Since they’re aware that they will have an average of 1.5 minutes to answer each GRE Verbal question, many people preparing for the GRE reason that they should restrict themselves to spending about 1.5 minutes on each practice question. However, the truth is that using that approach does not work well at all.

In fact, I talk regularly with people who are wondering why their Critical Reasoning performance is not improving, and when I ask, almost all of these people tell me that they are doing all their CR practice timed. Here’s why that approach doesn’t work.

As we’ve discussed, to master Critical Reasoning, you have to learn to see what’s going on in the questions and use solid logical thinking to arrive at correct answers. However, when you do all your practice questions timed, you don’t give yourself enough time to develop those key GRE Critical Reasoning skills. Rather, you rush through questions, get many incorrect, and then read explanations that tell you what you should have seen and done. The issue is that reading explanations doesn’t result in your developing skill in answering CR questions.

If you’re surprised by this idea, think of it this way. CR is essentially a reasoning game. Would you expect to become good at playing any other game by losing the game and then reading explanations of how to play the game? No, right? To learn to play a game, you have to practice and learn to win, and CR is no different.

To master CR, you have to practice going through the motions that result in success, and the best way to do that is to do GRE Critical Reasoning practice questions untimed to give yourself time to succeed. In fact, this goes for every aspect of GRE prep. Whether we’re learning to answer GRE Quant questions, Text Completion questions, or any other type of GRE question, we’ll learn fastest and become the most skilled if we give ourselves time to learn to succeed.

Then, once you’ve learned how to play the CR game, you can work on speeding up. By the way, if you practice effectively, you’ll speed up naturally. After all, you’ll become so skilled at answering CR questions that you’ll naturally answer them more and more quickly.

Warmest regards,

Scott Woodbury-Stewart
Founder & CEO, Target Test Prep