GMAT Critical Reasoning: 8 Essential Tips

Critical Reasoning (CR) questions are at the heart of what is tested on the GMAT, because CR questions directly challenge your thinking skills across a wide range of situations that require critical analysis, logical reasoning, and attention to detail.

In fact, some students find that Critical Reasoning GMAT questions are the trickiest questions they encounter in the Verbal section of the GMAT. To master GMAT CR, you must be able to employ smart, efficient strategies for analyzing arguments and eliminating answer choices that are carefully and cleverly worded to trick, trap, and confuse you.

Critical Reasoning questions are at the heart of what is tested on the GMAT.

In this article, I’ll give you 8 tips that can help you truly master GMAT Critical Reasoning, discuss why shortcuts and gimmicks won’t help you make serious gains in your Verbal score when it comes to GMAT CR, and lay out an effective pacing strategy for tackling CR questions. But first, let’s take a look at some Critical Reasoning basics and review the different CR question types.

Of the 36 Verbal questions you see on the GMAT, between 9 and 13 will be Critical Reasoning questions.

GMAT Critical Reasoning questions are designed to test your skill in making, analyzing, and evaluating arguments and plans.

Each Critical Reasoning question begins with a written stimulus, usually a short passage of about 100 words or fewer, which is followed by a question and 5 answer choices.

The question will always ask you to determine which of the 5 answer choices is logically related to the stimulus in a particular way (we’ll look at what those ways are shortly).

Like GMAT Reading Comprehension passages, Critical Reasoning passages can be related to subjects such as economics, science, music theory, politics, and psychology, to name a few, but you don’t need to have any specialized knowledge of these subjects in order to answer CR questions.

Any information that you might need that is not contained within the CR passage will be information that is considered “common knowledge” for anyone with a high school (or even middle school) education.

For example, in evaluating the logic of CR answer choices in order to determine which is correct, you might need to know that profit equals the money taken in from selling something minus the cost of selling that thing, but you would never be required to know the relationship between mortgage interest rates and bond yields.

The former is common knowledge, while the latter is specialized knowledge in economics.

Aside from common sense and a basic level of education, all of the information you’ll need to answer a GMAT CR question will be within the written stimulus.

CR questions are not testing your level of knowledge about a particular topic; they’re testing your ability to logically evaluate information that is given to you.

The “author” of a GMAT CR passage may be some unidentified person writing about a plan or a proposal, a town’s mayor arguing for the implementation of a new law, or a concerned citizen who concludes that there are too many cars using the freeway near her house.

While the authors of these arguments vary from question to question, one commonality that they all share is that they assume that they are correct, whatever their argument may be. In other words, they assume that their arguments are sound and logical. Your job will be to parse their arguments — what conclusion has the author reached?

What evidence does she give to support the conclusion?

What assumptions does she make? — and to analyze, in some way, statements (answer choices) related to those arguments.

So, you won’t need to know anything about local politics or city planning to analyze the arguments of the town mayor or the concerned citizen, but you will need attention to detail, skill in the use of logic, careful, clear thinking, and an ability to sidestep mental traps and cognitive biases.

Now that we know the basic structure of CR questions and what they test, let’s take a look at the different types of CR questions you can encounter on the GMAT.

There are 11 major GMAT Critical Reasoning question types:

• Find the Assumption: These questions ask you to select the answer choice that presents an assumption upon which the author’s argument depends.
• Weaken the Argument: These questions ask you to select the answer choice that presents a fact that would weaken or hurt the author’s argument.
• Strengthen the Argument: These questions ask you to select the answer choice that presents a fact that would support or help the author’s argument.
• Resolve a Paradox: These questions ask you to select the answer choice that presents a fact that would resolve a situation that appears to be (but is not actually) paradoxical.
• Cause and Effect: In general, these questions ask you to weaken, strengthen, or evaluate an argument that is based on cause-and-effect reasoning.
• Inference: These questions ask you to select the answer choice that presents an unwritten conclusion that must be true based on only the information presented in the passage.
• Find the Conclusion: These questions ask you to select the answer choice that presents a conclusion that is best supported by the passage.
• Evaluate the Argument: These questions ask you to select the answer choice that would best help you determine whether the given argument is well-constructed or poorly constructed.
• Logical Flaw: These questions ask you to select the answer choice that presents a flaw in the argument’s reasoning.
• Complete the Passage: These questions, which are hybrids with other question types, ask you to select the answer choice that best completes an uncompleted passage.
• Method of Reasoning and Bold Face: These questions ask you to determine the way that a passage is logically organized or structured.
• Of those 11 question types, the first 3 — Assumption, Weaken, and Strengthen — are the most common, but you never know what mix of question types you’ll see on any given GMAT, so it’s important to be prepared for all of them. Luckily, all of the various GMAT CR question types call upon the same key skills: your ability to analyze an argument, your ability to understand what the question is asking you to find, and your ability to find that thing (and not something that the question isn’t asking you to find).

So, let’s take a look at how to best refine and implement the skills you’ll need to conquer GMAT Critical Reasoning.

Every argument is composed of 3 key components: a premise or premises, which are the facts that form the foundation of the argument; one or more assumptions on which the argument is based; and a conclusion, which is supported by the premise.

There also may be some background information given in a CR passage, to add context to the argument (ex. The Turkey Lodge has been a free meeting space for community groups in the Town of Gobble for more than 40 years). It can be helpful to think of an argument as a math problem:

(any background info) + Premise + Assumption = Conclusion

To effectively analyze a passage presented in a GMAT CR question, it’s essential that you are able to identify which sentences provide evidence or background and which sentence presents the conclusion.

Remember, CR passages are quite brief — generally a handful of sentences — so identifying the function of the different sentences shouldn’t take long, once you know what to look for. With that in mind, let’s delve a little deeper into the 3 components of an argument.

Premise (Evidence): A premise is a fact that supports the argument’s conclusion and is used to build the argument. Such facts typically provide reasons for believing that the conclusion is correct or justification for the conclusion.

In other words, premises are the evidence provided by authors of Critical Reasoning arguments. This evidence may come in the form of statistics, observations, or results of scientific studies, to give a few examples.

The important thing to remember about premises given in a GMAT CR passage is that they are always statements of fact. You must consider any premise in a CR passage true.

Assumption: Unlike premises, assumptions are not stated in the passage. An assumption is an unwritten piece of information that has to be true in order for the logic of a given argument to work.

In other words, if an argument‘s assumptions are found to be incorrect, the argument will fall apart. Thus, a vital part of any argument is its assumptions, because without them, the argument’s conclusion could not be true. Think of assumptions as the glue that connects the evidence to the conclusion.

You don’t see the glue — the information isn’t written on the page — but without it, the evidence and the conclusion don’t form a seamless whole.

Conclusion: The conclusion is the statement that an argument’s premises support. Conclusions come in the form of ideas, viewpoints, recommendations, suggestions, and plans of action, to name a few. Authors tend to use specific keywords to indicate that a conclusion is about to follow. Some common conclusion keywords are the following:

Therefore
In conclusion
Thus
Hence
Consequently
As a consequence
Accordingly
It follows that
For this reason
As a result
This shows that
It can be concluded that
Clearly
should
ought to
must
so

Of course, logic and critical analysis should always prevail when you’re looking for the conclusion in an argument, but these words are often useful cues that what follows is indeed a conclusion.

Since GMAT CR questions ask you to evaluate how various statements relate to the logic of a given argument, a great way to train for CR is to identify the argument’s key components.

In the beginning of your preparation with GMAT practice questions in Critical Reasoning, as you’re reading CR passages, identify the specific sentence or sentences that represent either a premise or a conclusion.

Doing so will also help you to notice any gaps in the argument’s logic — that is, assumptions, without which the evidence does not logically lead to the conclusion.

Let’s test these skills with a realistic GMAT Critical Reasoning practice question. Try to identify the premises and conclusion in the following passage, and of course, the assumption upon which the argument depends — in this case, the correct answer.

Energy Analyst: Given the amount of sunlight in our area of the world, even if the roof of the average house in our area of the world were completely covered with solar panels, the panels would provide only about two-thirds of the electrical power used by the appliances a house typically has. So, in our area of the world, rooftop solar will never be the sole source of electrical power for houses.

Which of the following is an assumption on which the argument is based?

A. Electrically powered household appliances will not in general be redesigned to use around half the power that such appliances use today.
B. A household would not save money by generating two-thirds of the electrical power it uses by using rooftop solar panels.
C. People in the energy analyst’s area of the world are not concerned about the effects on the environment of using fossil fuels to generate electricity.
D. In the future, solar panels will generate much more power per unit of area than solar panels available today generate.
E. A roof covered with solar panels is not as attractive as a roof without solar panels.

Check the solution to this GMAT Critical Reasoning practice question here.

While we used an Assumption question for our example here, noticing assumptions is useful for more than just answering Assumption questions.

For instance, correct answers to Strengthen and Weaken often make a statement that either substantiates or undermines, respectively, an assumption in the given argument.

Overall, the point of this exercise is to learn to notice what is going on in a CR passage and to understand the logic of arguments in CR, as opposed to just reading passages and attempting to memorize what is said, or having some vague notion of why an argument makes sense. With enough of this detailed and methodical practice, zeroing in on the premises and conclusion in an argument, and recognizing any assumptions necessary for the argument’s logic to work, can become like second nature to you.

To further test your skills, try your hand at this question and this one. Remember, identify the premises and conclusion in each passage, and try to notice any gaps in the arguments.

I just discussed the importance of doing a detailed and methodical analysis of the passages you’re presented with in GMAT Critical Reasoning practice questions. The fact is, that type of analysis is not probably not going to fit into a 1-, 2-, or even 3-minute time window for finding a correct answer to a CR question.

In order to train yourself to quickly analyze GMAT CR passages, and to become more skilled in general at evaluating the logic of arguments and related statements in CR questions, you must start off by doing CR practice questions UNTIMED.

Resist the temptation to skip this necessary step and dive right into completing practice questions “on the clock.” Trust that, as you become better at evaluating the logic of the different answer choices and how it relates to the logic of the passage, you will naturally get faster at finding correct answers.

If you don’t initially give yourself time to learn to clearly articulate why incorrect choices are incorrect and correct answers are correct, you ultimately put a ceiling on your ability to answer tough CR questions in the allotted time.

In the later stages of your GMAT prep, once you’ve gained the skills you need to answer CR questions accurately, you can further hone your skills by doing practice questions timed. By that point, you should be close to answering CR questions in a reasonable amount of time, so adding the pressure of a ticking clock will be effective in helping you reach the next level of your competency in CR, rather than be a source of frustration that discourages you and distracts you from focusing your efforts where meaningful progress can be made.

Many people offering GMAT Critical Reasoning strategies recommend that test-takers read a CR question stem first, before reading the passage, so that they will know which type of question they’ll need to answer and can read the passage with that information in mind.

While this strategy may seem like a neat shortcut, I’ve found that students don’t tend to save any time by approaching CR questions in this way. In fact, reading the question first can actually add to the time they spend on a CR question.

Here’s the thing: You don’t need to read the question first to realize that you are reading an argument that contains supporting points and a conclusion.

So, you can read and understand a given argument perfectly well without reading the question first. Moreover, you may gain a deeper and more complete understanding of the argument if you’re not reading specifically to answer a particular question.

In other words, if you’re thinking about the question, and reading the passage with that in mind, you may be distracted from noticing details, making connections, or identifying gaps that you would otherwise see.

When you read the question first, you run the risk of putting blinders on, even subconsciously.

You may even be tempted to glance back at the question from time to time as you’re reading the passage, to see whether you’ve hit on a sentence that answers the question.

At the very least, you will likely have to read the question stem again after you’ve read the passage, just to make sure that you’re answering the correct question as you begin to eliminate answer choices, so is it really necessary or advantageous to read the question before the passage as well?

The importance of understanding the passage in a CR question cannot be overemphasized. If you do not understand the passage, you will not have a solid basis for choosing an answer. Conversely, in many cases, if you fully understand the passage, it can be rather obvious which answer choice is correct.

The simple truth is that you don’t need to know what the question is in order to understand the passage, and reading with the question in mind can distract you from developing understanding of what the passage says and noticing key details of the passage.

So, I recommend carefully reading the passage before you read the question, so that you don’t narrow your focus in a way that causes you to miss nuances in an argument or gloss over a detail that ends up being important.

Remember, answer choices in GMAT Critical Reasoning

are meticulously worded to throw you off track. So, if you’re looking for the answer to the question or trying to pre-think answers while reading the passage, instead of thoroughly absorbing what you’re reading, you’re likely to fall into a trap.

Of course, as with any GMAT strategy, you ultimately have to do what works best for you, so don’t be afraid to try out a GMAT Critical Reasoning strategy that you think may work better with your learning style. Just be careful not to waste a lot of time trying to squeeze a significant score increase out of gimmicky CR “hacks.” In the case of reading the question stem first, in my experience, it typically doesn’t make the process of finding correct answers to CR questions any more efficient.