Problem Solving

sureshbala wrote:I am sure every question that you find in GMAT from P & C is very close to your practical life

there's no way this is true, unless you're a gmat instructor in your "practical life". :/

really, it boils down to each student's learning style.
* some students are unbelievably good at memorizing formulas and applying them to problems. for these students, it's advisable to memorize as many formulas as possible, in order to reduce the amount of conceptual acrobatics required to solve problems.
* other students are more conceptually agile, but are not good at memorization. for these students, your advice is right on the mark; memorization would be at best ill-advised, and at worst a disaster.

in any case, this is definitely one of those situations in which advice is not "one-size-fits-all".

lunarpower wrote:

sureshbala wrote:I am sure every question that you find in GMAT from P & C is very close to your practical life

there's no way this is true, unless you're a gmat instructor in your "practical life". :/

really, it boils down to each student's learning style.
* some students are unbelievably good at memorizing formulas and applying them to problems. for these students, it's advisable to memorize as many formulas as possible, in order to reduce the amount of conceptual acrobatics required to solve problems.
* other students are more conceptually agile, but are not good at memorization. for these students, your advice is right on the mark; memorization would be at best ill-advised, and at worst a disaster.

in any case, this is definitely one of those situations in which advice is not "one-size-fits-all".

Dear lunarpower,

What I meant by practical life is that questions like seating arrangements, puzzles, etc are something which we come across in life compared to logarithms, inequalities. geometry and Quadratic Equations. I meant that this is a topic where there is a huge scope to apply logic rather than formulae.

I also agree to your idea that advice is not "one-size-fits-all" but when it comes to P & C of GMAT one can avoid formulae based approach. As such there are other topics where he has to memorize formulae but I feel that this topic is an exception.

Anyway, thank a lot for sharing your views....

Regards