*Bubbasch writes:*
> Hi guys,
> I'm struggling a lot with Critical Reasoning (CR). Could anyone share some tips or strategies that helped you improve and overcome difficulties in CR?
I absolutely recommend Powerscore CR Bible and GMAT Ninja CR series (especially 2026 series; Episode 2 is my favourite though because Charles clearly explains why negation and pre-thinking/pre-phrasing doesn’t always work especially when solving medium/hard CR questions). CR Bible is absolutely the killer and my understanding completely changed after going through each and every chapter thoroughly in detail. If my understanding of any of the concepts mentioned in the chapters is not exactly how it has to be understood/comprehended, I used Gemini Flash 3.5 (Extended Thinking, this is a free version and has enough token size and wouldn’t get exahusted even if you solve 1000 questions in a day) to make me understand it clearly and generate GMAT Focus style questions something like a 10 question drill for each chapter and solved them. At the end of the each chapter in CR Bible, you’ll see a mini drill with actual GMAT style questions and answers along with the explanations. I asked Gemini to generate something similar and it used to do that and I solve them till I answer every question correctly. There is no limit/fear of exhaustion of questions (although they are not official questions) with this approach because it can generate any number of questions on that particular concept. The main point/objective to do this drill is to ensure that the concept is understood correctly and deeply ingrained. Once that’s done, you can try the hands-on on the OG questions. Again, the reason to do this rigorous exercise is to ensure that concepts are understood correctly and able to apply them perfectly beforehand and not directly applying them on OG questions and exhausting them. Post gaining that confidence, applying the same techniques/methodologies on OG questions makes more sense and also builds confidence because now your accruacy would have gotten improved. First thing is to have a through understanding of the CR Bible with the help of Gemini, and follow every episode from the GMAT Ninja CR series and solve those questions. Charles explanations are absolute killer and definitely helps building this kind of rigor.
People generally give recommendations. But, I also wanted to tell you what are *not* recommended and should be absolutely avoided at any cost if you’re aiming for elite scores like 715+. Note that these suggestions are for those people who want to attain elite scores.
1. Pre-thinking: As I mentioned earlier, this just doesn’t work on every medium/hard question. Although it works on easy or easy-medium ones, going with that approach as your primary arsenal will not get you anywhere close to reach those elite scores. Most prep companies (e-GMAT especially) notoriously suggest pre-thinking and ask students to make a habit of visualising a mini movie/story in your head and come up with the assumptions or what’s going to happen/predict and look at your options to match with your screenplay. This is detrimental because; 1) you’ll not have enough time to do this entire screenplay. 2) Most of the time, you’d not see your pre-thought assumptions in the options (especially in medium/hard questions). By the time you do this pre-thininking and look at the options, you’d not find them and you’ve nowhere to go. You’ll again follow the same approach and pre-think and yet again fail to see them in the options. You end up getting panicked because you’re running out of time and select something random and move on. e-GMAT notoriously advertises pre-thinking as a game changer, however, it misses out on the basic concept that there are two different types of assumptions questions that are typically asked in the exam. Yes, you read it right. All assumptions questions are not that straightforward. They fall under two categories. One is a supporter type assumption questions and another is defender type assumption questions. Supporter type is an easy one and pre-thinking actually works and quickens the process of solving. Note that most of easy assumption questions are of supporter type and e-gmat banks on this type and advertises. The defender type assumption questions are the notorious ones because there could be a million possible assumptions that you can pre-think and every pre-thought assumption is right, however, you’ll not find them in the options. This is where the difficulty hits and most of the medium/hard assumption questions are of this type. Once you go through the chapter 8 from CR Bible, you’ll understand this on why defender type assumption questions are not easy. E-GMAT methodologies won’t work on these questions. There’s also one post I saw in Reddit (
https://www.reddit.com/r/GMAT/comments/ ... gacy-sct=1)where Martin Murray states the dangers of pre-thinking. He’s more concenrend about the defender type of questions in his argument. I saw several hate comments stating that he is wrong and pre-thinking always works and makes the job easy. But the thing these people miss out is that the pre-thinking is actually determintal on defender type assumption questions. Veterans like Charles/Martin Murray knows this very well and their suggestions are absolute killer. If you go with any test prep company that says pre-thinking is the game changer and shows results as proof, just do not blindly go with them by trying to learn and apply those methodologies. At the end, once you realize that they are not working for you, you must have already spent significant amount of time in learning those faulty concepts and it’ll be much difficult to un-learn and re-learn right methodologies (similar to what happened in my case). Remember that, CR is just a form or math that uses English language instead of numbers. It has to be solved mechanically and logically, not by imagining or visualising and writing screenplays in the head. A test taker under immense time pressure will not have the time to do this entire visualization and take additional cognitive load/spatial memory and flush it out after every question and again play another movie for next question. Utilising spatial memory wisely under immense time pressure is extremely important for solving CR and moving on to next question immediately by flushing the previous questions data for the spatial memory. This point is also mentioned the CR Bible I think somewhere in the first or second chapter. These two were my main mistakes; pre-thinking and visualization. And these were exact techniques that e-GMAT suggests in their course and advertises too but flipping the technique completely opposite. They just go against what CR Bible suggested which was the exact reason why I couldn't solve the CR timely. When I read the CR Bible, it exactly mentioned the issues I was facing and it's just beautiful because it gave solutions and advice for tackling those exact issues.
2. If you plan to go for a private tutoring, ensure to do a thorough review of the tutors background and understanding on these concepts at advanced level. *Do not* just go by the results that they portray.
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09 Jun 2026, 08:49
