I finished my Official Guide set of Critical Reasoning problems last night and went through my normal process of putting in all my answers and times into my OG Tracker. I usually wait until I finish all the problems in a section before inputting them. The tracker has all the answers loaded, so I immediately see whether or not I got the answer correct. For a good set, I’ll get them all right, or maybe one or two wrong. For this particular critical reasoning set, my accuracy was only 68%.
Unfortunately, the real problem I had with this subject was the Manhattan GMAT prep itself. The MGMAT books are usually extremely helpful and have definitely improved my overall score thus far. However, I don’t think they did a great job with the Draw the Conclusion section.
When I got to the “In Action†problems at the end of this chapter, I got all 10 out of 10 questions correct. I didn’t fully realize this at the time, but they were all brain-dead easy. I just assumed the OG problems would be just as easy. I took the exact same approach to my OG problems and thus ended up with such a terrible score.
The problem with the MGMAT Draw the Conclusion problems and training is that they’re both too simplistic. Most of them make the conclusion to simply be an extension of a premise, or even just a restatement of a premise. For the harder CR GMAT questions, this strategy simply won’t work. You’re not going to get to a 700 GMAT level question and just see a regurgitation of a premise – they wouldn’t make it that easy on you.
My learning from all of this is that you do need to take a “predictive leap†on draw the conclusion questions. You definitely have to go through each of the answer choices and see which one makes the most sense and is the least wrong or irrelevant.
