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Help required on CR!!

by adi_800 » Tue Jul 20, 2010 5:42 pm
Hi All,

As of now, I am doing really grt on SC... Courtesy Manhattan SC guide.
I am doing descent job on RC as well...

But I am really really pathetic on CR...
I am having around 6-7 weeks for my exam and I am really worried how should I be going wid CR??

Can you please suggest some alternative as to what should I be doing?
I think in next one month, I can afford to spend 70% on CR. But i wanna see the results.

I will be really GRATEFUL to experts if you all let me know about below points.

1. What strategy should I be using to solve CR?
2. What practice material should I be going for?
3. There is a lot of debate as to read the question first or read the argument first? What should I be doing?
4. I do have Manhattan cr guide. But I have not done CR from that book. Do you think that I can get the strategy of the book in one months time?
5. I am done with the problems from OG. Will redoing those help me?
6. What material should I be following for extra practice?


Also, being an Indian and not much into reading, I do face problem in quickly understanding the material.

Please let me know about what should I be doing in next month for CR.

Regards,
Aditya
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by gmatpill » Wed Jul 21, 2010 1:17 pm
1. What strategy should I be using to solve CR?

I would recommend using visual diagrams. This is a technique all of our students use very well.


2. What practice material should I be going for?

Definitely the GMAT Prep software from mba.com and the Official Guide questions.

3. There is a lot of debate as to read the question first or read the argument first? What should I be doing?

Each person finds a different strategy that works for them. So try both and see which method works better for you. Be flexible.

4. I do have Manhattan cr guide. But I have not done CR from that book. Do you think that I can get the strategy of the book in one months time?

Possibly. If you learn well from a book--then sure. However, if you learn better with someone walking through questions with you, then you might want to find something that suits this learning style.

5. I am done with the problems from OG. Will redoing those help me?

Absolutely! You should wake up in the morning and redo the questions you did yesterday, but do them in backwards order. Or you can do them in random order. Chances are you won't remember a good portion of them. And even if you do, re-doing them can reinforce some thought processes in your head.

6. What material should I be following for extra practice?

There's tons of books at the local bookstore or online. Focus less on doing thousands of questions and more on your thought process.
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by Stacey Koprince » Sat Jul 24, 2010 12:29 pm
Received a PM asking me to respond.

What have you been using to study CR? What materials are you using that teach you what CR is all about and how to get better at it? (Note: OG or straight problem books don't do this for you. They just give you practice problems.)

Re: what strategies to use, there are a lot of different strategies out there. The key is to find strategies that work for you. It is important to be able to:
1) recognize different types of CR questions
2) know what you're supposed to do for that type, including any note-taking / organizing of information and analysis
3) know how the arguments tend to be structured or the kind of information given in arguments of that type
4) know the kinds of trap answers that tend to appear in the different types of arguments

If you are studying every day, then yes, you can get what you need from the MGMAT CR book in a month.

I used to read the argument first. I now read the question first. I think you can reasonably do things either way - again, it depends what works best for you. I used to avoid reading the question first because I felt that it might distract from fully reading and understanding the argument - because I'd be thinking about the question. After some research, I realized that the question did two valuable things for me: it told me the kind of question type and it sometimes told me the conclusion or gave me clues that helped me find the conclusion.

If I know the question type, then I know certain things to expect when I read the argument. If it's draw a conclusion, I don't expect to find a conclusion because I know there isn't one. If it's weaken, I know that I need to find the conclusion (which the question will actually just tell me something like 40-50% of the time!) and I also need to be thinking about the flaws in the argument. I also know that the right answer will contain some new piece of information that relates to the connection between one of the premises and the conclusion, so I know where to focus my thinking. If it's analyze the structure, and I have boldfaced statements, I know that my primary concern is to find the conclusion and then understand how the boldface stuff relates to that conclusion, and I don't care as much about the other info.

So that's why I personally prefer to read the question first: because I feel like it does more for me than reading the argument first. (If you're not really getting the most that you can out of reading the question, though, then it's not so valuable to read the Q first.) I talk about this stuff some more in this article:
https://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/2010/05/ ... -reasoning

If you like what I wrote so far, then go ahead and try your MGMAT CR book and see what you think. (I wrote / re-wrote the most recent version of that book. :))

Yes, re-doing the OG problems will be helpful. First, you can do some that you've already done to REALLY understand the techniques that you're practicing. If there are some that you really remember well, do those first. Here's an example of how to analyze a CR question:

https://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/2010/01/ ... r-question

Really pick these apart to understand HOW to learn what you want to learn / do. Then, go start practicing on other OG questions, ones that you don't remember as well. Finally, AFTER you feel like you've actually learned some stuff and you're getting better, THEN test yourself on new problems. You can go to OG Verbal Review, OG11, or other older editions to get some new problems. You can also use GMATPrep.

Also, being an Indian and not much into reading, I do face problem in quickly understanding the material.
Let's change that habit! Read every day. It doesn't need to be a ton - it can be just 15 or 30 minutes - but read every day. Read complex business and science (both hard science and social science) articles. The Economist. The Wall Street Journal. Scientific American. University publications: https://magazine.uchicago.edu/ - particularly articles in the "Investigations" tab - and https://harvardmagazine.com/
Please note: I do not use the Private Messaging system! I will not see any PMs that you send to me!!

Stacey Koprince
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by lunarpower » Tue Jul 27, 2010 2:46 am
stacey has already given an exhaustive response to this question, but i have one more suggestion that i have given to many students:
if you find that you are overly detail-oriented, and you have problems focusing on the main idea of a passage, you may want to consider reading passages about topics that you don't understand.

this may sound like a joke, but it's actually completely serious.
a couple of years ago i was in a waiting room and saw a law journal from saudi arabia sitting on one of the tables. i picked it up and looked at one of the articles, which dealt with ways in which electronic commerce had affected sharia law.
i did not understand a single one of the technical legal terms in the article -- the terms were in arabic, and they were not explained because the journal was written for an expert audience -- but i could still, from the topic sentences and introductory paragraph, tell the main idea of the article:
* it presented certain aspects of sharia law that had been adequate before the internet but did not adequately cover the changes imposed by electronic commerce;
* it described some recent court decisions that help clarify the position of sharia law regarding electronic commerce;
* it described the way in which the existing principles were modified and clarified to deal with electronic commerce.

i could tell all of this, despite not understanding a single detail of what was written in the body paragraphs of the article. in fact, precisely because i could not understand the body of the article, i was forced to come up with a much more complete understanding of the article's main idea.

so, if you are overly detail-oriented, you may want to try something similar -- pick up a journal about some topic that you really don't understand at all, look at one of the articles, and try to figure out the main idea/purpose of the article. you should still be able to do this, even if the details in the article don't make sense.

otherwise, stacey's suggestions for reading material are excellent.
Last edited by lunarpower on Tue Jul 27, 2010 2:47 am, edited 1 time in total.
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by lunarpower » Tue Jul 27, 2010 2:46 am
one other suggestion -- you may want to stay away from newspaper articles, which tend to be heavy on facts and light on main ideas/concepts. in fact, the american code of journalistic ethics actually requires that journalists not put too much "main idea" into the articles; therefore, most newspaper articles are going to be way too packed with facts to adequately simulate a gmat article.
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by uwhusky » Tue Jul 27, 2010 2:09 pm
lunarpower wrote:one other suggestion -- you may want to stay away from newspaper articles, which tend to be heavy on facts and light on main ideas/concepts. in fact, the american code of journalistic ethics actually requires that journalists not put too much "main idea" into the articles; therefore, most newspaper articles are going to be way too packed with facts to adequately simulate a gmat article.
Great insight, plus I noticed that some of my local papers seem to be lacking an editor or two.
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