4,000 Verbal Questions: A (Painful) GMAT Success Story

The unglamorous truth behind most big GMAT verbal improvements: sometimes, it just takes a lot of practice. This is the story of Ms. HP, who answered roughly 4,000 Critical Reasoning and Reading Comprehension questions, gaining 110 points and admission to Harvard Business School. Here’s what her journey means for your own GMAT studies.

Disclaimer: this article tells the story of a student who took the “old” version of the GMAT, so the scores below don’t match the scoring system on the current GMAT, introduced in November 2023. The punchlines of the story hold true regardless, so we’ve left the numbers intact.

Everybody loves a good, hyper-dramatic GMAT success story. We’re all addicted to the “I went from a 460 to a 740 in just one month!!!” posts on GMAT Club or Reddit. The faster somebody improves, the more excited we get in the GMAT world. Like anybody else, I certainly love to watch one of our students (or a perfect stranger) jump 100 points in a few weeks.

But I love it even more when a GMAT student succeeds after fighting like crazy to improve, and I admire plucky test-taking persistence more than I admire pure test-taking talent. And when it comes to making large score improvements, it is incredibly common to have to work LONG AND HARD for each and every point.

Today’s story features the amazing Ms. HP, who is probably the most maniacally dedicated GMAT student I’ve met in 25+ years of tutoring.

Ms. HP’s GMAT Verbal Problem

When I first met Ms. HP (not her real name; “HP” refers to Chinese hot pot, which is one of her favorite meals), she had just earned a string of 640s on her GMAT practice tests, with equally erratic performances on quant and verbal (Data Insights was not part of the GMAT back then). After a session or two, I realized that Ms. HP had excellent math skills; once she learned to consistently check her work to avoid unforced errors, I wasn’t really worried about her GMAT quant score at all.

Verbal was a different story. After Ms. HP completed some Critical Reasoning and Reading Comprehension diagnostic tests from my favorite LSAT® book , I discovered that she had some legitimate weaknesses. She had a tendency to rush through questions, she would occasionally over-think CR passages, and she simply didn’t feel confident battling through the dense language of CR and RC texts. Her GMAT score goal was a 720, but her error rate was easily twice as high as it needed to be to achieve her goals.

If you’re struggling with CR or RC, you won’t like what I’m about to tell you: for certain students, including Ms. HP, the only reliable cure for GMAT verbal ailments includes tons and tons of practice.

Sure, a good GMAT (or LSAT®) tutor can help you to conquer difficulties with particular question types. If you’re disproportionately bad at, say, inference questions or assumption questions or main idea questions, we can fix that. If you have some bad habits, such as taking too many or too few notes, or focusing on the wrong details, a good GMAT tutor can help with that, too. And a good GMAT tutor can help you learn to organize the information in RC and CR passages efficiently.

But if your reading skills are fundamentally flawed or if you consistently misunderstand the passages, there’s really only one (unappealing) cure: craploads of reading practice.

Sure, some occasional guidance from a GMAT tutor can help you to focus on the right details, but there are no GMAT test-prep gimmicks that can make you a fundamentally better reader. You simply have to work hard at improving your core reading skills, often over a long period of time.

Ms. HP, for better or worse, really didn’t have many bad habits with CR or RC, and her errors were evenly distributed among the question types. The bottom line was that she wasn’t great at reading the passages and answer choices. So I told her to do a heavy dose of verbal practice questions: ideally four 25-question sets per week – two each for CR and RC. 

An Unusual Path to GMAT Verbal Success

To make a long story short, Ms. HP proceeded to work like crazy, and consistently did far more homework than I assigned each week. Her CR and RC results improved dramatically, and she ultimately earned a 750/49Q/42V on the old GMAT scale, a 98th-percentile result. If we use Ms. HP’s original GMAT practice test scores as a baseline, she improved by 110 points. Awesome, right?

Here’s the truly incredible part: Ms. HP completed a total of roughly 4,000 CR and RC questions before her GMAT exam. Yes, you read that correctly: 4,000 questions, give or take a few.

In addition to completing every official GMAT verbal question in print at the time – most of them at least twice – she also completed every CR and RC question from 43 full LSAT® exams for an approximate total of 3,225 LSAT® questions. If we include her work in GMAT books and on practice GMAT tests, she did somewhere in the neighborhood of 4,000 CR and RC questions, in just a few months.

All of it worked out: Ms. HP graduated from HBS, married a delightful HBS classmate, did some amazing strategy work for one of the world’s best-known companies, and is now raising two beautiful children. 

I’ve seen plenty of students work hard for their (often dramatic) GMAT score improvements, but I’ve never seen anybody work as mind-blowingly hard as Ms. HP. The qualities that made her an incredible GMAT student are exactly the qualities which make her great at everything she does: she has a positive attitude, an incredible work ethic, a laser-like focus on her goals, and, pardon the expression, cojones of steel. (Not literally, of course.) She also has outstanding taste in hot pot.

4,000 Verbal Questions? Ugh!

I know what you’re thinking. And I get it.

If you’re completely terrified by the thought of completing 4,000 CR and RC questions, don’t worry: Ms. HP is clearly an extreme character (in a good way), and I suspect that she could have achieved an amazing GMAT score with a less-heroic quantity of verbal exercises. And if you’re studying for the GMAT right now, odds are good that you’ll be able to reach your peak with substantially fewer questions.

But next time you sit down in front of a GMAT book and dread the thought of doing another few dozen CR questions, think of Ms. HP. Hopefully her story will provide a little bit of inspiration… or at least remind you that this GMAT verbal crap isn’t always as easy as we’d like it to be.

If you want to follow her path – ideally with fewer hours of studying – start with our guides to Critical Reasoning and Reading Comprehension, and see why LSAT® questions make such a good GMAT supplement.