Bold face R quesions

Due wrote:Hello All,

Are CR questions in which the candidate is asked to recognise the relationship between bold faced parts of the question stem considered tough ones.

ie Would you get them when you dpoing good?

I know one always gets them in MGMAT verbal but MGMAT is well known not to be adaptive.

You must get them if you're doing well, I only saw one during my exam .

They aren't as complicated as they seem. Its testing your understanding of how the premises relate to the conclusion.

Good question, Due - Boldfaced questions can come in a variety of difficulty, as can any subset of CR questions, so it's difficult to determine how you're doing based on the appearance of one of those questions.

Like osirus mentioned, they're not as difficult as advertised, at least not as a blanket question type. The question, much like other "Method of Reasoning" questions that ask you to describe the author's logic, asks for a description of portions of the argument, and you need to therefore understand the way that the argument is constructed. If you've practiced with them a fair amount, you'll start to pick up on the logic-description vocabulary (premise, counterexample, etc.), and you can actually start to see them as a bit easier than other questions in a way - the boldfaced print tells you which components of the passage are most important!

More importantly, I'd caution anyone against trying to read in to their performance on test day by trying to interpret the difficulty of the question types. In its simplest form, it's just a waste of time and energy - you're using your mental faculties to try to intuit the "scoreboard" at a time when it's irrelevant. When the Saints went down 10-0 in last night's Super Bowl, the things they needed to do to win - move the ball efficiently on offense, put pressure on the quarterback on defense, etc. - were the same as they would have been were they winning. Same for you on test day - whether you're doing well or poorly, your job is still to get questions right, and your final score will reflect your ability to do that. Any time or energy that you divert from that goal can only be considered wasted time.

Furthermore, trying to interpret question difficulty can actually be quite counterproductive. A question need not "look difficult" to be difficult - you might think that you're doing poorly because you got an "easy" question, but maybe you're just missing the element that makes it difficult, or maybe it's one of the unscored, experimental questions. I've talked to multiple test-takers whose fatal flaw on test day was incorrectly predicting that they were doing poorly...then allowing that discouragement to lead to a poor performance: https://blog.veritasprep.com/2009/03/gma ... -week.html

Don't let me accuse you of making that mistake, but I'm always nervous when I hear people talking about trying to predict difficulty levels!