Critical Reasoning Strategy

[matthew.e.salmon]

Critical reasoning questions have been giving me a little bit of difficulty so I have been considering different approaches / strategies to these types of problems. Over the last couple of weeks, I have been switching back and forth between different forms of diagramming and note taking and I think I have just confused myself. In an effort to get to the bottom of this, I looked back to my first CAT that I took prior to class to see how I performed on CR questions. The results were pretty telling: In comparison to performance on my recent CATs (CATs 3 and 4 taken after the class was completed), I got a higher percentage of CR questions correct, my average difficulty of right and wrong answers was ~30-40 points higher, and I did the problems at faster on average (by ~15-20 seconds w/ no guessing on CAT 1 that would skew results).

I am taking the GMAT in 4 weeks and wondering what I should do? Should I abandon all CR strategies that I have learned over the past couple months and just go with a more "natural" approach?

I should also note that this is the only problem type that I experienced this for - all other MGMAT strategies have proved to be very effective.

Any insight would be greatly appreciated,

Matt

[tim]

while you are working on improving your performance, you should be trying as many approaches as possible to see what works best for you. once you have found what works best, go with that. it sounds like you have some idea of what will work best for you on the GMAT, so you should keep that in mind as you take the test..