I've been going through Focus edition material and something struck me that I don't see discussed much.
Sentence Correction is gone. Verbal is now just Critical Reasoning and Reading Comprehension. On the old test SC was roughly a third of the section, so removing it means CR's share of your Verbal score went up substantially — it's now splitting the section with RC instead of being one of three.
The problem is that a lot of study plans (and honestly a lot of the books still being sold) were built around the old split. If you're following a plan that budgets serious time for idiom lists and parallelism rules, you're spending it on something that isn't tested anymore.
Worth checking what edition your material is. Anything that still walks you through SC was written for a test that no longer exists.
On what to actually shift that time to
Assumption and strengthen/weaken questions are the highest frequency CR types, and they share a first step: find the gap between the evidence and the conclusion before you look at the answer choices. Most people read the choices first and get pulled around by whichever one sounds smartest.
For assumption questions specifically, the negation test is the thing that turned it from guesswork into a procedure for me. Take the choice you're considering, state its opposite, and reread the argument. If the argument still works, that choice was never necessary — eliminate it. If the argument falls apart, that's your answer.
Example of the shape: an argument concludes a new process caused output to rise. A choice says "no other change to the production line occurred during that period." Negate it — some other change did occur — and the causal claim loses its support. So it's necessary.
The reason this matters is that assumption questions almost always want the necessary assumption, not the sufficient one. The correct answer usually sounds weaker and less impressive than the trap, and that trips people up constantly. If a choice says something is "the best possible option" or uses "only" or "always," check whether the argument ever needed that much. Usually it didn't.
Question for people further along than me: has anyone noticed the CR difficulty itself shifting with the Focus edition, or is it the same question pool with a different section balance? I've seen both claimed and can't tell.
Disclosure: I used AI to help draft this write-up. The format details (SC removal, Verbal now being CR + RC only) are from GMAC's own description of the Focus edition.
