about prephrasing an answer before looking through the AC

unrealsimon

I know a lot of people who advocate prephrasing an answer in your head for certain type of questions (assumptions, flaw, etc) before you go through the AC because you can get an idea of what the problem is with the stimulus. I don't know if this happens to anyone else, but I find this process actually hinders, rather than assist me, in finding the right AC. For example, if I notice a certain gap/flaw in the reasoning of the stimulus, I tend to generate an answer in my head, and while looking through the AC, I become so focused on finding an answer that matches my prephrase that I would often gloss over the right one, which is sometimes not exactly the way I imagined it would be, or sometimes just phrased in a subtle way that makes it easy to miss.
In these cases, I often find myself not liking any of the AC, because none of them matches my prephrase. And this would force me to go through the AC again, wasting valuable time.
Anyone else has similar experience? When I don't prephrase the answer, sometimes it's easier to spot the right AC because it will remind me of the gap/flaw in the stimulus and it doesn't have to conform to a pre-existing model.

Jonathan Wang

If you know in advance what the gap/flaw in the stimulus is, such that an answer choice can 'remind' you of it, haven't you already prephrased it on some level? And if you don't know in advance what the gap/flaw in the stimulus is, how on earth will going into the answer choices blind help you at all?

This is a common complaint for people who have difficulty prephrasing, and I have two general responses: 1 - confirmation bias is at work here, because you aren't counting all the questions where not prephrasing completely screwed you, and 2 - if your problem is that you tunnel vision on your chosen prephrase, it sounds more to me like an execution issue than an issue with the strategy itself.

unrealsimon

Yup I think it's caused by tunnel vision. Thanks Jonathan.

km.edelson

I found this strategy very helpful, if a little time consuming: While drilling LR questions where prephrasing is relevant, write down exactly what you think the answer should be before you look at the answer choices. Then write down the actual correct answer next to your own articulation of the answer. Generate a number of these, and compare your answers with the test's answers. Some will match nearly verbatim. These aren't the questions to worry about. Where this actually helps is seeing how the answer choices can identify the same thing you did in different language - the ways in which this happens are repetitive, and you can learn what to look for and identify blind spots. Even if you don't come up with a list of common ways that the test shifts things around, you'll be getting attuned to the subtleties of the test and see them more clearly when doing these sorts of problems in the future. Hope this is helpful.