转-the key of GMAT

The “STOP” reading methodology

I definitely had some trouble with reading comprehension on my practice tests, missing about 1 or 2 questions per passage—far too many to score well on the verbal section. I found that my strategy for dealing with reading comprehension was  flawed. I was trying to read the question first and then skim through the passage to get the answer to the question. This did not work well since many of the questions require an understanding of the passage as a whole, not just individual parts. As a result, I started employing “active reading” using the Veritas Prep STOP methodology. I changed my strategy and spent more time on the first question reading the entire passage carefully while actively looking for the STOP elements of Structure, Tone, Organization and main Point. This way, I had a much more clear understanding of the passage from the first read through and could immediately identify things such as:

By taking more time up front to read the passage carefully, I found it much easier and faster to answer the subsequent questions about the passage. So instead of spending 2 minutes on each of 4 reading comprehension passages for a total of 8 minutes or so per passage, I instead spent 4 minutes first carefully reading the passage, looking for the STOP elements and then spending about 30 seconds to 1 minute on each of the subsequent questions.

After doing this, I went from 1 or 2 errors per passage to 1 or 2 RC errors in the entire verbal section.

The Business Takeaway: When presented with foreign, unfamiliar subject matter, the effective business person is able to focus on and extract the most important elements from an otherwise esoteric source of information.

Focus on the specifics of the argument and ignore any answer choices that do not directly address the linear logic of the argument.

I’ve found that a lot of the wrong answers I was choosing on the CR section were answer choices that were true, but did not directly address the specific path of logic that the argument uses. Often times, an answer choice that more appropriately fits the argument’s reasoning turned out to be the correct one.

For example: “Ever since the CEO of the company implemented a company-sponsored health care program, the productivity per employee has been up 12% over last year. Since there were no other incentive programs created in the last year, the rise in productivity must be directly attributable to the employees’ happiness with the CEO’s program.”

When asked which answer choice would most WEAKEN the conclusion of the argument, a popular wrong I answer I might have selected may have been:

“Incentive programs have been shown by business studies to be generally ineffective at boosting employee productivity.”

However, the correct answer choice would have been:

“Over the last year, over 15% of the staff of the company has been laid off, while the company has shown the same level of business activity.”

As you can see, the first answer choice is very tempting since it has the words “incentive program” and “employee productivity” in it. However, it only states that it is a general case and not an absolute rule. The second answer, while it may not sound as good, actually directly addresses the argument’s logic in that the rise in per employee productivity may have actually been the result of employees having to cover for the laid-off employees’ workload.

Using this general strategy, I was able to much more effectively identify the trap answers that did not relate directly to the pattern of logic presented in the argument.

The Business Takeaway: Effective business people have a tight focus on the things that really matter when faced with critical decisions and do not get dissuaded by irrelevant facts or information.

Approaching sentences with the goal of creating logical meaning instead of “relying on my ear” or on idioms to correct sentences. And getting rid of “junk.”

Sentence Correction was my worst verbal subject before I started studying. I kept on getting a good number of questions wrong and wasn’t  able to identify any solid rules to follow so I just started memorizing the particular structures of the sentences on the questions that I got wrong and saying “OK, this is the idiomatic way of writing this.” This became completely unmanageable because there was no way I could hold all those idioms and constructions in my head with a sufficient level of accuracy.

Then I thought, “Well, the GMAT really should not reward my ability to memorize idioms. Otherwise, the people with the best memory and not necessarily those with the best reasoning abilities would do well on the test.” As a result, I changed my thinking and started to approach sentence correction from a logical standpoint. Instead of relying on a vast library of idioms, I took a small subset of grammar rules (mostly those in the “agreement” category) such as verb tense, pronoun agreement, modifier agreement, subject-verb agreement, and agreement between equivalent elements. I found that almost all of the sentence correction problems could be solved by applying this relatively small set of rules to them. It was much more manageable and made much more sense:

Dealing with sentence correction using this framework was infinitely easier than trying to pull out the proper idiom from my memory bank. There wasn’t a single question on the actual GMAT where I had to actually KNOW the proper idiom to use in that situation. In fact, there were several instances where I saw that a wrong answer choice contained a “nice-sounding” idiom that ultimately ended up being the incorrect answer choice because it did not conform to one of the rules above. Had I “used my ear” like I was doing before, I would have certainly gotten those questions wrong.

Finally, the difficulty on the harder sentence correction problem was not so much that there were harder and more obscure rules that were thrown at me as much that the GMAT just put a bunch of junk in my way to hide where the real subjects and antecedents were. So a tricky sentence would read something such as:

“The committee that handles the country’s budget, made up of six senators and six congressmen from twelve different states, are currently deciding what programs to cut in order to reduce the deficit.”

You see how this is trick since the sentence hides the verb “are” from the singular subject “committee”. By cutting out all the fluff, the sentence would ready to me as:

“The committee, ::junk junk junk junk::, are currently deciding ::junk junk junk junk::”

Now, it is plainly obvious that the “committee” requires a singular verb of “is” instead of “are.” For many of the problems, I was so focused on the critical elements in the sentence, I don’t even remember what the subject matter of those sentences were after answering the question!

There are probably only 2 dozen or fewer grammar rules that you actually have to know to do well on sentence correction—much easier than memorizing a whole list of idioms!

The Business Takeaway: Effective business people are able to avoid distracting information and sort through to the most important elements.

In conclusion, the same skills that are rewarded on the GMAT are the same skills that are required to become successful MBAs and effective business people:

When you are studying for the GMAT, keep in mind that the GMAT rewards this type of thinking and you will be able to tell which strategies will actually be effective on the GMAT and which strategies will not.