Critical Reasoning

Hello,

I have seen many topics about the different review materials available out there, but very few of the topics compare/contrast the content of the material. Well, I happen to have a lot of the published material that is available commercially (with the exception of the MGMAT books). In particular, I have the Veritas Prep material. This post is a review of the Critical Reasoning material available.

Books in my possession with CR material:
OG Verbal Review
PR 2007 with CD
PR Verbal Review
Kaplan Premier 2006
Kaplan 800
Kaplan Verbal Review
Veritas Critical Reasoning book 1

Booked reviewed thus far:
PR 2007 with CD
PR Verbal Review
Kaplan 800 (partially)
Veritas Critical Reasoning book 1

So as you can see I have not completely gone over all the material I have at my disposal, but as I review them I will edit this post and provide more information.

PR 2007 with CD:
Very simple and good introduction to critical reasoning. Particularly good is the discussion of scope. This book is not written for people trying to achieve 700 scores I believe, but still discusses important topics. In partiuclar, this book discusses the many problem types in CR. However, I feel PR's categories are too fine-grained which ends up creating too many different problem types.

PR Verbal review:
I don't even remember what was included in this book. That should be an indication as to how good this book is for CR. I will look through it again and add more info.

Veritas Prep:
With PR material, I found the material generally did not help me. I resorted to simply doing what I did before I learned the material which was to go by my instinct and what I learned about logic and critical reasoning from my college classes (in particular, my computer science classes). Veritas' CR material was the game changer here. Veritas begins the course with a study of arguments and reasoning. This first class does not have a particular focus, but is intended to prepare you for CR. In particular, this course discusses argument topics like deductive reasoning, inductive reasoning and arrow diagrams.

The CR lesson comes later, but the arguments material really did have a noticeable effect on my understanding of the CR stimulus. The CR lesson and book are both very good. This book, like the PR books, discusses the diferent problem types, but the categories are more coarse-grained meaning there are fewer categories. This is good because less categories means less memorizing how to attack a particular category. The solutions generally include a sentence about the category type for the question stem and why it falls in that category. In addition, the explanation for why a particular answer choice is the correct answer is usually very good; however, the explanations for why the incorrect answer choices are incorrect are strangely worded and confusing to understand.

This book has a terrible discussion of scope even though I found scope to be very useful for eliminating incorrect answers. The PR books outshine in that area.

Kaplan 800:
This book has a very interesting way of dicussing CR. In the other books discussed above, the CR focuses on the problem types (categories) and how each problem can be attacked. However, in the CR section of the Kaplan 800, the focus is not on the problem types and, instead, focuses on the stimulus content in CR questions. In particular, the book describes how to dissect different stimuli and how to critically analyze a particular stimulus type (e.g. how to dissect stimuli containing statistical data). Very good discussion thats adds to your understanding of CR problems.

Cheers.