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Test coming up soon! Struggling with CR and RC questions

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Test coming up soon! Struggling with CR and RC questions

by tri » Wed Mar 25, 2009 5:26 am
Hi all!

I’ve been studying for 3 weeks and I have about 2 1/2 before my test so I would really appreciate any advice you could give me. Keep in mind that I have taken next week off work so I have an entire week dedicated to the GMAT.

I recently took the prep from Manhattan and scored a 680, but struggled quite a bit on the CR and RC sections. What can I do to improve?

For CR, I seem to struggle with timing. I have a difficult time to focus and thus I must read the paragraph a number of times before answering. If it weren’t for the timing, I would be able to answer practically every question. I understand that improving my focus is no small feat especially with so little time, so I thought about adopting a CR strategy in order to approach every question systematically. However, using the strategies I’ve read on the forum and on the Internet, I find myself even slower than before. It always comes down to whether I truly understand the passage and sometimes that requires that I reread it a couple of times. I heard that the Powerscore CR Bible has interesting strategies, should I look it up? Obviously, I wouldn’t be able to go through all of it, but I could check out the summaries.

As for RC, I also have a difficult time reading the passage. I tried to take notes, or read more attentively the first few lines of every paragraph, but nothing has worked. Again, it seems that if I understand the passage well, then I can get the questions right. However, this problem is magnified in RC, since I risk of getting multiple questions wrong in a row. My strategy so far is to read lots of articles on Scientific American, Economist and New York Times websites to help me with my reading focus and speed.

Thinking about it now, maybe I should just focus on improving my time on sentence correction questions in order to give myself a bit more time on CR and RC questions. Even tough, I struggle less with SC questions, it is probably the easiest section to improve in a short amount of time. What do you think?

Honestly, I would be fine with a 680 score on the GMAT, but I don’t want to put too much pressure on my Quant score.

Any help would be appreciated,

Thanks
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by Stacey Koprince » Wed Mar 25, 2009 11:59 am
Received a PM asking me to respond.

As I mentioned in my PM, RC and CR are probably the toughest areas to improve in a short period of time. As such, it's critical for you to try to narrow down your areas of strength vs. weakness. Are you really too slow on all types of CR questions, consistently? Or are there certain types that seem to slow you down most of the time? Ditto on RC, expect expand the question to ask: are you really too slow on all types of RC passages and all types of RC questions? etc.

I also want to caution you: it's great that you have a week to dedicate to study, but it's really hard to "cram" for this test, especially for RC and CR. You may not get where you want to be in such a short period of time. (At the same time, you scored a 680 on your practice test, so perhaps you aren't that far from where you want to be?)

Generally speaking, for both RC and CR, you need
- strategies for how to read and extract the most important info
- strategies for how to understand and correctly analyze / think about the question
- strategies for how to spot and eliminate wrong answers, especially the most tempting ones

Based on your notes, you're definitely struggling with the first one.

For RC, I'd like you to try an exercise.  Go back to problems / passages you're already done from OG and go over them again with your notes from when you first did these.  Now that you've done the problems, checked your answers, and generally know how things were supposed to work, go back and look at (a) what you initially wrote down on your first read-through and (b) what your understanding of the passage was before you started answering questions.  How well do (a) and (b) match what you knew of the passage and questions after you'd done the questions and gone back to correct your answers and analyze everything?  Probably not very well, based on what you're describing.  Where are the disconnects? 

Did you misunderstand the main point of the passage?  If not, did you think the main point was something else? Or were you just not sure what the main point was? If the former, what caused you to think the main point was something else? Do you now understand why that was not the main point? Where is the main point actually located in the passage? How is it presented? Are there any clues that could have helped you to identify it as the main point?

Did you misunderstand the purpose of any of the paragraphs? Or were you not sure of the purpose of any of the paragraphs? (Or were you not even aware that you should try to understand / articulate the purpose of each paragraph?) Going forward, most of the time, the main point / purpose of each paragraph can be found in the first or second sentence (or both combined).

Did you get caught up in confusing detail on your first read-through? The solution to that one is not to get better at understanding the detail. The solution is actually to say - oh, that's confusing, but that's only a detail. I'll ignore that for now. If I get a question on it later, I'll come back to it and try to understand at that point. For now, I only care about the high-level stuff.

Here's another post with RC suggestions: https://www.beatthegmat.com/verbal-strategy-t14035.html

Critical Reasoning is a bit too long and complicated for me to do in a single forum post, unfortunately, so for that I do recommend buying a book. I like my company's book, of course, but just ask around and see what non-biased people recommend. :) Remember that you want something that teaches you how to read and understand the arguments, first. Then you also need something that teaches you how to identify and answer the different types of CR questions.
Please note: I do not use the Private Messaging system! I will not see any PMs that you send to me!!

Stacey Koprince
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by pJackson79 » Wed Mar 25, 2009 11:55 pm
I would suggest that given your time constraint, you ignore RC since it can be very difficult to improve in RC in a short amount of time (just my opinion). It is hard to learn new techniques to improve comprehension. Instead, you might consider just focusing on CR and gaining a better feel for how those questions work so you can make gains there. Just a thought...I hope it helps. Good luck!
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