Critical reasoning is killing me

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vishal.pathak: Master | Next Rank: 500 Posts; Posts: 176; Joined: Thu Sep 22, 2011 5:32 am; Thanked: 5 times

Critical reasoning is killing me

by vishal.pathak » Fri Mar 23, 2012 1:45 pm

Hi Everyone,

I have 1 month left for my exam. I am very bad at critical reasoning. I have gone through Powerscore's book on critical reasoning but I have neither been able to improve my accuracy nor my speed

I take a little over 2 mins in most CR questions and the accuracy is close to 50%

Can somebody please point me to a resource that can help me

All thoughts are welcome

Regards,
Vishal

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Source: Beat The GMAT — GMAT Strategy | Fri Mar 23, 2012 1:45 pm

sam2304: Legendary Member; Posts: 1239; Joined: Tue Apr 26, 2011 6:25 am; Thanked: 233 times; Followed by:26 members; GMAT Score:680

by sam2304 » Sun Mar 25, 2012 10:20 am

There are number of ways which will help you increase your CR performance.

* Try taking notes, it helps you comprehend better. Initially it will take time but you will increase speed gradually when you get used to note taking. You will learn to make it as short as possible and save time on them. Moreover taking notes keeps you active and engaged in verbal section. Make the notes as simple as possible and avoid unnecessary things to understand better.
* The next thing is to find your weak question types. You might be weak in draw a conclusion, weaken or strengthen questions. So find that out and try to find some pattern in each type.
* Prephasing helps you a lot better, but first you need to understand the argument so learn to take notes.
* Use POE, there are innumerable right answers for any single situation so you have to use the process of elimination instead of finding the right one.
* If you are looking for words or ways to eliminate an anwer, you are wasting time. Try to eliminate based on reason, you might be obsessed with powerscore techniques. Believe me, it helps a lot but its detrimental sometimes. You might be trying to categorize the answer choices to which wrong answer type it will fall in, you are wasting time doing that instead of finding reasons. So forget powerscore techs and start over.
* Redo OG problems and read every explanation for why the wrong answers are wrong and right answers are right.

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