Hello,
The other night, I took a practice test, and much to my surprise, I absolutely rocked the quantitative portion (at least relative to how I had performed on other practice tests). But also, much to my surprise, my critical reasoning score plummeted.
As I usually do, I went through each problem I got wrong and recorded notes on what I missed and what I need to practice more on. While reviewing my notes, I realized that I am having a much more difficult time identifying the source of my critical reasoning errors and I can't find an overall problem that I can use to study and improve. To put that another way, when I get a quantitative problem wrong, it is easy to read through the problems and identify not only what I did wrong on that particular problem, but also what I was missing on the overall concept being addressed in that problem (i.e., I missed a permutation question, but after looking it over and assessing what I did wrong, I realized not only specifically what I did wrong but also conceptually). I can't seem to do that with critical reasoning.
Looking over all the critical reasoning questions I got wrong, it almost seems like each one I got wrong was in its own little world. There is no underlying concept that I seem to be misunderstanding; it is just that I reasoned one answer was more efficient than another. In the quantitative, I can isolate conceptually what I did wrong and improve on that concept, but in the critical reasoning, I can't identify what concept I am missing. I have read through books and blogs and know all about untangling the stimulus, identifying the conclusion, understanding the question stem, etc., but then when I get the problem wrong, I can't determine anything from my error other than I got the problem wrong.
Has anyone else felt this same frustration with critical reasoning? How exactly do you prepare or study, or better yet learn from your mistakes when you can't even identify exactly what mistake you are making?
Thank you!
The other night, I took a practice test, and much to my surprise, I absolutely rocked the quantitative portion (at least relative to how I had performed on other practice tests). But also, much to my surprise, my critical reasoning score plummeted.
As I usually do, I went through each problem I got wrong and recorded notes on what I missed and what I need to practice more on. While reviewing my notes, I realized that I am having a much more difficult time identifying the source of my critical reasoning errors and I can't find an overall problem that I can use to study and improve. To put that another way, when I get a quantitative problem wrong, it is easy to read through the problems and identify not only what I did wrong on that particular problem, but also what I was missing on the overall concept being addressed in that problem (i.e., I missed a permutation question, but after looking it over and assessing what I did wrong, I realized not only specifically what I did wrong but also conceptually). I can't seem to do that with critical reasoning.
Looking over all the critical reasoning questions I got wrong, it almost seems like each one I got wrong was in its own little world. There is no underlying concept that I seem to be misunderstanding; it is just that I reasoned one answer was more efficient than another. In the quantitative, I can isolate conceptually what I did wrong and improve on that concept, but in the critical reasoning, I can't identify what concept I am missing. I have read through books and blogs and know all about untangling the stimulus, identifying the conclusion, understanding the question stem, etc., but then when I get the problem wrong, I can't determine anything from my error other than I got the problem wrong.
Has anyone else felt this same frustration with critical reasoning? How exactly do you prepare or study, or better yet learn from your mistakes when you can't even identify exactly what mistake you are making?
Thank you!
