Quick Tip

After you read an RC question, stop and come up with a plan before diving into the answers. 

I often will see students rush through RC question stems to get to the answer choices in an attempt to save time, only to be lost and confused when they get there. RC question stems can be difficult to parse out, unlike the simpler and repetitive LR ones. Don’t be afraid to spend some time sitting on the question stem to make sure you understand what is being asked of you. 

Discussion

Overconfidence Errors

Overconfidence errors—questions that you thought were correct that end up being wrong—can be a pain to troubleshoot. Not only did you get the question wrong, but you didn't know that you got the question wrong, so it's sometimes difficult to understand what to do to improve on your next practice test. Today I’ll talk about how I help my students overcome overconfidence errors.

A common reason students commit overconfidence errors is because they misinterpret the meaning of a sentence or phrase. To maximize your review process of overconfidence errors, you can ask yourself the following questions:

  1. What did I misinterpret? Identify the issue at hand.
  2. What did I think it meant? Knowing this will give us clues on how to fix the errors for next time.
  3. What does the sentence or phrase actually mean? Work on your understanding for the future.
  4. How did I come to misinterpret this sentence/phrase? This requires honest self-reflection as you try your best to remember the actions you made during your timed exam.
  5. What action(s) can I take to improve? Add it to your process and get the question correct next time.

Let’s put this into practice. Say you misinterpreted the question stem below:

Which one of the following, if true, most strongly supports the argument above?

Often, students wrongly think the question stem above is a Most Strongly Supported (MSS) question, when in fact it is a Strengthening question. So, let's ask the five questions above:

  1. What did I misinterpret? The question stem.
  2. What did I think it meant? I thought it was asking me to find which answer choice was most strongly supported.
  3. What does the sentence or phrase actually mean? It is actually asking me to strengthen the argument in the stimulus
  4. How did I misinterpret this sentence/phrase? I saw the words "most strongly supported" and jumped the gun without reading the question stem carefully.
  5. What action(s) can I take to improve? From now on, when I see the words "most strongly supported," I will stop and remember that I have a tendency to jump the gun here, so I will stop myself, take a breath, and read carefully to make sure I understand what the question is asking me to do.

I always advise my students to ask these questions when overconfidence errors occur in their practice tests. Oftentimes, overconfidence errors appear when students are reading too fast. But just saying “I need to read more carefully next time” isn’t a concrete goal that you can take actionable steps towards. Saying “I am aware that I misinterpret MSS questions, so I’m going to be careful here next time”, however, is.