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CR - Timing Issue

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iwillsurvive101 Rising GMAT Star
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CR - Timing Issue Post Thu Mar 29, 2012 8:54 am
Elapsed Time: 00:00
  • Lap #[LAPCOUNT] ([LAPTIME])
    I am practicing Critical Reasoning topic, and while I am solving OG problems, I am noticing that my average response time for CR questions is > 2.30. The diagramming part itself takes about 1.10 min for me(I am following MGMAT's diagramming instructions).

    Is this normal?

    Should I skip diagramming and go straight to the answer choices? Any idea how can I speed up?

    Thanks in advance

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    killer1387 GMAT Destroyer! Default Avatar
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    Post Thu Mar 29, 2012 9:20 am
    IMO
    try every approach you think exists and select the one that suits you coz the approach you talked of may have resulted boon for one and bane for other.

    iwillsurvive101 Rising GMAT Star
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    Post Thu Mar 29, 2012 6:32 pm
    Thanks killer1387, I am in process of trying out different approaches.

    I am wondering how much time on average most test-takers are spending on CR questions. It certainly takes longer than Sentence Correction(my average for SC is 1.30), whereas my the fastest I have solved a CR question is about 1.15. Also, what to experts recommend w.r.t CR timing.

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    Bill@VeritasPrep GMAT Instructor
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    Post Thu Mar 29, 2012 6:54 pm
    In my experience, diagramming is a great way to get comfortable with the types of logic used on the GMAT, but ,as you've noted, it tends to be very time-consuming. Once you've got the logic down, I would recommend starting to move away from diagrams.

    Bill

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    iwillsurvive101 Rising GMAT Star
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    Post Thu Apr 05, 2012 7:30 pm
    I've been trying very hard to improve my timing on CR questions. I completed all of OG questions with an accuracy of 68%(is that good?), with average time of 2.15, but that's an average of all the questions.

    If I average the 600+ questions, my average is ~3 minutes. How can I improve. Experts -- please share your feedback. I am now only trying to diagram the Conclusion part, and skipping the Premises. Helps, but still can't get AVG-to-HARD problems solved under 2.45.

    Thanks!

    dchhikara863 Just gettin' started! Default Avatar
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    Post Fri Apr 06, 2012 12:27 am
    Certain question types in C.R. appear more frequently than the others. For example strengthening/weakening and inference. I am sure you know that!

    What helped me was to focus on more frequently appearing question types and with time I learned on which questions I needed to draw the map and which questions I could just go straight to the answer choices.

    Also, while reading newspapers in my day to day routine I found myself looking for flawed arguments that I strengthened and weakened in my mind.

    You know you've reached a great point in your understanding of CR when you can start predicting the rights answers. That affords you a few more secs by not over analyzing complicated answer choices needlessly. All this took me a month to master.

    I know this is not a direct or statistical approach but hope it helps.

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    lunarpower GMAT Instructor
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    Post Thu Apr 12, 2012 5:49 am
    i received a private message regarding this thread.

    --

    in general, diagramming is NOT something you should have to do on every critical reasoning passage. in fact, you should be able to deal with the vast majority of critical reasoning passages without having to diagram them.
    diagramming is a tool that you should generally reserve for passages on which you find yourself lost or confused.

    ** IMPORTANT **
    whenever you deal with any kind of printed book about stuff like this, you have to keep in mind that it's a printed book -- in which we have to, well, print stuff.
    most conspicuously, this means that we have to take processes that are essentially 100% intuitive -- such as understanding the core point of an argument -- and try to map them onto a printed page. the real point is to develop the intuition, of course, but that's simply not something that we can write in a strategy guide. (“you're supposed to get the point of the argument” -- this is really the main issue, but i think you can see that it's not something we could write an entire chapter of a CR manual about.)

    in terms of critical reasoning and reading comprehension, there are exactly zero “facts”/“rules” that you need to memorize, and there are also zero formal processes that you must use.

    the end goal is to develop the right kind of intuition. if you already have this intuition, then you are already where you want to be. if you don't, then any tool that you might use, diagramming or otherwise, is simply a means to that end, not an end in itself. keep what works for you, throw out the rest.

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