Already try to follow advice like "focus on the author's opinion," "read for structure, not details," but still getting too many wrong, or running out of time on the last passage? Here are 3 mistakes you might be making.
@EricB7Sage
100
Already try to follow advice like "focus on the author's opinion," "read for structure, not details," but still getting too many wrong, or running out of time on the last passage? Here are 3 mistakes you might be making.
@EricB7Sage
13 comments
My two cents: Whether something is in the passage and you can't remember, I think you should decide:
Based on what you read: can you make a strong inference that this AC would not be discussed or supported by the passage?
If you can't remember BUT you can make this strong inference that it's not discussed, then it's fair to eliminate/move on.
But if you can't make this inference, then you should totally go back to the passage.
One for me is not being able to tell in a critique or debate passage what the author likes. Sometimes it seems more expository, describing others opinions, and I don’t really see what the authors point is.
@Lillia555 It's possible you're not supposed to be able to tell -- sometimes the author really is neutral and simply reporting a debate between other views. In that case the author's main point is something like, "There's a debate about this issue".
@Kevin_Lin Absolutely. Upon reflection, I'll rephrase my thought. It would be interesting to see an instructor go through a touch RC critique/debate passage, and touch on all the possible types of questions in RC, where the author has a slight bias that the passage expects us to pick up vs not. Theres clearly "family trees" of types of questions for RC, as in LR, but yet theres distinct ones where a factor that might be relevant to one question isn't relevant at all to another. Without necessarily doing process of elimination through actual answer choices, just comng up with ideas. Sometimes its easy to see everything as relevant and getting lost, but how can we filter for specific things based on an analogy, parallel reasoning, identifying what is the authors real implicit attitude vs our own associations, identifying when to be "robot" and when to be "lawyer" in our approach to questions.
I'm realizing upon typing this out that this is a huge project haha
Hidden message in this video is to trust your gut!!! Thanks Kevin, for putting faith in our guts.
I've been spending at least 1:30 too long on each passage (according to the PT analytics) since I've started studying and I've felt like that's a problem, but it seems like the takeaway here is that it's not a problem as long as I'm answering questions more quickly?
This was pretty helpful!!! Thank you, Kevin! :)
ahahah i feel so called out but i truly needed this
One thing that I'm interested in is going over conditional vs causal vs formal logic in a youtube video, like hard curve breaker questions, identifying which words are "black and white" indicators of the type of answer we need, and which ones are "gray" especially when multiple types of reasoning are blended together. I am finding that I'm using the rules, but in edge cases on the hardest questions I'm using trial and error.
I always appreciate how in 7sage's examples they don't always use he/him pronouns :)
also I think my biggest problem is answering the wrong question--I definitely skim through the question stems... I'm excited to try being mindful with RC!
@SusanLeifker same :) girlboss turtle
Great video! I’m loving the RC curriculum I’m about 60% done. I’m shooting for a 165 by October and the best PT I’ve gotten is a 155 and I’ve been drilling in the high 160s but haven’t PT’ed. RC is a struggle sometimes, I’ve really had to change how I read but I’m working on it. Best I’ve done timed is a -6. My main reason for me telling you this is that I wanted to ask is RC more of a mind game where the LSAT tests your confidence of your read essentially?
@RussoLeoP That's a big part of it ... of course you do need to read the passage very well. That's step 1. But I find that a lot of people who do read the passage well don't realize how aggressively we can/should move through the questions. They're too careful and end up taking 9+ minutes on a passage/question set that they could have taken 7. And then this means later on when they get to a passage/questions set that really does require 10-11 minutes to finish, they just don't have enough time. Then they misdiagnose the issue. Because they got the earlier passage all right, and struggled with the later passage, it seems like the problem is with that harder passage later on. But actually the problem stems from the passage they found easy.