I think part of that is just a matter of building mental stamina and attention span, staying engaged with each question and reading the stimuli actively. I highlight a lot in LR, too - I always highlight the conclusion, highlight the premises, highlight the parts of conditionals, etc. Helps me avoid the trap of losing focus and overlooking key parts of the argument, which is almost always where those "oh well DUH, that's obviously correct" lapses come from for me. The other part is that pattern recognition plays a big role in this test, and whether it's recognizing patterns in what makes an answer choice correct or (maybe more helpfully from the point of view of quickly being able to employ a process of elimination) incorrect. If you've recently started, you likely haven't been exposed to enough material to be able to quickly and reliable recognize patterns in the test; once you do, it's likely that you'll spend less mental energy parsing each individual question, and that'll help with stamina.

I usually score between -0 and -2 for RC, and I'd say I am especially focused on highlighting for structure in both LR and RC. In RC at least, my passages are awash with colors when I'm done with them. For example, blue is always stuff in the author's voice/things I might consider conclusions or reasons for writing the passage; pink can be arguments the author is rebutting; green is other arguments offered or premises that support the author's conclusion; yellow is background. That can all change slightly based on the type of passage it is, but generally I do it so that I have a physical, color coded map I can easily refer to when reading questions that illustrates how the passage is structured, and in turn helps me better understand how it all fits together to further the author's central argument/goal for writing. I suppose actively highlighting and thinking about the reasons for highlighting help me more actively read, understand, and retain the passage.

Hope that helps!

I don't think you should discount it at all. At the end of the day, the test is about how many questions you get right; if you only had time for 3 sections, and you got 75 out of 77 questions right, then that's still valid data about your skill level. The experimental section adds more data, if only because it's an additional 25 questions (even if they're "unscored"), and it helps test your pacing and attention span, but dropping only 2 questions across 3 sections is a strong performance! Many people are happy if they get 2 questions wrong a section.

Got this right, and if it helps others here's how I thought of it:

What's the conclusion here - ie what is the author trying to claim? That an exact replica of a scene is not the only thing people care about in paintings. That's a claim about people's preferences about art. Which answer choice deals with defending a claim about people's preferences for art? Only D. With that in hand, I kinda just assumed that the premise about photography's NOT having displaced painting fit the bill as a historical fact.

A: is there an aesthetic principle the author has articulated, that they're supporting? No.

B: The author isn't defending peoples' tastes, only making a claim about what influences their tastes.

C: The author isn't trying to explain why photography didn't displace painting - they're using that as a premise, not the conclusion.

E: Again, not defending people's artistic preferences. Descriptively inaccurate.

Totally tripped me up when it came up in the PT, but considering it this way helped me. The text basically says that the size of GZ's population was unlikely to be as big as it was due to several factors (like a farm in a desert). Just as irrigation is a mechanism that could enable something unlikely like a farm in a desert to flourish, so, too, did the cattle economy allow GZ's population to grow when it otherwise probably shouldn't have.