GMAT Strategy

Hi CAREY33,

IR involves many of the same skills that CR does (with a bit of 'math' and the potential to occasionally use Quant Tactics thrown in). As such, you might find it worthwhile to deal with IR later on during your studies, after you've honed your other Quant and Verbal skills. All that having been said, since many Schools have publicly stated that they do not use an Applicant's IR score as part of the review process, you probably shouldn't be spending that much time training for IR. While it's helpful to get some repetitions in to become familiar with the question types and get comfortable 'dumping' questions when appropriate - and you should ALWAYS include the Essay and IR section when you take your CATs - putting in lots of time to train for IR is NOT a good use of your time.

GMAT assassins aren't born, they're made,
Rich

I agree with Rich. Most students will not need to spend much additional time studying for IR outside of the time they spend studying for Quant and Verbal. Most of the concepts tested significantly overlap with the concepts tested in Quant and Verbal.

As an example, here are some question types that I saw on IR when I took the real test a few months ago:
- a combinatorics problem that utilized the standard n!/((m!)(n - m)!)
- a question very similar to a CR question, but for which I had to choose the one that most weakened in column A, the one that most strengthened in column B
- one ratio problem

The only practice that most students should need to do is with reading and synthesizing information from charts and graphs. This should require less than 5% of a student's total study time, I would think.