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mnguyen222184
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mnguyen222184
Thursday, Jun 14 2018

When I started studying, I was averaging anywhere from 10-12 wrong in RC. As I started to do better and solely focus on LR, my RC improved to maybe -9/-10. For the longest time, I neglected RC and also neglected MSS / NA questions on LR. I took the next steps around the same time so I am not sure what truly improved my score, but I was averaging 3-5 wrong just before this June test. Although I studied for several months, my RC improvement happened to click within a period of a month.

Before my largest improvement, I was writing down a few words for each paragraphs main point taking about 4.5 min to read and write each passage.

With the help of a tutor, I bettered my understanding of MSS, NA and Main Conclusion questions in LR which transferred to RC to the point I no longer needed to write down anything while reading, cutting down my reading by a min

I checked out some RC guides online (eg. Voyagers) and tried a few things, taking what I felt worked best for me (boxing names, circling shifting words like "although", and underlining key phrases that indicated main point contributions)

I started practicing speed reading with Spreeder app, but I don't think this helped largely. Instead, I started aiming for a min per question per passage which includes the reading time (eg. 7 min for a 7 question passage). I rarely made this mark but it helped me start to grasp reading comprehension passages within 2 - 3 minutes.

I drilled the RC passages from tests 1 - 20. These seemed more difficult to me as I rarely got perfect scores for these while getting much better scores on the newer tests. While reading over 40 passages, I started to find an interest in any of the passages since they are usually about some uncommon subject that I had not learned before, which for me became a fun thing to me. I dreaded an LSAT / PT that had an experimental RC but was glad I got one on the June test.

At first while drilling, I did maybe 10 without time and making sure to check my answers and find the phrasing in the passage where I was wrong.

After a while I started to feel a pattern in the passage structure and understood it well enough to go back to the paragraph which the question was asking about. I started to get better at sensing trap answer choices which were really not much different than the MSS, NA, and MC traps.

I got a subscription to The Economist and read a few toward the end of my studies and found them interestingly similar to RC passages, but there really are plenty of RC passages to practice on. My friend goes 0/-1 on RC and he naturally reads dense material like Darwin or Sartre, but I find that tactic to not be "me". I did begin reading The Concept of Law which takes a certain level of logical reading and I think that helped me some too. Good luck! Hope at least some of these things work for you

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mnguyen222184
Wednesday, Dec 06 2017

Was in a similar boat, and only recommendation is you just have to keep working at it. Started at 153 back in February and studied while working 50+hrs a week. Just took the Dec LSAT averaging 167 prior so we'll see.. Increases were not linear or expected. Here was my progression:

Studied Feb to May increasing to high 150s low 160s with LSAT trainer (Avg -12 RC, -10 LR, -5 LG)

From May to June LSAT, 5 section PTing and hours of LG drills and 7Sage videos and redoing. Improved to (-10 RC, -9LR, -1LG) - Got a low 160

Took a month break and got back on it for December. I rode the train every day and focused on LR for about 1.5 hours each day drilling and reviewing question types. Was out of newer practice tests at this point. But saw an increase using 30s PTs (Avg -10 RC, -6LR, -0LG)

So it takes time and you need to give your mind a rest every now and then to let it soak in. Good luck and keep pushing forward!

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