@ said:

Feel more and more hopeless every day thinking of those logical reasoning sections, anyone feel the same way? :( Were they especially hard or was it just me...?

I felt the same, at least for the first LR. There were a series of about 5-10 questions which were totally opaque to me, I read the stimulus for each of these questions for a long time and I was ascertaining nothing. It ended up eating a sizable amount of my time and I felt rushed for the remaining questions on that section. That's never happened to me before. I felt I did well on the other LR, and I felt that the RC and LG were comparatively easier to the first time I wrote the test. But that first LR section may have spoiled the whole test for me and I'm extremely disappointed because of it. Knowing I may have to write the test a third time because of that section is killing me.

I would be interested in the virtual group BR if there is one - please let me know!

I got a 158, which was a major improvement from my 153 last year (56th to 74th percentile). However, I really thought that both LR sections (more so the first one than the second one) were more difficult than usual. LR is usually my best section, I average about -5 or -6 for each, and this test I got -8 and -10. Tough pill to swallow, because I met my PT avgs for Reading Comp and I did the best I've ever done on LG. I'm a little scared to re-write just because I doubt I will ever do that well on LG ever again.

I'm a Canadian applicant, and my GPA is high enough to pair with the 158 score to boost my chances of admission. I'm going through some personal issues right now and don't feel like re-writing in January, so I'm going to use this score and see what happens this cycle. I'm still very happy that I was able to make the 5 point improvement. I think this will help my admission chances with at least some of the schools I applied to. But yeah, those LR sections, wow! Brutal. If I had got just 2-3 more questions right I would have broke into the 160's which was what I ultimately wanted to do. But my rationale is that a 158 is close enough.

@ How long after doing BR did you see score improvements? Were these improvements surprising to you? Did they cover all areas of the test? Thanks!

@ I started off with Manhattan Prep, and was following their core curriculum which included learning the theory and drilling the question types. I then transitioned to 7sage about a month before my December exam, and got through most of the core curriculum. My general study strategy was to learn the core curriculum and drill the appropriate question types per lesson.

With Games in particular, I found this approach to be inefficient and counterproductive. I wasn't able to make the progress leap in Games that is characteristic of most students who start working on them for a month or so. The approach I used really further conditioned what I have learned are bad habits, especially in Games. I'm not able to easily make inferences when I diagram, so my approach was merely to brute force every Game by drawing out each possible scenario according to what the question was asking. This is what I did on the December exam. While it is an admittedly terrible approach, it was the one approach I got comfortable with because, although it is incredibly time consuming and inefficient, it assured me the greatest sense of accuracy with each question. (I had extra time accommodations for each section, which made my method a plausible method to use on test day.)

I'd like to unlearn some of these bad habits and start fresh, despite how difficult that may be. Do you suggest the Fool Proof Method?

In addition, when it comes to LR, I am still somewhat struggling with MBT, Inference, and SA Assumption questions, mostly because I am still struggling with how to chain conditional statements. What do you suggest is a good technique for these particular areas of weakness?

Hopefully I can patch things up in time for February. I know its only my first time writing the exam, but I don't want to keep making the same mistakes and make a living only preparing for this exam. I appreciate your thoughts and advice.

In addition, I will say that I took a majority of the PT's before I knew what 7sage was and was privy to their teaching methods. I have never BR'd a PT before. I imagine this is one thing in particular I could start doing. And in doing this, I could re-orient myself with the CC. With all of this in mind, is the February 2018 testing date a reasonable amount of time to recalibrate my strategy to see an improved score?