Step 1, the deposition: "What were you thinking?"
Every review of a missed question starts in the same place, and in my experience it’s the one place most students skip. Before the answer key, before the explanation, before I say a word about the logic, I want to know what was going on in the student’s head at the moment they clicked.
I call this the deposition. You write down your answer and one honest sentence about why you picked it, before you learn whether you were right. The reason is a little grim. The instant you know the correct answer, your memory of your own reasoning changes. You start believing you “almost had it.” You remember noticing the thing you didn’t notice. Hindsight rewrites the scene, and the witness is you.
On the card. Step 1, the deposition, 2 minutes. You write your answer, the correct answer, and one honest sentence about what you were thinking when you picked it. All of it goes down before the key.
Is this your broken step? Answer yes or no to each.
- I write my answer and my reason before I look at the key or any explanation.
- My sentence says what I thought at the time, even when the truth is it sounded right.
- When I can’t say why I picked a choice, I write that down instead of building a reason after the fact.
Two or more “no” answers means this chapter is your next week. Its exercise, “Your three questions, step 1,” sits at the end.
Out loud, the deposition is one question, and I ask it before anything else. What were you thinking when you picked it? Every exchange below is some version of it.
The hint you didn’t know you got
A student I’ll call Owen brought me a flaw question in his first year with me. He’d gotten it wrong on a timed section, reviewed it on his own, and by the time he got to our session he could tell me exactly what the flaw was. The argument generalized from a single case. He said it cleanly, in his own words, before we looked at any choices. On paper that’s a perfect prephrase.
So I asked the question that matters more than the prephrase.
“Was this your prephrase when you first attempted it, or is it with a little bit of a hint, knowing already the correct answer?”
He paused and admitted the flaw only stood out once he knew the answer. In the moment, under time, he hadn’t seen it.
That’s the deposition doing its job. His review had produced a true sentence about the question (it generalizes from one case) and a false sentence about himself (that he can spot that kind of flaw). The second sentence is the one that costs points, because he’ll meet that skeleton again next week in a different costume, and the version of him that sits down with the timer running is the version that didn’t see it.
Once he’d said that out loud, the real conversation could start. I asked why he hadn’t seen it live, and he offered two candidates, overthinking or rushing. I told him the flaw was the obvious kind, the one you’re supposed to find in a few seconds.
“So it’s a number three, meaning you don’t want to overthink it. It is whatever the most obvious flaw would be. Then the next thing is make sure that you don’t rush into the choices without already having an idea.”
Notice what I did not do. I didn’t explain the flaw. He already had that. I asked when he’d had it, and the answer told us both what to work on. A student who can explain a question after the fact but not during it has a recognition-timing problem, and until it’s named nobody can work on it.
Tell me why you’d say C
The plain version of the same question works near the top of the scale too. Daniel came to me with recent sections at zero or one wrong and a real test that had gone badly on time. In our second session he brought a question he’d gotten right and wanted to confirm his reasoning on.
A lot of coaches, in my experience, hand a right answer a “good” and move on. I asked him to explain it.
“Tell me why you would say C is the answer.”
His reasoning was sound. Then I added a concrete example of the principle, which looks like overkill. I wanted to know whether his explanation was understanding or recitation.
“If you’re not clear on whether you get it, then a lot of times bringing up examples can help you really be certain of it.”
That’s the right-answer branch of the method, which chapter 8 covers. For now the point is narrower. The question “tell me why” works on a right answer exactly as well as on a wrong one, and if you only ask it about misses you’ll never learn which of your right answers were luck.
Could you tell me why A is incorrect?
The third form of the deposition is about the wrong choice rather than the picked one. Claire, in her thirteenth session, was reviewing a question where she’d ended up between two choices. She knew which one was right by then. I asked about the other.
“Could you tell me why A is incorrect?”
What came back was a reconstruction of her original wrong reading of the conclusion. The choice had looked good because she’d misread what the argument was concluding, and asking her to eliminate the wrong choice, rather than defend the right one, pulled that misreading into the open. “Why is the right answer right” would have let her say something true about the right answer and never touch the reading that sent her the wrong way.
How long are you spending on them?
The deposition isn’t always about one question. Sometimes it’s about a habit, and the question is about process rather than reasoning. Maya, second session, told me she was missing easy questions in the first half of the Logical Reasoning section. The obvious diagnosis is rushing. I didn’t assume it.
“Okay. How long are you spending on them, would you say, on that first half or the first ten questions?”
About a minute each, she said. That’s a good pace, and I told her so. So rushing wasn’t it.
“I wonder then if maybe you’re, even within that minute, overthinking some of them?”
Probably, she admitted. Then the honest part came out. She sometimes picked the more complicated answer on purpose, because the simple one felt like a trap. The belief underneath the miss was that it couldn’t be that simple, and no amount of pacing advice would have touched it, because the pace was fine.
“Overthinking is oftentimes the most likely culprit when it’s an easy question. Of course there are occasionally tough questions scattered in those first fifteen or so, especially from maybe nine to fifteen there could be a harder one or two in there.”
She decided to review her wrong-answer journal more often, looking for the simple-answer-rejected pattern. I’d asked a timing question and gotten a belief back.
When you can’t say why you picked it
The hardest deposition is the one where the student has nothing. Sofia, fifth session, a parallel question. She’d picked a choice and couldn’t tell me why. Not wouldn’t; couldn’t. The reasoning hadn’t survived the week.
When that happens, asking again gets nothing, so I go to a different choice.
“What are your thoughts on D, looking at it?”
Looking at the right answer fresh, with no stake in defending it, she worked out why it paralleled the stimulus. That’s how she found the real error. She’d judged the stimulus as flawed when it wasn’t, and had gone looking for a flawed choice to match. The deposition on the picked choice had failed, so we took the deposition on the stimulus instead, and that’s where the error was.
This is worth a rule of its own. If you can’t reconstruct why you picked a choice, you picked it without a reason you could state. That means you picked it on feel, and feel is the thing the test is built to exploit. Write that down as your deposition. “I don’t know why I picked it” is an honest sentence, and the why-chain can start from it.
Why the order matters
Some form of “what were you thinking,” “why did you pick that,” “walk me through it,” or “tell me why” opens most of my reviews, and “what do you think” or “you tell me” opens most of the rest. Whatever the words, the first thing I want from the student is their account of the question, not mine.
Politeness has nothing to do with it. A coach who explains before asking has just contaminated the only evidence that matters. The student’s live reasoning is a crime scene, and the moment I say “here’s why B is right,” the scene is gone. The student nods. Three weeks later the same skeleton shows up in a new costume and takes the point again, because nobody ever found out what the student had actually believed at the moment of the click.
“Real review is not passive, it’s forensic. You’ve got to dissect your thinking like it’s a crime scene.”
So I ask. And then I wait, which is harder than it sounds, and is the subject of chapter 10.
The fake version
The fake version of this step is the Nod. You read the explanation, agree with every word, and turn the page, and your own reasoning never touches paper. The deposition stops it, because your sentence is down before you’ve read a word of anyone else’s.
In your notebook
Alone, you write three things before you look anything up. Your answer, the correct answer, one honest sentence.
It gets written or said, every time. I tell every new student this:
“I require that all of my students keep some kind of wrong answer journal or error log to document their review process, for the simple reason that if you’re doing it in your head, you’re not really doing it at all. You’ve got to articulate your mistakes in your own words to fully extract the key insights and lessons learned from your review process, in order to make sure that you don’t make the same mistake again.”
That’s why the written version has you write it down before you look anything up, and why in a session I make you say it.
Sidebar: “I don’t have a study partner.”
You don’t need one. The written version is the default, and every step in this book runs alone at a table. A partner or a coach adds a second person asking the questions out loud, which helps. Their rule is that nobody explains anything until “what were you thinking when you picked it?” has an answer. Either way, that first answer goes on paper.
Your three questions, step 1
This is where the exercise that runs through the whole book starts. Do a timed set, and before you check a single answer, mark the three you were least sure of. Those are your troubled questions. Some will be misses. Others are guesses, or right answers that ate your clock. Label them 1, 2, and 3 on a fresh page, and keep that page. Every step from here on runs on the same three, and by chapter 9 they’ll be a finished review with a rematch date.
Still before the key, write the deposition for each one. Your answer, and one sentence. What was I thinking when I picked this? Hindsight will try to answer for you, so write what you thought at the time. If the honest sentence is “it sounded right,” write that. If it’s “I was down to two and this one felt safer,” write that. Then check the key and add the correct answer.
The honest sentence is allowed to be ugly. Tidying it is the one way this step goes wrong:
“If you try to get it perfect in the moment, by definition, you are not revealing what you actually thought about the problem. You’re trying to dress it up or color it up to be more accurate than it really was.”
A neat paragraph about the argument’s structure, written after you’ve seen the key, usually isn’t a deposition. I know, because I wrote myself plenty of those back when I was studying:
“I just told myself, oh, I get it now. How could I have been so dumb? That makes perfect sense. It wasn’t nearly enough, though, and my practice tests told that story.”
Keep going past these three. Within a week you’ll notice the same sentences showing up on different questions. “It sounded right” shows up on reading inference questions. “This one felt safer” shows up on assumption questions where you grabbed the stronger choice. That repetition is the skeleton showing through, and you can only see it because you wrote the deposition before the hindsight arrived.
