 76 or 75 would be more than sufficient for anything in the top 50. And you could probably get away with a 70+ if you're going outside the top 30 to 50.

Time Management

If you listened to our GMAT® Quant episode from last week, we introduced something called the 1-2-3 rule, and that still applies exactly the same way on GMAT® verbal. It's definitely worth listening to that quant episode. We're not going to rehash the 1-2-3 rule right here because we went into extreme depth in both of those quant episodes.

Having said that, some of your timing issues might be related to your individual strategy for critical reasoning and your individual strategy for reading comp. For critical reasoning and reading comp, the question types are different enough and the strategic approach is different enough that you're going to want to address your specific strategy for each individual question type first, and then deal with your overall section timing.

Critical Reasoning — Deep Dive

We already mentioned that critical reasoning tests logic, but it's a logic where the GMAT® makes its own rules. So a general logic textbook is probably not going to be super helpful on critical reasoning — in fact, it might even be counterproductive. You're going to want to get a GMAT®-specific source of learning on critical reasoning.

There are great books out there that you can engage with. If you have a personal recommendation for a book — something that worked for someone you know well — that's probably a good bet. Pretty much any reputable course or tutor is going to be able to help you have a strong structured approach to critical reasoning.

Two keys to great CR performance:

Key #1 — Know the difference between each CR question type. We like to break it into six different types of critical reasoning questions. Other providers split it up differently — some say nine, some say ten, some say four. The important thing is that you have an approach that's working for you.

The important thing is that you understand how each of those categories is different from the other. To give an example: there's a critical reasoning type called "describe the role" — what a lot of people call boldface questions because they're the only type of CR that has boldface type in the argument. And that's going to be very different from another CR type that we'll call a strengthen-the-argument question.

So a boldface and a strengthen are going to have two totally different approaches. There's going to be some overlap between the skills you need to be great at each one. But it's critically important that you understand how one is different from the other, and how those two are different from the third type, the fourth type, the fifth type.

A good analogy here would be like volleyball and tennis are both sports. But if you try to apply the rules and the strategies that make you a good tennis player to the game of volleyball, some of them probably will translate well — but all of them? Totally no. There are specific things that have to be implemented in the game of volleyball that would be totally nonsensical in a tennis match, and vice versa. And that's exactly the same as these different critical reasoning types.

So if you've been lumping critical reasoning all into one bucket and treating all CR questions the same, that is a missing piece for you that we strongly recommend you address.

Once you learn the difference between each CR type, you must put in the repetitions so that you know them so well you don't have to think about how they're different from one another on an actual test. When you see an assumption CR question on the GMAT®, if you have to think, "Wait, what's my job on an assumption question again?" — you haven't studied it and learned it well enough. You want it to be like a reflex.

Key #2 — A robust review process. A lot of you have learned this the hard way already by just doing a ton of critical reasoning questions, completing a bunch of CR questions without a robust review process. Every year we meet thousands of students who have completed all the verbal questions in the official guide or taken several courses — sometimes worked with private tutors — and their verbal score hasn't gone up. Sometimes it's even gone down.

The purpose of practicing is not completing practice problems. The purpose of practicing is to improve your skills. And so you want to be making meaningful gains from each individual question that you do.

Reading Comprehension — Deep Dive

Reading comprehension is a totally different world from critical reasoning. It does not test logic. It tests just reading comprehension.

You can gauge the difficulty level of the reading comp you're looking at by how difficult it is for you to comprehend the passage. If you're having a tough time reading the passage — you feel like it's complicated, it's difficult, you're losing focus — then the questions associated with that passage will also be difficult.

The algorithm will choose your reading comp questions — three for a short passage (meaning you don't have to scroll to see the whole thing on the screen), or four for a long passage (meaning you have to scroll to see the entire text). It will choose those three or four questions at a pre-selected difficulty level, and then it will average your performance across the reading comp and then adapt accordingly.

If your reading speed is slow, that's the bottleneck. If you're a really slow reader or reading comp is a weakness for you, then you might want to consider giving away one question per passage on reading comp. This won't be a game-changing strategy, but it can be helpful if you're starting as a very slow reader.

If that's you, work on your reading speed over the long term so that you eventually get fast enough to theoretically answer all the questions.

Reading speed is like a muscle. The more you read, the stronger that's going to get. The best time to start working on your reading speed is 20 years ago. The second best time is today.

Start with 10 or 15 minutes a day. Read anything in English — anything that you like. You don't have to read super academic sources from the beginning, although that's good to scale up as your reading speed and ability improve. If you have to start with grade one reading level stuff, start with grade one and scale up.

What we recommend: start with something that's an easy amount of reading for you to do, then do that three days in a row, and then lift that by 20%. Once you've hit that for three days in a row, lift again by 20%. Keep bumping it up until you're reading one to three hours a day. It's probably a good amount if you really need work on this.

The #1 mindset shift for reading comprehension: You are never, ever being asked for your opinion or your personal point of view on a reading comprehension passage. You're being asked: what did the passage say? That's why it's called reading comprehension. It's not called reading interpretation.

This can be very difficult to wrap your mind around because it really sounds like you're being asked for your opinion and your subjective point of view in a lot of reading comp questions. Phrases like "what was the author's intention" or "what can be inferred from the passage" sound like they're asking you to interpret the text. But they're not.

Think about all the language instruction you've had until this point in your life. Think about how boring your literature class would have been in high school or college if the teacher just said, "Hey, what does it say in line five of the passage?" and you just read it and the teacher says, "Great job, you get an A for the day."

Most of us have been conditioned to come up with our own interpretation, think about symbolism, allegory, or read between the lines. This is an important skill in life and in business — to read between the lines and to think critically. But that's not the skill that's being tested on reading comprehension.

What this means is that the answer must be based on what you read. It must be objectively verifiable. Like you should be able to take your reading comprehension answer choices to a court of law and say, "Your honor, right here is the evidence in the passage that proves this right answer right and proves why these other four answers are wrong."

If you can't do that, then you need to review more using that mindset.

The Review Process That Actually Works

This applies to critical reasoning and reading comprehension. The number one key is practicing with official guide questions. GMAC invests a lot of money into each individual question — thousands of dollars. They have professional question writers who specialize in this. It's very expensive and it's extremely difficult for third-party providers to properly replicate this.

So the economics of the GMAT® industry prevent virtually all third-party test providers from writing questions that are on the level of quality of what you'll find in the official guide.

If you don't have a copy of that book — and any edition from the last 20 years is totally fine — then it is essential that you get a copy.

For every verbal question, make sure you write down two things:

Number one — why the right answer is right. It should be a compelling reason that you can systematize in the future. Think: if I see X, I will do Y. It should be a systematizable, repeatable thing that you can do on future questions to get those types of questions correct as well.

For critical reasoning, something rooted in the specific strategy for that question type is going to be the best bet. For reading comp, your answer should be rooted in something the text told you. It should be something objectively verifiable — you can point to it on the page.

If you need help with this, put it into a web search and learn from someone who does have a compelling reason. Use the answer explanations in the official guide itself. They're actually good — decent — for verbal. For quant, the official guide explanations are maybe a 50% hit rate. But for verbal, they're better.

Number two — a compelling reason for why each wrong answer is wrong. That doesn't need to be systematizable, but it's great if it is. Generally, something rooted in the logic and strategy for that specific type of CR question is best. And then something rooted in the text of RC — or "it is not addressed in the text at all."

That's it. That is GMAT® verbal, everybody.

If you need help with your personal verbal situation — you're struggling to make progress on your own, or you've tried with another provider and it's not working — then we've got your back. You can talk to us live. Just head to our website, register for the webinar, and then tell us a little bit more about your situation. Or if you prefer to DM, reach out on any social channel at The GMAT® Strategy, and we will give you as much as we possibly can for free.

As always, our greatest hope is that this material will make your studies as easy and as painless as they can possibly be.

If you want more tips and strategies for optimizing your performance on the GMAT®, head to our website — theGMATStrategy.com — and check out our free video presentation on how to achieve your dream GMAT® score in half the normal time.

In the meantime, this is a weekly show, so please subscribe and stay positive and stay consistent with your studies. Talk to you soon.