Learning from mistakes

Aidoe

I've found that I'm very stubborn when I take a PT and BR questions. But the problem is when I review the question and listen to the explanation, even if I understand my mistake, I can never seem to really change my thought pattern when I revisit the question weeks later. The explanation just doesn't seem to be sufficient enough to override my own false intuition. Even if I end up getting the question correct, I can't help but notice that it's more because I remembered the right answer than understood exactly why. I could recall the reason used to justify it as the right answer but I can't say with all honesty that it's entirely convincing or that I would be able to spot it in future questions. I think this is a product of having studied for so long for this test where I've internalized certain ways of thinking that I just can't seem to change. I wouldn't say my fundamentals are lacking because I've been through this course, and others before, many many times. Instead, I think my problem is that I'm unable to extract patterns because I get so bogged down on the individual question that I resort to the same thought pattern that leads to pick the same exact answer choice.

Any advice on how I can actually learn from my mistake? How are people able to effectively understand a problem, abstract it, and apply it to others to improve? I think this is what's always held me down and is the key to any sort of improvement on LR.

Pacifico

I'd say you need to start reverse engineering it a bit more and really lean on POE (especially during BR) to get your mind right. The really consistent patterns in the test appear more in the wrong ACs than the right ones in my opinion. So being able to see through trap ACs and the like is really an effective way to deepen your understanding of the dynamics of the test. The majority of the time, each AC is there for a very specific reason.

As an example, imagine a flaw question where the correct AC is that it confuses a necessary condition for a sufficient one. The best trap AC will reverse this by saying it confuses a sufficient condition for a necessary one. Then perhaps there are multiple issues in the premises that one might mistake for a flaw if one loses sight of the conclusion. So one AC could address a part to whole flaw, one could address an expertise flaw, while another is closely related and appears as more of an ad hominem flaw.

Because those issues arise in the premises themselves they don't represent the flaw in the argument, but the test writers are preying upon people mistaking those issues for argument flaws. They go back to the same wells time and time again and the better you can recognize these issues over multiple tests the easier it should become for you to catch the traps moving forward. Hope that helps! Let me know if you have any questions.

Aidoe

Ok, thanks a lot!