Deciding between 2 Logical Reasoning Answer Choices

[maddieg12]

Hello,

I was wondering if anyone has any advice for answering logical reasoning questions. Each question that I get wrong, I have been choosing between 2 answer choices and pick the wrong one. The other answer choice ends up being the correct answer. This is for any type of logical reasoning questions. I was hoping someone could help me figure out why this happens or provide some type of guidance.

Thanks in advance,
Maddie

[Rachael Wilkenfeld]

Hi Maddie,

It's hard to know exactly what's going on for you without knowing more about your individual performance on individual questions. That said, I have some thoughts.

First, you might be seeing only half (or less) of those you narrow down. Consider all the times you narrowed it down to 2 and selected the correct answer! It can be easy to feel like you ALWAYS pick the wrong one, but make sure that's true. Make sure you are tracking both situations so you can understand your overall performance.

Second, think about how you decide between the last two answer choices. What is making you pick the incorrect one? Why was it tempting? Are you falling into patterns or certain traps? Some of that will be able to be picked up through good analytics---seeing the question types you tend to miss, seeing if there are any reasoning types you tend to miss, and so on.

The final thing to check is your prephrasing. Prephrasing is THE critical skill on this test. If you aren't actively thinking about what your correct answer should do, you are much more likely to get tripped up by tempting wrong answers. The answer choices aren't going to help you figure out the stimulus. If you don't understand it before the answer choices, you won't understand it after. So doing the work up front and creating a strong prephrase is the critical difference between students who can get by on this test and students who excel on this test.

Hope that helps!