“Close” Counts in Russian Roulette, but Not on GMAT Verbal Questions

If you keep narrowing GMAT verbal questions down to two answer choices and picking the wrong one, here’s the uncomfortable truth: you’re not “almost there,” because most hard questions only have two tempting answers to begin with. A near-miss is still a miss, and it’s almost always a sign that you misread or misinterpreted the passage.

Let’s suppose that you just tackled a long, painful set of GMAT, EA, or LSAT® Critical Reasoning and Reading Comprehension questions, and let’s suppose that you weren’t all that thrilled with the results. Let’s imagine that you did, say, 50 questions, and you missed 15 of them.

Like a good GMAT student, you decide to look through all of your errors. And you realize that you almost had the right answer to almost every single one of your 15 misses. Again and again, you notice that you were down to two answer choices… and then selected the wrong one.

That’s frustrating on one level, but encouraging on another. “Hey,” you think, “I didn’t really miss the questions all that badly. I’m just barely missing them, right? So that means I’m doing pretty well! I just need to do a better job of guessing when I’m down to those last two, and then I’ll CRUSH the CR and RC questions on the GMAT.”

Sorry, friends: that’s not quite how things work on GMAT verbal questions.

The Bad News About Close Misses on GMAT Verbal Questions

Sorry, but a near-miss isn’t really much better than any other miss on GMAT Verbal. “Close” might be a great result if you’re playing shuffleboard, horseshoes, or Russian roulette, but it doesn’t mean anything on a multiple choice test. Don’t kid yourself into thinking that you’re necessarily close to a score breakthrough on the GMAT just because you consistently narrow the Critical Reasoning and Reading Comprehension questions down to the last two options.

Think of it from the perspective of the people at GMAC who write verbal test questions for the GMAT. I often imagine that some evil troll in GMAC’s headquarters (or, more likely, a very pleasant, professional question-writer sitting in her home office) comes up with an idea for a Critical Reasoning question, and leaps from her seat in excitement. “I have a great idea for a really tough question!” she exclaims, and then writes the CR passage. Her moment of CR-writing inspiration probably included one extremely tempting wrong answer, in addition to the hard-to-embrace correct answer.

And then she proceeds to invent three additional answer choices, none of which are as tempting, difficult, or inspired as the first two. After an intense period of testing and editing, the question eventually becomes an instrument of torture for GMAT test-takers around the world.

Here’s my point: the vast majority of difficult GMAT CR and RC questions simply don’t have five tempting answer choices. They usually have only two or three, and you’ll frequently struggle to decide between the last two options. At worst, you’ll feel that tossing a coin is a perfectly reasonable way to decide between those final two answer choices. And your coin will inevitably be wrong sometimes – and certainly more often than you’d like.

How to Improve Your CR and RC Performance on the GMAT

So please don’t trick yourself into thinking that some wrong answers are “less wrong” than others. If you miss a CR or RC question on the GMAT, it’s probably because you misread or misinterpreted something, either in the answer choices or, more likely, in the passage itself. Even if you feel like you’re “close” on the majority of your misses, stay focused on the fundamentals: read with laser-like precision, practice diligently with official questions, and concentrate on honing your ability to distinguish between similar-sounding answer choices.

Eventually, you’ll get substantially better at catching the nuances of GMAT verbal passages, questions, and answer choices. On the majority of GMAT verbal questions, you’ll still be forced into a difficult choice between the last two answers. But as you strengthen your ability to understand the phrasing and logic behind CR and RC questions, you’ll choose the correct option more and more frequently. And then you can put the coin away, and watch your GMAT verbal scores improve.

Start with the fundamentals in our beginner’s guides to Critical Reasoning and Reading Comprehension, and if you’re stuck between two answers under time pressure, our verbal time management technique tells you when to commit and move on.