“Close” Counts in Russian Roulette, but Not on GMAT Verbal Questions
UPDATED FOR THE NEW GMAT IN 2024
Let’s suppose that you just attacked 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 and Executive Assessment verbal questions.
The bad news about close misses on GMAT & EA verbal questions
Sorry, but a near-miss is still a miss on the GMAT or Executive Assessment. “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 EA or 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 EA and GMAT. I often imagine that some evil little monkey in GMAC headquarters (or, more likely, a very pleasant ACT contractor 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 and EA 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 more often than you’d like.
How to improve your CR and RC performance on the EA and 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 or EA, it’s probably because you misread or misinterpreted something, either in the answer choices or 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 GMAT, EA, and LSAT 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 EA and GMAT verbal passages, questions, and answer choices. On the majority of EA and 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 and EA verbal scores improve.