Can anyone give me tips on how to reach the last passage of RC during timed practice? :/ RC is already my weakest section, and not getting to the last passage almost guarantees me around -5 right off the bat which is really discouraging. I think my biggest issue is spending too much time on questions but even when I understand an easier passage pretty well, I still end up spending around 10–14 minutes (+questions) on it. I'm taking the November LSAT, so I'd really appreciate any advice on how to improve my timing
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Are you a slow reader or just second-guessing yourself? If it’s the latter, force yourself to trust your gut and flag + move on (working on breaking this habit myself, but we’ve got this!). If it’s the former, you might want to try reading a short article or passage, then writing a low res summary of it daily. Maybe go to the library and borrow one or two science/literature magazines.
Good luck :)
@Rubyjesuslover wait.. I love this advice so much! Thank you for it - I think you just made something click in my brain.
@Rubyjesuslover Thank you for the advice! I've actually been doing this for about a month now but sadly I haven't noticed much improvement in my RC timing :( I'd say I'm an average-paced reader, and I want to clarify that the 12–14 minutes is how long it takes me to read a passage and answer the questions, not just read the passage itself. I think my issue is that I spend too much time on the questions, but at the same time, I don't want to rush through them and sacrifice accuracy
For me, the key issue on RC timing is thinking about what you can get away with sacrificing in order to gain more time. Maybe you can spend less time on the passages and have slightly worse understanding, but make up for that and more by having more time to look back at the passage and answer the questions. Maybe you can put a hard limit on how long you spend on each question, which may decrease your accuracy a bit, but you may more than make up for that by getting to every question. Essentially, the goal is not to be a perfectionist on understanding every word of every passage, while only moving on from a question when you're 100% sure about it. The goal is to move quickly enough through the whole section, while still maintaining a sufficient - but not perfect - level of understanding.
@AriVilker1 My average reading time is about 5 minutes per passage, so I believe the questions are what take me longer. I'm gonna try applying this advice to my RC practice and spending less time on the questions, especially since 90% of the time even when I spend longer on a question I end up going with the answer choice I initially picked before I started overthinking it. Thank you! :)
Remember the test is open book not memorization. About 85% of the passage is never in a question. If you spend too long reading up front you won’t have time to utilize the text to confirm answer choices when you do the questions.
@julielamberth Thank you!