I am wondering how others mark time while in the exams? If you are just using one watch, do you familiarize yourself with/memorize where the minute hand should be during each set? What I have been doing in my practice sets is using white-board marker "tick" marks on the face of my watch to denote 7 minute sections, and I've found this to be helpful, but am not sure if this is allowable on exam day, unless I erase the marks I made pre-exam and spend the first minute using my highlighter to write on 7 minute chunks (unless tick marks on watches are allowable). (Have also considered using fine black glue just to slightly darken the lines in the 7 minute chunks so that the ticks appear less noticeable). I am using my watch less and less, though, so perhaps this will be completely redundant, but just wanted to hear what others were doing! (This became more of a concern for me after I heard using multiple watches was not permitted on test day).

This is long, rambly story of going from about a -14 on RC to -4 on RC because I stopped being stubborn.

So a couple of days ago I had a substantial RC meltdown. Basically a whole bunch of events transpired that more or less showed me what I needed to do to help my RC. Here are the events that kind of resulted in me learning how to do RC more efficiently.

Until about four days ago, out of the practice tests I have completed, I had maybe gotten 2/4 passages completed on RC (Averaging about 12-15 minutes per passage – no joke). Even when I tried to do J.Y.’s memory method I would just sit there thinking “I just can’t do it, J.Y.! I’m just not smart enough!” (if you don’t think J.Y. is omniscient, you’re doing the course wrong).

Then, I did one passage and got ¾ passages done on a prep-test with one sneaky line reference question completed in the last passage. I heralded as a huge success thinking, okay. This means I’m getting faster at reading.

Correlation vs. Causation anyone?

After doing some R.C. drills (at my same obnoxiously slow pace), this was quickly disproved.

Then I just started experiencing dread at the myth that people can’t get higher on RC easily (or even at all, as some will tell you). And here I was, doing my drills, sometimes spending up to ten minutes just reading the darn thing.

Then things just spiraled out of control; I freaked out and asked the Internet.

In doing so, I found this article, https://lsathacks.com/email-course/reading-comprehension/. I took the reading speed test the article tells you to and I read it at the same speed I’d been reading LSAT questions. Basically the thing just confirmed I was like dial-up internet when it came to reading speed (although of course, my comprehension was super high because I was reading so darn slow).

The speed test told me I was in the "insufficient" category of readers. I thought, “Insufficient? Screw you online reading test! Your website is insufficient. I read Derrida. My Master’s thesis has 250 references -- I had to read all of those. My whole job revolves around editing and making recommendations on doctoral dissertations and master’s theses. There’s no way I’m an insufficient reader… Is there?”

But there was no way I could think to RRE this apparent paradox.

So I resigned myself to believing I had an irretrievably FMOR and gave in to crippling self-doubt, tabbed back to the article, mortified, thinking “save me from this death.” The article said I was probably “subvocalizing” (a word for pronouncing each word as you’re reading) as I was subvocalizing – super meta. It said smart people didn’t do that.

Mortified at the thought that I had been doing this very thing basically most of my life, the article said I should use Spreeder (basically an app that flashes words across the screen at a certain number of WPM and you can use it to increase your number of WPM and so that you can learn not to subvocalize).

So, I loaded some pretty dense material on Spreeder. For ten minutes I spreeded (hmmm… spred? sprud?) at different speeds. After my ten minutes were up, and before I continued with my spreeding like a time-wasting buffoon, I figured I should look in the LSAT forums and see what other people said about Spreeder.

Lo and behold, J.Y. had already chimed in on it (he’s omniscient, remember?):

If you're running out of time on RC, it's not because you can't read the passage fast enough. It's because you're waffling b/t answers. You do that because you don't read well - be it the passage, the question stem, or the answers. Focus on reading well. Focus on reading for structure. Advice on how to read faster targets casual reading. If you've done any RC at all you'll know all too well that the speed limit is not set by how quickly your eyes can move across the page, how many words your eyes can snap in one shot, or whether you're subvocalizing. Rather, the speed limit is set by lack of subject-matter familiarity and the dense grammatical structure.

I thought, “So magic doesn’t exist. Great. I still can’t read well so basically I’m just screwed.”

Then I tentatively tried to look up LSAT RC reading structures (look them up in the forums – there are some really interesting ones). They gave me some insight, but no cheat sheet in the world was going to help with my problem.

Crestfallen, I returned to my RC drills. I tried to use the highlighter method posted up here earlier by @kylereinhard, hoping that the effervescent yellow stain would incite some inner RC warrior like it had for him. Long story short, I took 8 minutes on the stimulus and 4 minutes on the questions. And I got three wrong. Well, a girl can dream. (Not bashing his method. Try this -- maybe it'll work for you).

Crushed, I tried to look for happy stories in the Webinar section of people who did awesome things after being not so awesome. I found Allison Gill Sanford’s webinar https://classic.7sage.com/webinar/lsat-prep-for-170-plus/ and jumped to the part where she talked about RC. In the webinar, she said, “I would spend way too much time up front on the easy passages…” Which was exactly how I felt. Then (and I’m pretty sure it was her who said this, or maybe it was something I saw in the Trainer, which I looked in after listening to her webinar), which basically said we should try to keep our reading rate more or less constant over our different stimuli and then also replicate this in the practice test (obviously with allowances for harder passages).

So I figured, ok. If I am going to succeed at RC maybe I should just try to read at a speed that will just get me there on time. So, there are maybe 440 words per RC section. If you read in 2 minutes, that means 220 words per minute. If you read in three minutes, that’s 146 words per minute. I knew what it felt like to read at both of those speeds because I had spreeded earlier that day – which showed me that I could read, comfortably, at both of those rates.

So, I decided: I’m going to ‘spreed’ the stimuli (not in the Spreeder app, just on the page but at the same rate as I would read had they been in the spreeder set to 220), using J.Y.’s memory method, for one RC section. I grabbed my analog watch and set it to zero, and-ahem-spreeded the passage until 3:30. Then did a 30 second review of structure. Then answered the question until the full 8 minutes was up. Then went onto the next one. And so on.

Results of the first try:

-4 (And this time, not -4 thanks to guesses!) -- obviously a significant difference for me.

And since I was actually able to focus on the problems (which I’ve since noticed, thanks to BRs and this method, are more so with the questions than with the actual passage itself), I’m improving on RC now just as if it was LR!

Moral:

If you’re like me and you’re doing RC like a sloth because you basically misunderstand everything everyone says because you are some sort of backwards and self-destructive over-achiever (and/or you’re just inherently defiant to omniscient authorities even when they are one hundred percent correct), then maybe just run over quickly to Spreedster, prove to yourself you can read faster than you are right now, come back, and ‘spreed’ it.

I’m not saying skim it. Just read it at a faster rate. For 3:30 or 4 minutes or less. As J.Y. pointed out earlier, don’t worry about subvocalizing or anything like that right now either. You can become a non-subvocalizing speed reader at a different time if that’s really your passion, but I’m not so sure the RC section is the time for it unless you have like ten years to prepare or something.

Anyways. I hope this is helpful to somebody so that they don’t go through the whole ridiculous situation I just went through.

Keep calm and carry on!

*P.s. Don’t mean to insinuate that the article mentioned above can’t be helpful to some folks! Maybe it is the secret way to victory and I'll just never really know.

Just a simple BR worksheet you can print out double sided and use if you find it helpful and you're not already tired of printing. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YM5Vmzap38SSVhloin5PYEffF6DPv6_uc2IJo6yoYBU/edit?usp=sharing