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Which Critical Reasoning question type drives you crazy? Boldface? Find the Assumption? Inference?

I’ve put together what I’m calling the Master Resource List for Critical Reasoning. A couple of disclaimers. First, this list includes only free resources, no paid ones. There are a lot of good resources out there that cost some money—they’re just not on this list!

Second, this list for Critical Reasoning is limited to my own articles. I’m not trying to claim that only my articles are good enough to make such a list—far from it. I’m most familiar with my own articles, so that’s what I’m using. (And, okay, I will admit that I think the Manhattan Prep Critical Reasoning process is the best one out there. But I’m biased. ?) Read more

Many a true word is said in jest.—I don’t know, but I heard it from my mother.

I think that Critical Reasoning is my favorite part of the exam because it is the purest of the pure.  I’ve written before that the GMAT is an aptitude test rather than a knowledge test.  On the simplest level, in both the quant and the verbal, the exam tests a logic system: be specific, don’t assume, and don’t rationalize.  Nowhere is this more true than in Critical Reasoning—there is no mathematical foundation work nor are there grammar rules.  As Gertrude Stein used to say, There is no there, there.  Of course, she was talking about Oakland. . .fill in your own joke.  When I’m being* mean to students, I say, If you know what all the words mean, you should get them all right.

But students don’t get them all right.  Even those who know what all the words mean.  Why is that?  Because people think.  They assume, they rationalize, and they inject opinions.  Why is this bad?  Because it’s a game.  Critical Reasoning doesn’t take place in reality.  Here’s an analogy I thought up all by myself, so it isn’t in the Strategy Guide: Critical Reasoning bears the same relationship to reality that Monopoly does.  When you play Monopoly, you don’t think about how reasonable free parking or building hotels is, you exploit the rules.  It’s the same thing.  A lot of OG arguments involve medical issues, but you hardly ever care whether people live or die because that’s usually not the conclusion.   Play the game.

As a by the way, if students struggle with the CR, it’s often half of their trouble in the quant.  Folks are not specific; they read the question or the given incorrectly.  And they don’t recognize the types and patterns.  In other words, they don’t play that game.  However, folks fail to notice these mistakes because they are too consumed with worry about their math foundations.  Conversely, engineers with strong foundations also suffer here, especially in the DS because they try to use brute mathematical force instead of playing the game.  It is a behavioral problem.  People don’t do; they think.  Don’t think—much like in life, it only gets you into trouble.
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Recently, I published an article challenging those going for a 750+ to answer a certain Quant question in 30 seconds. I received a lot of positive feedback about that article—and requests for more of the same.

I’m happy to oblige: here’s a GMATPrep CR problem. The normal timeframe is about 2 minutes—but if you’re going for a 750+, you’d need to be able to answer something like this much more quickly. Read more

A colleague here at Manhattan GMAT forwarded me this infographic about the value (or lack thereof) of an MBA. Though the author doesn’t explicitly say so, the statistics she chose to display indicate that she believes an MBA is by and large overvalued.

The great irony here, of course, is that the training you get as an MBA is exactly the training that sharpens your ability to think critically about arguments like this one. In fact, that’s what the GMAT actually tests with its Critical Reasoning section. Just to demonstrate, I’d like to break down this infographic from top to bottom, using the same strategy I teach my students: pointing out the (flawed) assumptions necessary to conclude that an MBA is overvalued.

Premise: The cost of an MBA program including expenses is $120,000.

Assumption #1: Students actually pay all of that $120,000.

Attack: I’d estimate that around half of my MBA classmates had some scholarship or corporate support that significantly defrayed their cost. This, by the way, is probably the most underrated reason to ace your GMAT “ a high GMAT score can open the door to many merit-based scholarships.

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We’ve talked about various types of Assumption Family questions in the past (find the assumption, strengthen, weaken, and evaluate the conclusion), but we haven’t yet tackled a Flaw question. This is the least frequently tested of the 5 Assumption Family question types, so you can ignore this type if you aren’t looking for an extra-high score. If you do want an 85^th+ percentile verbal score, though, then you have to make sure you know how to tackle Flaw questions.

If you haven’t yet, read this article before we try our GMATPrep problem. Then set your timer for 2 minutes and go!

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Eliminating Bad Answer Choices will help to save you time and give you better odds at guessing, but bad answer choices are fewer and further between on the more difficult end of the GMAT. Even the correct answer might, at first glance, look irrelevant to the conclusion. Oftentimes on difficult CR questions, students can get down to two or three plausible answer choices, but are forced to guess because they aren’t 100% confident in their answer. And while this is often a good thing” remember the test is adaptive and tough questions often mean that you are doing well” it’s important to have a strategy to help better your chances when you are trying to make that final decision.

One of my favorite TV shows, Pardon the Interruption, used to have a regular feature called Good Cop, Bad Cop. The two hosts would choose an issue in sports and pick sides- will Tiger Woods win the golf tournament this weekend? The good cop would make arguments for why Tiger would win the tournament while the bad cop would make arguments for why he wouldn’t. The set-up was farcical and the hosts would choose sides arbitrarily, but I loved it because you would hear reasoning for both sides of an issue. Neither person argued for the side they truly believed in 100% of the time, but they pretended they cared deeply about one side of an issue, made a case for their side, and would preemptively rebut the argument that they knew the other host would make. That’s how I approach Critical Reasoning on the GMAT- on one question I’m the project manager for Hotco Oil Burners (OG #97) and the next I’m President of Country Z (#66). But no matter what role I’m playing, I am constantly asking myself what would help and hurt my argument. Let’s try a problem out to see how this works:

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This week, we’re going to discuss one of the most common critical reasoning problem types: Strengthen the Conclusion. Strengthen questions belong to the Assumption Family of questions; we’ll talk more about that later.

If you haven’t yet, read this article before we try our GMATPrep problem. Then set your timer for 2 minutes and go!

In many corporations, employees are being replaced by automated equipment in order to save money. However, many workers who lose their jobs to automation will need government assistance to survive, and the same corporations that are laying people off will eventually pay for that assistance through increased taxes and unemployment insurance payments.

Which of the following, if true, most strengthens the author’s argument?

(A) Many workers who have already lost their jobs to automation have been unable to find new jobs.

(B) Many corporations that have failed to automate have seen their profits decline.

(C) Taxes and unemployment insurance are paid also by corporations that are not automating.

(D) Most of the new jobs created by automation pay less than the jobs eliminated by automation did.

(E) The initial investment in machinery for automation is often greater than the short-term savings in labor costs.

Okay, now that you’ve got an answer, let’s use our 4-step CR process.

Step 1: Identify the Question

First, we read the question stem: Read more

GMAT topics generally fall into one of two categories: things that people know and things that people don’t. When the average adult doesn’t know much about a topic, it’s easy to make a GMAT question. Exponents, triangles inscribed in circles, proper usage of the present perfect tense, and pretty much every Data Sufficiency question fall into this category. These questions don’t have to be especially tricky to be difficult.

But when the GMAT takes a topic that people do have some familiarity with- basic algebra or subject-verb agreement, for example- the GMAT needs a way to complicate the problem, oftentimes by preying upon the simple mistakes we all make. This is exactly what I see with Critical Reasoning questions. We make illogical arguments in our daily lives and refute other people’s illogical arguments with illogical rebuttals. I went to Notre Dame and therefore know that the University of Southern California will not win a national championship in football this year. Why? Because I hate USC. Is this logic sound? Probably not. My liking for USC’s football team doesn’t mean much when it comes to whether or not they will be successful this year. In the real world, we look for whether a fellow football fan likes or dislikes our favorite team before deciding whether they make a good argument. We look for a (D) or an (R) at the bottom of CSPAN before deciding whether a politician sounds intelligent. But if we can ignore these irrelevant items and focus on the point an argument is trying to make, we will be much more likely to spot bad answer choices in Critical Reasoning arguments and be able to quickly eliminate them on the GMAT. Read more

This week, we’re going to discuss one of the most common critical reasoning problem types: Inference. (Note: our current materials call these questions Draw A Conclusion, but we’re changing the name next month!) If you haven’t yet, read this article before we try our GMATPrep problem. Then set your timer for 2 minutes and go!

* When a polygraph test is judged inconclusive, this is no reflection on the examinee. Rather, such a judgment means that the test has failed to show whether the examinee was truthful or untruthful. Nevertheless, employers will sometimes refuse to hire a job applicant because of an inconclusive polygraph test result.

Which of the following conclusions can most properly be drawn from the information above?

(A) Most examinees with inconclusive polygraph test results are in fact untruthful.

(B) Polygraph tests should not be used by employers in the consideration of job applicants.

(C) An inconclusive polygraph test result is sometimes unfairly held against the examinee.

(D) A polygraph test indicating that an examinee is untruthful can sometimes be mistaken.

(E) Some employers have refused to consider the results of polygraph tests when evaluating job applicants.

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This week, we’re going to discuss one of the most common critical reasoning problem types: Weaken the Conclusion. If you haven’t yet, read this article before we try our GMATPrep problem. Then set your timer for 2 minutes and go!

* Tiger sharks are common in the waters surrounding Tenare Island. Usually tiger sharks feed on smaller sharks, but sometimes they have attacked tourists swimming and surfing at Tenare’s beaches. This has hurt Tenare’s tourism industry, which is second only to its fishing industry in annual revenues. In order to help the economy, therefore, the mayor of the island has proposed an ongoing program to kill any tiger sharks within a mile of the beaches.

Which of the following, if true, most strongly calls into question the likelihood that implementation of the mayor’s proposal will have the desired consequences?
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