I have written this one for one of the questions in a Private Message, but I think it will be helpful to many:
PR, Kaplan, and other sources of CR are often misleading as only ETS CR is right and has a certain format. I have noticed that Kaplan was pretty similar, but more complicated. PR seemed to have a much greater twist to it.
What helped me most with CR was:
- Answer qeustions without looking over the answer choices
this way nothing temps me
- Summarizing the passages
- Practice finding assumptions of arguments - this is quite helpful. Just take any argument out there and practice summarizing and finding the assumptions.
Reading was much harder, I can only say what I did, since you did nto say what you were doing. I improved tremendously after I started to stop after each passage and summarize my readings. The readmap concept outlined in many textbooks. I think this was most helpful.
Another element was reading a lot of literature just to get used to extensive reading times and improve "absorbing" skills for various levels of BS. I was very bad focusing/concentrating as I often start thinking about other things. I also tried to question author's points but that was difficult and required a lot of practice. In the review mode, I would often re-read the passages to see why I made a mistake and the second time it was much more obvious and I sort of "learnt" how to figure out a trap or predict a question. Sometimes I just knew this question was coming.
I did not do any mistakes on the "Topic" or "title" of this passage could be ..... those were always fairly easy - the scope quesitons. It is good to understand that.
There is much more to the scope than many think. Very many questions have answer choices that are very good but are out of scope. I would estimate that you can help it in 30% of CR"s understanding the scope correctly. Very often the passage will talk about passanger cars and the answer choice will be about cars or trucks. Sometimes, the passage will talk about costs, and the answer choice will be about efficiency, profit, and ROI, which are not related. (though they may in some questions where new information is actually needed to answer the question or bring clarification.)
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