The first Verbal batch enters the Library this morning. Five lessons on the Critical Reasoning Assumption family — the most-tested CR question type and the one whose underlying move generalises to every other CR family the candidate will eventually meet. The Number Properties batch from July sits next to these; the Verbal section is now opened.
We have been writing prep for CR backwards, as an industry, for at least a decade. The standard format is a tour of question types: a Strengthen module, a Weaken module, an Assumption module, each treated as a template with a list of trap answers. A candidate who finishes that course can label question types. The same candidate, given an unfamiliar prompt, often cannot.
Why Assumption first, not all of CR
Every CR question is a question about the same underlying object: an argument with one or more premises, an unstated connecting link, and a conclusion. Strengthen tightens the link. Weaken dislodges it. Flaw names what is broken in it. Assumption asks what the link actually is.
The Assumption family is where that move is named most directly. A candidate who has internalised what a load-bearing assumption looks like — what it is and what it is not — solves Strengthen, Weaken, and Flaw items with a different first read of the stimulus. Teaching Assumption first is the choice the pedagogical work made for us. The other CR families ship in later batches, against the same underlying object the Assumption lessons name.
The five lessons
CRA-1 — Argument anatomy: the gap that matters. The foundation. What a premise is, what a conclusion is, and the load-bearing gap between them that every Assumption question tests. CRA-2 — Necessary vs. sufficient assumption. The distinction most candidates never see named, and the one that decides between two trap answers on roughly a third of Assumption items. CRA-3 — The negation test. The single most useful diagnostic on the section: negate the candidate answer, ask whether the argument still stands. The widget walks the negation live. CRA-4 — Five recurring assumption shapes. The patterns the GMAC item-writers reuse — causal, comparative, definitional, sampling, no-alternative. Naming the shape collapses the trap-answer set. CRA-5 — The trap map. A capstone that catalogues the four answer-choice traps Assumption items run repeatedly, and the move that breaks each.
What candidates will notice first
Two things, observed across the alpha cohort that previewed the batch through August.
CR feels slower for the first two lessons. Candidates who arrive at the Library having drilled CR as templates spend more time per slide in CRA-1 and CRA-2 than the engine expects. The reason is almost always that they are mapping the new argument-first frame against the template-first instincts they came in with. CRA-3 onward brings them back to the engine's predicted time-per-slide. The Library does not produce a slower CR reader; it produces a candidate whose first read of the stimulus is doing different work.
The negation test transfers. Alpha candidates who completed CRA-3 used the negation move spontaneously on Strengthen and Weaken items in practice sessions afterward, without being told to. That generalisation is the whole reason the Assumption family ships first. We will write a longer note on the cross-family transfer pattern once the cohort produces enough Mock data to read it.
What is not in this batch
The other CR families — Strengthen, Weaken, Evaluate, Paradox, Flaw, Boldface — are queued behind Assumption in the authoring order. Each will get its own batch when its slide drafts pass the same review the CRA batch did.
Reading Comprehension is on a longer timeline. RC's pedagogical argument is materially different from CR's — the Predict step has to attach to a passage, not a stimulus, and the slide grammar we built for NP and CRA does not transplant cleanly onto a 350-word passage. We are taking the time to get RC's slide format right before shipping the lessons themselves.
Adaptive within-lesson sequencing. Same as v0 — the per-slide response data the v0 and v0.5 batches are now collecting will, in v1, drive a per-candidate slide-order optimisation inside each lesson. v0.5 still runs the same fixed slide order for every candidate.
Who gets it
Every Pro 4-month, Pro 6-month, and Ultra subscriber has the five Assumption lessons available today, next to the five NP lessons. Pro 1-month still does not include the Library — same reasoning as July's release; thirty days is the wrong window for the Library to do its work.
Free diagnostic candidates can preview one lesson — CRA-1, Argument anatomy — without subscribing. Same format as the NP-1 preview. Same lesson the subscribers see.
The next batches will keep filling out the Quant foundation — fractions and percents, ratios and proportions — alongside additional CR families across the autumn.
— Brightroom Curriculum