RC - help/advice (long....)

[george.kourdin]

struggling with RC. sincerely appreciate any help/tips/advice.

long story short i am pretty terribad at this. i think that RC is single-handendly tanking my verbal score. looking at the assesment reports and the breakdown of the incorrect answer choices on the last two CAT exams as well as the mba.com official exams, it is clear that i have a tendency to get 2/3 or 3/3 questions wrong on an RC passage. the last CAT exam is a prime example. 1st RC passage i got 2/3 wrong, 2nd 2/3 wrong and the 3rd passage is 3/3. phenomenal i know.....the fact that i am getting consecutive answers wrong clearly exacerbates the problem and yields a net lower avg score.

ive read MGMAT RC book, Powerscore CR bible, Veritas RC book and Kaplan verbal bible. Done all the exercises in all the bookes + the OG. I've also read whatever articles I could find on RC by Stacey, Ron, skimmed some Gmat club stuff (taken with a grain of salt....). some of these sources obv. disagree (mainly on whether to preview first question or not). i think that my general approach to RC is pretty standard, but i could be wrong. i basically read with scope/tone/general idea in mind, keeping an eye out for key changes in the flow of the passage. if the sentence is important and i do not get it, i attempt to paraphase/simplify it in my head. i write a few words max for each passage, generally outling main point/casual relationships etc. before moving to the question i paraphse the passage in my head and identify the conclusion/may point. the ony thing i do not do that some books advise is to preview the first question because in my head i am focusing on finding the answer to that question and i think that detracts from my understanding of the whole passage. if the question is a specific/detail type question, then i think i am sacrificing an answer to the next two questions for an answer to the first one. thoughts on that and the approach as a whole?

is there anything else that anyone can advise that I should read/do/study?

in my own somewhat-biased opinion, i think that i understand the passages fairly well and the problem does not stem from me missing the main point/not understanding the big picture (again i could be wrong - if someone has any idea on how to fix this, please chime in). the problem stems from just a general wtf sense that i get once i start reading the questions. its as if 80% of these questions are written in chinese. there are times where i can't even narrow it down to two contenders. i end up Xing and reXing answers. i think that two things are happening here:

1) to me, answer choices on RC appear cryptic. getting the right answer requires paraphsing both the passage and the answer choice. not just one or the other. sometimes, the right answer will be sprinkled throughout the passage and worded in a way that is not directly represented in the answer choice. i find myself paraphsing each of the answer choices and attempting to link them to the text. it is as tedious as it sounds. what can i do to make this process more efficient? is it a function of me not reading intently enough? how do i end up time after time with questions that don't make much sense and yet, i think i have an okay grasp of the actual passage?

2) attention to detail - somewhat related to (1). i think that the following is happening very often: i browse the answer choices, scratch my head and hate life. then i end up picking a wrong answer which is typically wrong because it contains words from the passage but does not answer the question completely or the true-in-the-real-world-type wrong answer. of course, the right answer is masked or mentioned somewhere indirectly. i am not sure whether this made sense, but i find it hard to strike a balance on the test in situations where i know that the GMAT is extremly anal about what can be inferred/used etc. and these broader answer choices that end up being correct because they are mentioned in the passage in some shape or form. the test expects you to infer as little as possible and punishes you if one of the adjectives is wrong in the answer choice or if the qualifying verb is too strong/weak and the meaning is altered to a slight degree, however, it expects you to infer that the a synonym for X is Y and make a connection between an ambigously worded answer choice and the passage.

i realize that the GMAT is always right and there is no point in arguing about the structure of the test. if anyone finished reading this word vomit, id sincerely appreciate any and all tips on how to beat GMAT rc. i dont care what it is that needs to be done as long as it yields a result (score increase...)

thanks

[george.kourdin]

one last thing.....

when i review the wrong answers, they make sense. i don't disagree with why gmat answer > my initial answer. the logic makes sense. that is probably because if there was unlimited time, anyone/most would get this section right. i just wanted to emphasize that i do not disagree with the reasoning, i find it hard to find the right answer in the alloted time given the amount of info that is presented, the attention to detail that is required and the need to synethize and to paraphrase the majority both the passage and the answer choices.

thanks again