GMAT Strategy

hi -- responding to a private message (i have a huge backlog of such messages, after being on vacation for a couple of weeks).

here are a couple of lines that may contain the crux of the problem:

I studied hard for the past 4 months slogging day and night
...
I had a strategy for every type of question related to CR

from these two lines, i'm getting the idea that you may not really understand how the critical reasoning section works -- it seems that you think that you can just memorize a bunch of strategies and then turn around and execute them on exam day.
that's not how this test works. the critical reasoning section is just what it says it is: a test of your reasoning and thinking skills -- especially on the most common question types (e.g. strengthening and weakening questions).

the point of the CR section -- especially strengthening, weakening, and "explain the situation" questions -- is to mimic FLEXIBLE REAL-WORLD THINKING.
if you study too much for these types of questions, or if you try to memorize rules for them, then you will get WORSE at solving them.

as an analogy, imagine trying to memorize rules for common-sense situations in the real world -- situations involving personal relationships and interactions, everyday situations involving purchases or other such life decisions, etc. i think it's pretty obvious that any sort of memorization-based approach would be a horrible failure in these kinds of situations.
my point is that most of the critical reasoning section is the same kind of thing! these questions are basically meant to test your real-world, common-sense-type thinking skills; if you approach them by intense studying and memorization, you are not going to do well on them.


for further improvement, the most important thing you can do is change the entire way in which you view this exam. you won't improve on the verbal section until you get COMPLETELY RID of the "study study study memorize memorize memorize" mentality.

this is the biggest problem i see in the above. it's also a very common problem, especially among the demographic that populates this forum, but being very common doesn't make it any less of a problem.

good luck

srivats_nps wrote:If solving too many questions on this category would lower my score, then what is the best method/strategy to improve my success rate under timed conditions on this section ? Could you please help me out on this ?

the most important element of success at cr is truly understanding the nature of the problems -- and understanding that will give you the right mentality.

namely:
critical reasoning questions REQUIRE you to "reason critically" -- in other words, to apply normal human intuition / common sense, combined with close attention to what is and what isn't the actual subject of the argument. it is impossible to defeat the cr section with a set of memorized rules, no matter how extensive.

here's a little bit of perspective on the situation:
students who try to defeat cr through memorization are, in effect, trying to find a set of rules that will approximate or replace human intuition / common sense.
there is actually a name for that kind of effort -- "strong artificial intelligence" (strong ai) -- and that effort has so far been a total failure, despite the investment of literally decades of research and trillions of dollars.
so, basically, any student who tries to defeat cr by memorizing a set of rules is trying to invent strong ai, single-handedly, in his or her living room. needless to say, that will fail, and it will fail spectacularly.

also -- it gets worse: if you try to learn cr by memorizing rules, you WILL get worse at it.
think about the purpose of memorization: the purpose of memorization is to get rid of thinking. this is actually the only purpose for any memorization of anything, ever -- to bypass the "thinking" part of the problem. that is a good thing, of course, in certain situations -- for instance, you really wouldn't want people having to think about which side of the road they should drive on -- but it won't work here.

instead:

whenever you learn any kind of rule, always treat it as a GUIDELINE for your NORMAL THOUGHT PROCESSES.

here's an example (not from cr, but you get the point):
when you analyze a business transaction, one very generally applicable principle is always examine the self-interest of the parties involved.
this is obviously not a formula that can be memorized -- there are no hard rules that govern what "self-interest" is in any particular situation -- but it is a useful guideline. once someone has it in mind, he or she can use his or her own common sense and intuition to determine exactly what "self-interest" means in the situation at hand.

this is also what you should do with cr "rules" and principles. they should NEVER replace human intuition and common sense (because that's impossible); they should just complement or guide those things.

pemdas wrote:is your notion of "inherent abilities" standing close to "gut" feeling? If so, a few mistakes will occur in the verbal section by applying "gut" feeling, as one will be directed by emotions and not literal translation of the CR stimuli and RC passage texts into logical structures.

it's unlikely that "emotions" will become involved, since these passages are about topics that are as unemotional as topics can possibly be.

the problem here is that you're confusing intuition with emotion. they aren't the same. in order to process ANY reasonably complex system adequately, humans have to use intuition -- our brains just don't have a fast enough "clock speed" to apply rules to everything all the time, and/or we don't understand what the rules even are but can still reason by analogy.
for instance, think about watching someone walk, and deciding whether that person is "walking funny" (injured, or disabled, or whatever). sure you could probably formulate rules by which to judge this, but the judgment is always going to be mostly intuitive -- there are way too many variables involved in something like walking for us to process the problem with conscious rules.
the same thing is true for CR problems.

in fact,
human critical reasoning is so complex that NO ONE has EVER been able to simulate it with rules.
there's actually a name for the attempt to do this: it's called "strong artificial intelligence", and it has never been successfully accomplished by anyone, ever.
if you are trying to solve CR problems purely with "logical structures", then you are basically trying to invent strong artificial intelligence all by yourself while you study for the GMAT -- not gonna happen.

--

this whole "logical structures" thing also ignores the fact that many -- maybe even most -- CR problems have steps that are NOT strictly logical structures.
for instance, in OG12 CR 109, in order to realize that the correct answer is correct, you need to realize that "people will probably get caught doing X" translates into "people will do X less often".
this is NOT a logical structure; it's a common-sense intuitive deduction, based on the way people operate in the real world according to incentives and disincentives. if you try to solve this problem using purely "logical structures" you will probably mistakenly conclude that the correct answer on that problem is "irrelevant" because they don't spell out the idea that prank callers will be less bold if the potential of being caught is out there.

this problem is not unique in this regard. MOST strengthening/weakening/evaluation problem require some step that is a common-sense extension of the statements in the answer choices.
this is actually the whole point of the CR section -- to be impenetrable to people who think of things in terms of X's and Y's and NAND gates and DeMorgan laws, but to be accessible to people who combine an appropriate focus with the judicious use of real-world intuition.