Beat The GMAT Team's Featured Posts for 2010 - Critical Reasoning
2010 has been a special year for the Beat The GMAT community. This fall we celebrated our 100 000th member and this important milestone reminded us all that we are, first and foremost, a community built by our members for our members. We wanted to thank all of our members, both regular test takers and experts, by featuring some of our favorite threads from our forums. Your wonderful contributions are much appreciated by MBA hopefuls everywhere!
Critical Reasoning or CR is one of those question types that you either like a whole lot or you dont enjoy at all. Theres great variety in CR on the GMAT, but it all boils down to your passion in analyzing arguments. If youre having difficulty doing this, you can always turn to our community for help. Weve noticed that this year, people started putting in a lot more thought in their answers to CR questions, with some going as far as to break down arguments to their smallest parts.
Evaluating the argument about uranium
gmat_perfect posted a GMAT question which asked the test taker to evaluate the argument. This is a comparatively rare question type, which is why some users are uncomfortable with it. It also requires you to analyze the argument and try to weaken and strengthen it at the same time. Prashantbhardwaj and reply2spg both provided detailed answers, whereas chris@veritasprep supplied some good advice on evaluating the argument and CR in general:
One thing I have certainly noticed with harder CR problems is that the more obvious assumption/flaw will not be addressed in the answer choices. Instead, a more subtle and difficult assumption will be addressed and you will not be able to come up with that on your own.
Read the entire discussion here.
Boldface questions a test takers nightmare
GMAT hopefuls always complain about boldface questions. While theres a good chance you wont even see such a question on test day, only the prospect of dealing with a boldface question scares most of us. shivrajshekhawat was looking for some good strategy to tackle this type of question and he received solid expert feedback from jen@knewton and David@VeritasPrep. Heres an excerpt of that discussion:
My number one approach tip might sound a little counter-intuitive: When you first read the stimulus, you should actually read it as though nothing were bold. Take a few seconds to identify the conclusion and evidence as you would in any other question, THEN compare those with the bold statements.
Check out this very useful thread here.
Timing is always an issue
Experts always agree that timing is essential on the GMAT. Most of them also recommend spending between 1 minute and 30 seconds and 1 minute and 45 seconds on each CR question. But what to do when youre taking too long to answer a CR question? kashefian asked this exact question. He had a good hit rate in CR, but it would take him about 2 minutes and 30 seconds to answer one question. rkanthilal presented his strategy of dealing with the time pressure:
If you are getting a lot of questions correct but you are taking too long, I suspect that it is because you are getting stuck on a couple of similar answers. Just remember that it is impossible for two answers to be correct and it will never come down to a judgment call. There is always a hidden flaw in one of the answers that will make it incorrect beyond a doubt.
You can read the thread by clicking here.
Of course, our forums are just teeming with awesome advice. If you happen to stumble upon a gem, please share it with us in the comments section!