Learning to trust your gut.

rakinalikhan

as ive been studying and reviewing questions ive been getting better at selecting answer choices and being confident in my choices (thinking "yup, i know this answer choice is right"), i come across a few questions (particularly in LR) that makes me do a double take. i can narrow it down to two answer choices and then the face the dilemma of i feel that a question is right on gut but i tend to go with the other choice because it seems to make more sense in my head. this tends to backfire on me and can cost me 2-3 points. can anyone give me some tips or advice for how to condition myself to lean on my instincts and commit to it. it was hard enough to gain confidence for my answer choices test as is

Jonathan Wang

There's some confirmation bias here. There are assuredly plenty of times where you narrow to two answer choices, pick one because you get that same gut feeling you mention above, and get it right, but you don't think about those because those aren't hurting you.

If a wrong answer choice makes more sense in your head, then you've made a logical mistake and you need to stop doing whatever it is you did. Instead of focusing on 'trusting your gut', work on what you can control as far as correct thought processes. Good instincts come from competence, not vice versa.

Sami

Hey rakinalikhan,

I think there are two things that I have found that really helped me avoid this kind of trap.

1. Always have a pre-phrase after you read a stimulus and before you go through the answer choices. This will help you move extremely fast when you get to the answer choices, which leaves you more time overall on test, especially more time to read the stimulus where I think time is spent more efficiently. Let's say you still have a pre-phrase, are both answer choices you narrowed down to match the idea of the right answer choice you thought of in your pre-phrase?
*INot every stimulus has a pre-phrase but after you read a stimulus you should at least have an idea in your head about how a correct answer choice will act like.

2. Even when you get down to the two answer choices, do you just go with your gut or compare the two answer choices back to the stimulus? I used to just re-read the two answer choices and pick whatever. But I have found that if I am stuck on two answer choices its because I missed something important in the stimulus. So I would actually suggest you skip this question, come back and re-read your argument (in stimulus) carefully, especially the scope of your conclusion when compared to your premise.

* if you find that you don't have time to re-read the whole stimulus, at least pick an answer choice, mark it to come back later, and at the minimum re-read the premise and conclusion of the stimulus.

I don't think these two things are sufficient to help avoid you getting into these kind of traps, but I have found them to be very very helpful in reducing the likelihood that I will get into these kind of situations.