blind review

liasarkisian97

Hi, what methods do you use for blind review? I don't even know how to do blind review after completing a set of questions.

Scott Milam

The key is to remember the purpose of Blind Review. You are trying to separate questions that you got wrong because you don't understand the material from those that you got wrong because you didn't have enough time to answer them.

With that in mind, go back through and review your answers. Start with those you didn't get to or that you know you had to guess and tackle them. Then go back to your flagged questions and make sure that you still like the answer you settled on. After that, go back to any questions where you hadn't eliminated every answer but the one you chose and make sure you still think you picked the right answer.

Once you're done, you should have a pretty good sense of which questions you could have gotten right given your knowledge of the material. That can then guide your study moving forward!

Hope that helps!

Cant Get Right

One thing I always found important in BR was to fully articulate my reasoning. I didn’t just re-work the question, I wrote out full reports on each question where I broke down the logical structure of the stimulus, identified and explained the nature of any relationships established, and, in as much detail as possible, articulated why each answer choice was either right or wrong.

The goal in BR isn’t really to get the correct answer. In my mind, the correct answer is just a necessary consequence of successfully accomplishing the bigger, more complex goal which is to identify and understand each fundamental issue present in the question. I want to get deep into the material and understand it at its core, most fundamental level. I don’t just want to know that an answer choice is wrong, I want to understand why it’s wrong as well as whatever mistake I made that made it attractive in the first place. That’s the insight that is going to allow me to learn the lesson from that question in a way that I can apply on future questions.

For example, I encountered two different SA questions this morning where someone had chosen the wrong answer because he’d failed to see that conditional answer choices on both questions had the conclusion in the sufficient. When the conclusion is in the sufficient, the answer choice can never work as a sufficient assumption. It isn’t enough that he got both of those questions right in BR, because he hadn’t really figured out why he’d missed them in the first place. Without that insight, he was not any closer to correcting his mistake. The next time he comes across that type of answer, he has no reason to expect a different outcome. So despite getting the correct answer, he failed to achieve his BR objective.

So in BR, try to identify those issues and then work out exactly why such answers are wrong and must always be wrong. If you figure out why SA answers with the argument’s conclusion in the sufficient can’t be correct, then you’ll be much more careful when dealing with conditional answer choices on SA questions in the future. Answer choices making this mistake should then be quickly identified and confidently eliminated. Now you’ve transformed a question you would have struggled with and likely missed into one (barring other issues) you can quickly and easily answer correctly. Good BR habits are those that facilitate that process. Good BR is hard, frustrating, and time consuming, but the benefits are enormously powerful when it is undertaken successfully. It is worth the investment.