David@VeritasPrep wrote:These three types of questions becoming seemingly more common seems to point to what Ron has said, the GMAC does not want you to be simply classifying and relying on tricks for different types. The want you to THINK. They are leading you toward a more natural style of reasoning and not so many tricks and so forth.
yes.
in fact, the same can be said for ALL critical reasoning problems on this exam (with the possible exception of "draw your own conclusion" problems, which test the rigorous kind of thinking that one would use to, say, read a contract).
it's impossible to get very far or CR with "tricks" or "rules". (in fact, if you could make a set of rules that could, even somewhat, answer a non-negligible fraction of these questions, then you would thereby have invented "strong artificial intelligence" and would be well on your way to becoming the richest person in the history of the world.)
worse, trying to memorize scads of such things will actually
diminish your ability to perform the kinds of everyday human reasoning actually required by the questions!
you really have to be careful with "studying" for this stuff.
if you take a
sensible approach to the task -- i.e., understanding that you mainly just have to use your own everyday intuition, but that you have to
aim that intuition
more precisely than you otherwise might -- then you'll be fine, and you'll properly identify any shortcomings in your approach.
on the other hand, if your approach to the task is to try to memorize a huge set of "rules", then it's practically guaranteed that, after memorizing all that stuff, you'll be worse at CR than you were before you ever opened up a GMAT book.
in other words, the stakes are higher when it comes to studying for the CR section.
if you do unnecessary studying for, say, math, then that's not going to
hurt you; it may be a waste of your time, but at least it won't be anything
worse than a waste of your time.
on the other hand, if you go about "studying" CR in the wrong way - or if you "study" and "classify"
tasks you already understand intuitively - then the externalities will be tangibly
negative: you'll be actively rooting out the processes that actually
work on CR problems, and replacing them with "rules" that at best are a poor simulacrum of human reasoning, and at worst will actively mislead you.
caveat lector!
