A novel cohort selection method, namely, successive cohort selection (SCS) is presented in this paper for text-independent speaker verification. The proposed method computes distance between two models directly and it selects new cohort member based on both the claimed speaker model and the existing cohort members. In addition to this new cohort selection method, we also propose a new score measure to be used in verification stage. This new score measure makes use of the absolute score of an utterance to weigh its normalized score in order to further improve the accuracy of a verification. Experimental results on the YOHO speech corpus have revealed that the proposed cohort selection method together with the new score measure reduce the equal-error-rate (EER) of a textindependent system by four times. With only a cohort size of four, the EER of the system is reduced to 0.72%.