Critical Reasoning

GMAT CRs and OAs do exhibit discernible patterns.

I'm not trying to say that there are no patterns. Rather, what I'm trying to say is that whatever "patterns" do exist ...
... are suffused with exceptions, caveats, and limitations;
... are very remote and difficult to understand when expressed as generalities;
and, most importantly,
... are generally easy to understand with everyday common sense, and much harder to grasp when phrased as "rules".


For example:
To attack a causal conclusion, one can show that while the cause occurs the effect does not

--> I mean, ok, maybe I am just stink at reading English, but, at a glance, this sentence is completely unintelligible to me. To make any sense of it, I have to stare at it for at least 1-2 minutes and read it at least 5-6 times, because it's so abstract, remote, and confusing... and that's not even counting the additional time I'd need to try to apply it to problems.

--> On the other hand, in practice -- i.e., in specific situations -- this "pattern" is so simple that, given the right context, even a 6-year-old will have no trouble understanding it. (A 6-year-old boy hopes that cardinals will visit his backyard if he puts seeds on the ground. He puts seeds on the ground. No cardinals show up. He learns that he was wrong.) In fact, I'll raise the ante: even lab rats can understand it. (Rat presses lever repeatedly, hoping for cheese. Cheese does not come. Rat eventually learns that its original idea was wrong.)
Clearly, neither a 6-year-old nor a lab rat could crack open the OG and start solving CR problems -- but not for lack of "patterns". The problems are beyond the ken of these critters only because (a) the dense written language is incomprehensible to them, and/or (b) the situations described in the passages (e.g., trade embargoes, per-capita statistics, economic recessions) are beyond the level of what a 6-year-old or a rat can reasonably understand.

In fact -- with the exception of "patterns" involving things that are inherently too abstract for a small child's understanding, like per-capita statistics -- I'm pretty confident that, for just about any CR "pattern" that someone might try to describe, I can give an example that would be quite accessible to a second-grader.
But, once they're generalized into "patterns", extremely intelligent adults suddenly have to study them for hundreds of hours. Hmm.

Of course, if business was slow and I wanted to talk people into signing up for a hundred hours of tutoring, then I might start talking a good game about patterns. Luckily, business is not slow, so I can just tell the truth instead.
(:

In fact, if anyone DOES have "patterns" that can solve even a small fraction of CR problems, then that person should go ahead and contact the major U.S. intelligence agencies right now!!, because (s)he would be holding no less than the key to artificial intelligence. Those "patterns" would be worth literally billions, maybe even trillions, of dollars.

I've seen many students raise their level of accuracy by learning to recognize these patterns.

I've seen that happen, too, but almost always on practice tests. Unfortunately, these students are usually the same ones who get verbal scores of, say, 35, 33, 36, 32, 37 on our CATs or the gmat prep tests, but then walk into the test center and throw down a verbal score in the mid-20s (and whose painful experiences are legion here on the forum).
The problem is that practice tests are, almost without exception, modeled closely on OG and GMAT Prep items -- and so are the prep materials! So, sure, on practice tests, you'll get artificially familiar-looking "patterns". Often, you'll get practice-test problems that are little more than carbon copies of OG problems, with only a few specific nouns changed here and there.

By contrast, my students whose official verbal scores have been higher than the corresponding practice-test marks have, essentially without exception, learned to think about each individual situation in the CR and RC problems, and not to waste their time and cloud their judgment with "rules"/"patterns" that are at best crude simulacra of their own normal thought processes.

In any case, that's enough of this discussion, since it's unlikely to head anywhere other than in circles at this point.
But, empirically speaking ... Of my students who have insisted on the "patterns" approach to CR, literally 100% scored worse on CR after studying than before. Every single one.
Of course, my experience is mine, and others' experience is theirs, and that's that -- but those are some seriously convincing data.

David@VeritasPrep wrote:I do not know why people want to make things more complicated!

Amen brother! Witness!

David@VeritasPrep wrote:Success in critical reasoning is not about memorizing rules, but about understanding arguments.

What I teach on critical reasoning is focus.

Sing it!

ozlemmetje wrote:Hello,

I really try to understand but I think I fail.

I picked answer choice B, bc I thought if these accelerators can be used for more than one group of experiments then the lack of these accelerators cannot be seen as a reason for the decline of these articles.

Can you pls tell me what's wrong with my way of thinking?

I suppose you meant D.

The problem with D is that it doesn't address the essence of the problem, which is the difference between this year and previous years.

As stated, D is something that is true for accelerators in general-and that thus has always been true, both in previous years and now. So, it can't explain a difference between this year and previous years.