Free UMAT Resource Material Course Package

Since there's number of YOUs struggling with the logic games when I compare answers and check the emails, I thought I'd try schooling you people about this particular department and walk you through the park to teach you how to handle them.

Personally consider you're all lucky, that I'm taking time out to actually do this for you! .....I know, I know I'm awesome.. Now I mentioned in my INTRODUCTION that I've done preps so to my understanding even for those spending money doing packages you don't have detailed guidelines like this but just solution explanations, correct me if I'm wrong. Here we go children.

The test makers know that if you could spend hours methodically trying out every choice in every question, you'd probably get everything right. But what does that prove? Nothing.

First Principle: To Go Faster, Slow Down

To gain time in Logic Games, you must spend a lot of time thinking through and analysing the setup and the rules. This is not only the most important principle for logic games success, it's also the one that's most often ignored, probably because it just doesn't seem right intuitively; people having timing difficulties tend to speed up, not slow down. But by spending a little extra time up front thinking through the stimulus, the "action" of the game, and the rules, you'll be able to recognise the game's key issues and make important deductions that will actually save you time in the long run.

Games are structured so that, in order to answer the questions quickly and correctly, you need to search out relevant pieces of information that combine to form valid new statements, called deductions. Now, you can either do this once, up front, and then utilise the same deductions throughout the game, or you can choose to piece together the same basic deductions-essentially repeating the same work-for every single question.

For instance, let's say that two of the rules for a Logic Game go as follows:

If Bob is chosen for the team, then Eric is also chosen.

If Eric is chosen for the team, then Pat will not be chosen.

You can, as you read through the rules of the game, just treat those rules as two separate pieces of independent information. But there's a deduction to be made from them. If Bob is chosen, Eric is, too. If Eric is chosen, Pat is not. That means that, if Bob is chosen, Pat is not chosen. That's an important deductionone that will undoubtedly be required from question to question. If you don't take the time to make it up front, when you're first considering the game, you'll have to make it over and over again, every time it's necessary to answer a question. But if you do take the time to make this deduction up front, and build it into your entire conception of the game, you'll save that time later. You won't be doing the same work several times.

The choice is yours; we find that the rush-to-the-questions method is inefficient, time-consuming, and stress-inducing.

Always try to take the rules as far as you can before moving on to the questions. Look for common elements among the rules (like Eric in the rules above)-this will help you combine them and pull out major deductions. The stimulus creates a situation, and the rules place restrictions on what can and cannot happen within that situation. If you investigate the possible scenarios, and look for and find major deductions up front, you'll then be able to rack up points quickly and confidently.

Second Principle: Understand What a Rule Means, Not Just What It Says

RULE: Arlene is not fifth in line.

QUESTION: Which one of the following people is not fifth in line?

ANSWER: Arlene

Virtually every sentence in Logic Games has to be filtered through some sort of analytical process before it will be of any use. You may have to use the information about Arlene to help you eliminate a choice or lead you to the right answer, but even in the simplest of cases, this will involve the application, as opposed to the mere parroting, of the rule.

It's imperative that you think through its exact meaning, including any implications it might have For instance, let's look at a scenario in which you have three boxes, each containing at least two of the following three types of chocolates, gumdrops, and mints. Then you get the following rule:

Box 2 does not contain any gumdrops.

What does that rule say? That there aren't any gumdrops in Box 2. But what does that rule mean, when you think about it in the context of the game? That Box 2 does contain chocolates and mints. Each box contains at least two of three things, remember. Once you eliminate one of the three things for any particular box, therefore, you know that the other two things must be in that box.

Part of understanding what a rule means, moreover, is grasping what the rule doesn't mean. For example, take the rule we mentioned earlier:

RULE: If Bob is chosen for the team, then Eric is also chosen.

MEANS: Whenever Bob is chosen, Eric is, too.

DOESN'T MEAN: Whenever Eric is chosen, Bob is, too.

Remember the discussion of formal logic in Logical Reasoning. If I yell loudly at my cat Adrian, he will run away. That does mean that whenever I yell at him loudly, he runs away. But it doesn't mean that whenever he runs away, I've yelled at him.

We'll touch the next two principles in the next coming post.