I’m concerned with the actual amount of common sense needed in order to pick out a right answer choice in Critical Reasoning questions. According to the Official Guide, answering critical reasoning questions requires no specialized knowledge of any particular field, thus only minimal common sense is used in these questions. But during preparing for the exam, I found that this might not be the case.
One example is a question I encountered in the verbal review 2nd edition. The question is asking for an evaluation of a plan to increase advertising revenue for a newspaper. When I was eliminating the choices, I found one choice introducing a new factor: circulation of the newspaper. Since I was not aware of, under my background that’s far from publishing or advertisement, that circulation can actually relate to the advertising revenue, this option is otherwise very irrelevant and should be easily eliminated by anyone lack of such “common sense” yet sound in critical reasoning. Only by reading the official explanation that I realize the underlining assumption on how circulation relates to the advertisement.
So I’m now very concerned over the amount of “common sense” that’s expected for a test-taker. If someone is from a non-business background, or a culture that may not have an overly exposure to a “common sense” that’s otherwise seemingly unquestionable for the question designer, this might cause a biased disadvantage for such test taker. In my example, the test taker would fail to pick out the right choice not because he is less competent in his reasoning but because his lack of “common sense” for an underlying assumption.
Since the book that I’m studying might contain retired questions that didn’t reflect the standard or quality control that GMAC commits to right now, I hope you may kindly inform me of the real situations on current GMAT exams. Is such specific common-sense no longer exist in real exam? Or such level of common sense is deemed a minimal requirement for any potential business school applicants? In such case, I’d like to know the criteria and standards regarding to which extent the common sense is reasonably accepted to be used in GMAT questions, and to what extent it isn’t.