Rahul had cracked the online examination of a corporate giant and received the highest package in his batch. People started coming to him, asking for his advice.

One day, his best friend Anjali was sitting alone in the classroom, clearly worried about something. When Rahul talked to her, she said, “I have studied so hard, prepared for all the technical sections and interviews, but I am not able to clear even the first round. The reason – Logical Reasoning.” She was afraid that people would make fun of her if she told them that she was having trouble with the easiest looking section of the test.

Rahul came to her rescue and answered all the questions that were bugging her.

Why is Logical Reasoning important?

Every human being can reflect consciously on his/her actions and reason out situations. Logical reasoning helps in building rationale thoughts which allow people to come to conclusions by involving facts and experiences. Finding out the best solution to a problem will not be possible without logical reasoning.  It is used not just in situations requiring immediate solution of problems but also in anticipating problems that may arise in the future.

Why do employers use Logical Reasoning assessments for hiring?

Measuring the mental ability of any employee before their selection is a very important criterion for all the corporates. Logical reasoning helps determine an employee’s ability to adjust to a company’s environment. It also helps the employer gain more understanding of the candidate’s behaviour or personality.

Each employee contributes immensely to an organisation’s worth. Hence, it is necessary that before the selection of an employee is done, their abilities in terms of adaptive skills, cognitive abilities, and reasoning skills are tested out thoroughly.

What are the components of Logical Reasoning Assessment?

Rahul told Anjali his story of how he had prepared for Logical Reasoning.

He took out a notebook from his bag and presented it to Anjali. It was the notebook in which he had analysed the Logical Reasoning section when he was preparing for his placements.

Anjali reviewed the notebook and noted important points.

In the end, here’s what she had collected in her notebook…

• Odd One Out/Analogy

These were one of the easiest types of questions in the Logical Reasoning section. Anjali had to look for the best possible relationship between the given words. Although in the beginning, it was hard to find any possible connections, with time and regular practice she was able to solve these questions well.

• Series
  • Numeric series – From simple addition and subtraction of the numbers to complex exponential patterns, these types of questions need to be identified carefully. But in any case, if Anjali was not able to deduce the pattern in the first 30 seconds, Rahul suggested her to leave the question and move on further. She could revisit the question if she had time later.
  • Alphabetic series – These types of questions were easier as the number of operations that can be performed on the alphabets is limited.
  • Alphanumeric series – The easiest of the series, if Anjali was not able to find the pattern between the numbers, she could find the relationship between the alphabets.

• Coding-Decoding

These questions are an important part of Logical Reasoning section. Here words are coded using various logics such as jumbling the words, exchanging positions of the alphabets, arranging them in ascending or descending order, etc. To solve these questions, one has to correctly identify the logic behind the code and then apply that code to another word.

Trick – Represent the alphabets using numbers (as shown in the table below) and then analyse the correct patterns.

1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13
A	B	C	D	E	F	G	H	I	J	K	L	M
Z	Y	X	W	V	U	T	S	R	Q	P	O	N
26	25	24	23	22	21	20	19	18	17	16	15	14

• Flowchart

Rahul told Anjali that there are mostly two types of flowcharts used in logical reasoning assessments:

• Process flowcharts – Here the questions are based on what the result of one or two deciding steps of the flowcharts will be. In these kinds of questions, it becomes important to identify which steps are the decision steps and which ones are the process steps.
• Data flowcharts – Here the flowchart would have some operations to be performed on each step. These are very easy if solved carefully.

• Visual Reasoning

This category has a wide variety of item types under it. Picking the odd image out of the given ones, identifying the image that follows the correct sequence, image analogies, the list seemed endless. But how to approach these types of questions? Easy, start with the elimination of incorrect options, and after that find the differences between the leftover options and similarity of options with the images in the question. This way she could easily arrive at the correct answer.

• Data Sufficiency

These types of questions also involve using Mathematical concepts. They consist of a question which is followed by two or more statements. One needs to decide whether the information given in the statements is sufficient to answer the question or not. As easy as this seems, one needs to know the correct approach to solve the question, without which they would not be able to answer correctly.

• Attention to Details

This is one of the most desired skills that corporates like to test, making it one of the most important types of questions one needs to work on. The best part – these questions are always comparatively easier. From counting the number of specific characters in a sentence to finding the word which can be created using a given set of alphabets, the variety of question types in this category is diverse.

• Case Puzzles

The best and the worst types of questions are from this section. Why so? – if one can solve the passage, one would be able to score more than 1 mark by solving just 1 passage. She identified that case puzzles were majorly categorised as:

• Arrangements based – Seating people in circles, in a straight line or any other patterns.
• Grouping based – Where the data pertaining to people are given and they have to be segregated in different groups based on the same.

• Blood Relationships

These were Rahul’s favourite questions. He had found a great trick on one of the websites. The trick is to learn how to draw the family tree. One can use their own symbols to represent different relations and the answer would be very easy to find.

Note – One should never take a person to be a male or a female based on their names. These are methods used by question creators to confuse the candidate and to make them answer the question incorrectly.

• Assumptions & Arguments

These questions consist of a statement (argument) and other statements (assumptions) that follow the argument. To solve such questions, one must focus on understanding what the argument indicates. The strongest assumption would be the one that validates the argument and the weakest one would be the one which completely denies the assumption.

• Statement & Conclusions

These questions, most of the times, depend on “Syllogisms”. Rahul had studied how to crack syllogisms-based questions from various books to answer such questions. Rahul’s most important learning here was that one should never take the statements in the literal sense. He had to assume all the given statements to be true.

• Directions

These are the questions where someone starts travelling from one point to another (mostly taking random turns). Anjali used to face a lot of problems in attempting these questions. The mistake she used to make was that she used to try solving these questions without using pen and paper. The result – no answers or incorrect answers. But taking Rahul’s advice, she started making diagrams step by step and slowly started getting correct answers.

Taking help from what she had learnt from Rahul, and a whole lot of resources and website links that he had shared with her, she improved a lot. She also got a significant amount of help from books in her college library.

Anjali now started having fun solving the questions that she had once dreaded. She felt a sense of achievement as she was able to complete questions from books which were famous for having tough questions.

A month later when another lucrative placement drive was set to begin, Rahul wished Anjali good luck. She went to appear for the preliminary assessment with her confidence level at an all-time high. Later in the evening when she met Rahul she shared the wonderful news that she had bagged the most vied-for job role that the company used to offer. She was happy beyond measure. While they were celebrating, Rahul saw Tina sitting nearby with a similar look Anjali once had before he helped her. She had problems with the Numerical section.

Want to know how Rahul helped Tina?

STAY TUNED

P.S. – If you have any questions for Rahul, post them in the comments and he’ll get back to you.