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Brian Galvin is the Director of Academic Programs at Veritas Prep, where he oversees all of the company’s GMAT preparation courses.
Admit it: although it will never appear as one of the answer choices, the correct answer to virtually every GMAT question is “who cares?”. Given that x and y are nonzero integers…what is the value of y? Who cares? Which of the following principles, if valid, would support the scientist’s beliefs regarding medieval ecology? Who cares? These situations chosen by GMAT authors to test your problem solving and analytical abilities are, on their own, a bit arbitrary and irrelevant to your interests and expertise. For the most part, you’re only interest in these subjects is going to be the fact that you need to be able to answer the questions to get into business school (and maybe that you’ll see these topics show up on a game of Jeopardy or Trivial Pursuit one day).
Because business schools don’t tend to look at apathy as a positive quality in their applicants, you need to find a reason to care about each of these questions so that you can focus more clearly and have a more vested interest in the answer to that particular question. Critical Reasoning questions, though full of arbitrary subject matter, provide an excellent way to do this by looking to Hollywood for the answer:
Get into character.
As your favorite actors and actresses know, the best way for them to truly embrace their roles on screen is to become the characters they portray, and take ownership of the entire situation. With Critical Reasoning, you can do the same by reading the question stem first, and becoming the character in the courtroom drama that is the GMAT. If your job is to:
Strengthen the conclusion: Become a prosecuting attorney, with ownership of your “case” (the conclusion), seeking out the “smoking gun” piece of evidence that will best sell your case.
Weaken the conclusion: Become a cross-examining attorney, looking for flaws in the “testimony” of the stimulus and looking for the piece of information in the answer choices that will provide an alternate explanation for why the evidence doesn’t lead to the proposed “verdict”, or conclusion.
Draw the conclusion: Become the jury, using the judicial standard that your “verdict” must be true beyond a reasonable doubt. If you can find reasonable doubt with any of the proposed conclusions, you cannot in good conscience select them as the correct answer.
Describe or mimic the reasoning: Become a Court TV reporter and focus more on the technique of the argument than on the subject itself.
By taking ownership of your role within each question, you’ll read the stimulus as someone who is personally invested in the outcome of the question, and not as a passive observer, becoming familiar with the topic matter. The GMAT isn’t much concerned with your ability to become a 90-second expert on the myriad topics – botany, astronomy, politics of small, hypothetical towns – but it does care strongly about your ability to answer the specific questions it asks. By design, the subject matter is designed to generally fall outside the scope of your expertise, to neutralize any subject-specific knowledge you may bring in, and have a “who cares?” quality to it, to test how well you can avoid distraction and focus on the task at hand. The more vested you are in the outcome, the easier it will be for you to pick apart the important components of your job – the same way that you will when you are a post-MBA employee with bonus incentives to improve certain metrics for your company.
If, for example, a question asks you to weaken an author’s conclusion, the advantages to you of playing the role of “cross-examiner” are that you:
• Read the evidence skeptically, looking for holes in the logic that the author uses to reach his conclusion
• Naturally seek out the conclusion of the author so that you can weaken it
• Read the answer choices more enthusiastically, looking for the answer that makes your point (that the author’s argument is flawed) and not simply answering the relatively-arbitrary question overall
These steps will result in a more efficient read of the stimulus, because you’re less prone to distraction when you’re committed to your goal, and to a more internalized understanding of what the correct answer needs to have. Maybe even more importantly, you may even enjoy these questions more, as they become more of a game and less of a chore to read something abstract.
To succeed on Critical Reasoning questions, get into character and give yourself a vested interest in those questions. In doing so, you will more directly approach your role and give yourself a better chance at your Hollywood, happily-ever-after GMAT ending.
Read more GMAT advice on the Veritas Prep blog. Ready to sign up for a GMAT course? Enroll through GMAT Club and save up to $180 (use discount code GMATC10)!
