Critical Reasoning

I have practised a lot of critical reasoning problems and i am able to solve over 80% of problems in CR correctly.

Recently i decided to take a few quizzes to test my level of preparation in CR.

I started with practicing Assumption type problems (the easy ones) initially.
In the intial quiz of around 10 questions,my accuracy was around 90%.

Then i jumped over to solving medium and difficult level. The CR arguments here were much bigger and had around 60-70 words. In these problems, my accuracy fell to around 25% (i attempted all the quizzes in a timed test format).
After the test, i wrote down all the problems, drew a logical structure on paper of the arguments and then was able to solve a big percentage of the tougher problems correctly.

I attempted a test with tough assumption problems again after some days. Some of the arguments that i got were too convoluted and i had a strong urge to put down the argument in a structure format on paper. But looking away from the screen even once in an attempt to write anything kills atleast 20-30 seconds plus also destroys the focus. I timed myself when i tried to create a logical structure for each tough problem on paper and then answered the question. I took 3.5 to 4 minutes to solve each of the problems. Though the accuracy has improved, i am killing too much time here.

Can yl suggest how to deal with this situation.
How do you guys approach the CR problems, especially the convoluted ones, which have many links with many assumptions which are not easy to figure out.

[email protected] wrote:How do you guys approach the CR problems, especially the convoluted ones, which have many links with many assumptions which are not easy to figure out.

Generally I seek to understand what is going on in the argument by reading the prompt, maybe multiple times.

I am not really rule or strategy driven and mostly what I seek to get from the prompt are a general idea of what's going on in the argument and the conclusion of the argument.

Sometimes, the prompt is fairly complicated and it's not clear what will be needed for answering the question. In that case, reading and analyzing the prompt until I see the purpose of every part seems like a waste of time. So rather than do that, I go to the question and the answer choices to see what I am up against.

From there the process is dynamic. If in reading the question and answer choices I find that I need to further analyze the prompt, which is often the case with boldfaced questions, then I do. Otherwise I just use what I have to use to get the answer.

To me the conclusion is the key part of the argument, and usually what is going on in the arguments seems pretty clear. I don't often distract myself by worrying about every assumption or premise. I just seek to get the gist of the argument and to see how the answer choices work with that.

I am not sure if this helps you, but I am thinking that maybe if you seek to see a picture of what's being described and seek to handle the situations more as you would real life decisions rather than getting caught up in details or GMAT ish ways of doing things, you will see the arguments more clearly and get the CR questions right without having to do so much work.