So I am in the section of the curriculum where I am doing Logic Games, and I wanted to get your opinions on my strategy of tackling the practice problems. What I have been doing is doing the games on my own no matter how long they take until I figured out every inference on my own, sometimes it takes really long, sometimes I get the inferences in seconds. I do not watch JY's explanation until I am done with the game. Is this what I should be doing to get better at inferences, or is it better to just watch the game explanation if I am unable to make the inference?
Comments
http://7sage.com/discussion/#/discussion/2737/logic-games-attack-strategy
When I went through the LG part of the curriculum, I attempted the sample games (but not the problem set games) because I knew the former would help give me some familiarity with LG in general, but I had the LG bundle so I knew all the latter ones would appear in the bundle anyways so there was no need to slow my progression through the curriculum. You're having a focusing on the trees moment and the strategy you are using is going to give you insanely bad habits.
On the real test, if you encounter a game you don't understand, the correct response is to skip it and come back later. The incorrect response is to brute force your way through the game, possibly missing questions, and never getting to that wicked easy game that happens later. You will get better at making inferences when you see them being made. And if you are brute forcing then you are not really seeing how they get made, you're just working around that. If you can't make them, you need to watch the videos to see how they can be made and that way you will be better prepared for the next time around. This is also part of the essence of the fool proof method and why repetition is key for LG practice.
Eventually you will get a feel for the implications of floaters, or rules, not both rules, etc. But you'll never get there if you just keep brute forcing your way through the games. In the military we have a saying, "train as you fight," which means we try to do everything to simulate battlefield conditions as closely as possible, and you want to do the same thing in your prep. Why would you practice brute forcing if that is a last resort? Anyone can brute force a question (that's how a lot of people get LG questions right on their diagnostics), but not everyone can make all the necessary inferences.
Brute forcing is not a skill, so it doesn't need to be practiced, and you are wasting time and energy dedicating yourself to this out of some bizarre perfectionist quest to do it all on your own. Also, there are tons of games with pointless inferences. So why waste time finding every single one when you only need to find the meaningful ones? And the better you get at LG, you will understand what meaningful inferences are versus trivial ones. Trust the curriculum and the process, skip the problem sets, give the sample games a try, but know when you're bested and just watch the videos in receive mode so you can do some actual learning. Good luck!
So stop doing this. You know it's wrong to do this in the beginning, so just don't do it. Doing LG in your head is a very advanced level tactic and even then is not necessarily the best way to go because of the mental strain you could put yourself through, and it's hard to check any answers if you have extra time. In the beginning I would go hardcore in the opposite direction and write down too much and be really heavy-handed about it, then as you get better you can back off of this a bit until you reach your LG equilibrium.
You'll get better!!! Don't demand high levels of performance from yourself now. You'll burn out. Just do what you can and be willing to come back and go through fundamentals again until it clicks.
I think perhaps your challenge right now might be to cultivate gratitude for the times when you are able to attain 100% certainty, and acceptance for the times when you do not attain 100% certainty. That is probably a much more helpful and realistic mindset for studies and the test itself. It's just a pipe dream to think we're going to see 100% certainty all the time.
Methinks this is the definition of perfectionism! I understand, believe me! Perfectionists Anonymous right here!