⏰ TTP Tip of the Day: Do Not Attempt to “Pre-Think” Answers ⏰

I have the opposite perspective, so I feel obligated to post it here. Readers can consider the two opposing view points and decide for themselves which works better for them (if you're not sure, try them both out for a while and see which works better for you).

Firstly, I suggest always starting not from the passage at the top of the screen, but rather from the question stem in the centre of the screen. This way, by the time we start reading the passage, we already have a pretty good idea of what our job is. Are we supposed to strengthen the passage that we're about to read? Are we supposed to consider what additional information would be most useful in evaluating the argument? Are we about to read about a politician's plan to achieve some goal, and our job is to poke holes in that plan or identify something that the politician failed to consider? Or, perhaps, the passage that we're about to read is an incomplete argument, and our job is to identify which of the five answer choices would be the most logical conclusion to the passage above? If I go into the passage without having first read the question stem, then I'm going in blind and am just reading with no particular focus in mind.

Secondly, I absolutely take as much time as I want to consider the argument's structure and logic, and even more time than that to consider what would strengthen/weaken/ help to evaluate / logically complete / cast doubt / whatever the question stem asked me to do. If I can only come up with one good answer choice, I don't tie myself exclusively to the one that I came up with - I keep an open mind as I go into the answer choices. In fact, sometimes (particularly on hard questions), I can't pre-think even one single good option. That's okay - I try my best and if I can't think of anything, it will probably hit me in the face when I see it in the answer choices. The act of racking my brain to come up with a good answer makes the correct answer jump off the screen for me when I do finally read the answer choices.

Conversely, if I go to the answer choices too soon, before I've done any deep thinking about what exactly a good answer would do here, I'm much more likely to pick a trap answer, or worse - spend way more than 2 minutes going back and forth, debating among the different answer choices.


That's a misleading statement. They have MASSIVE amounts of data on the mistakes that test-takers have made. They don't have any data at all about the mistakes that test-takers are likely to make when they pre-think answer choices. The trap answers are designed to confuse us, to make us lose our focus, to make us think the argument was slightly different from what it actually was, or to make us think the question was different from what it actually was (e.g. a strengthening answer choice to a weaken question). These traps lose much of their power when we prepare for them ahead of time.

Therefore, I suggest spending as much time as possible before looking at the answer choices, and as little time as possible inside the answer choices. In fact, once you've read an answer choice that does exactly what you were hoping for it to do, your optimal strategy at that point is probably to pick that answer and move on. Nothing good can come of continuing to read the remaining answer choices.

For a short video covering my strategy, see below:

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