You're definitely not a lost cause. I'm not much of a success story, my first ever practice test was a 147 and this morning I got a 163 from November. Take that for what you want. There are definitely people who have gone from 140s to 170s. I think if your real test is notably lower than your practice test averages, you need to really self reflect on your study process and why that is. And go from there. Is it anxiety? Are you not properly simulating real conditions? Are you doing review that isn't actually helping very much? I wouldn't just passively follow 7Sage, take a hard look at your study process and go from there.

7Sage has helped a lot of people including myself. So it's not an inherent problem with the program. It might not be the right program for you, in which case you should ask yourself why, and what might be a better alternative. You should also self reflect on your study process, why isn't it working for you. Studying and working full time is very challenging and commendable, but it is possible to still see big increases doing this. If you want I could go over a few questions with you.

I got this correct by process of elimination but the language of C is just so hard to understand. I kinda get it now, but jeez.

Feel like you can just common sense this question, and by doing so you are actually identifying the same flaw JY pointed out, just in a very informal way. I've had jobs before, and I assume most of you have as well, is pay ever determined in a purely non-subjective way? What does that even mean? Even if there are hard thresholds for your pay, like you have to sell 50 of X item, to get Y dollars, the fact that they chose "50" to be the threshold, is subjective. So to say subjective pay is the reason not to have a certain type of job is completely ridiculous, because all jobs to a certain extent involve subjective evaluation for determining pay, which is the flaw JY pointed out.

On a tangent, if the argument was something like "you should not be an artist because the determination of pay is much more subjective than most other occupations, and that puts your livelihood in a state of perpetual instability" then there is something to that and I might agree with them.

I thought this was the easiest passage and set of questions for this PT by quite a lot for some reason. Anyone else feel the same? Maybe the fish passage was easier to understand, but it had way tougher questions.

First thoughts are that this this passage wasn't so bad, but some of the questions were brutal even though I only got 1 wrong, I felt like I won a lot of 50/50s or 70/30s, where I couldn't confidently eliminate all the answer choices. I somehow managed to get question 11 right, but that question was extremely hard. Not at all surprised it's labeled as a "170" difficulty, ACs D and E definitely were attractive to me. I got 13 wrong. have no idea why D is correct, will definitely have to watch the explanation.

For question 6 I ultimately picked C but I couldn't confidently eliminate D. You say the author wouldn't recommend nothing, but like, why not? Our author cares about genuine representation of the film, if subtitles make it so that isn't possible, I don't see why they wouldn't go for it.

E is incorrect because the phrase "certain forms of communication" is too weak and may not apply to TV. B for sure includes TV in this case by using the word "anything" and thus bridges the gap that we need.

For 18 what JY circled to support A is definitely the best section, but I used the word "grew" that comes before it. I thought that if they are growing 1 billion peptides, some of them can't come from nature, because why would they need to be lab grown. But I definitely see why this is some pretty sketchy logic on my part, I kinda knew B-E was wrong though.

I got this question right but I thought it was super hard so I hoped JY would help but he didn't really. The difficult part about this question to me is just understanding what is being said, instead JY focuses on the lawgic. When I read this part about a section about ceasing to regard an action as being freely performed, I knew it had to be relevant because why would they say it, but it was just very hard to figure out what that even means and why it's relevant to the first part of the stimulus. I think if you focuses on just breaking down the English into something understandable, that would be a better explanation.

This is a great example of a question where knowing necessary assumption questions want weak language helps a lot. It seems like C is a very attractive wrong answer choice, but C is easy to eliminate just by realizing that it's too strongly worded, which is a red flag for necessary assumption questions. The word "never" in answer choice C completely kills it, it's simply not necessary to have such a high burden of proof. E is much more moderately worded, saying that we should balance between these 2 things. This strategy won't completely answer the question for you, but it helps a lot.

My anticipation for this question was "but what if the works of one of those contemporary artists fills a specific niche that the vast majority of other artworks don't satisfy". This isn't exactly what D says but it works toward the same idea, which is that just because there are already tons of great artistic works doesn't mean all contemporary artists are wrong in thinking they can also aesthetically please someone. So my anticipation was good enough to lead me to D, though I still found E tempting. Maybe this helps someone.

Hey so does the 4 of us sound good? Can we do sometime this afternoon? Say 1pm EST? I'm not sure exactly how to set it up, if one of you guys know and is willing to do it I would really appreciate it.

This was a fun question because I don't think I've ever seen the flaw in this question in another question.

I got this question correct but I don't love JY's reasoning for it. How do we know ordinary fish don't have elaborate tails or strangely shaped fins? Cause it's right there in the name, they're ordinary. These are the traits that make these specially bred fish special.

It seems like people are picking E because they interpret "almost every Wednesday" to mean all Wednesdays? But you can have half-price coffee on Wednesdays even if there is no poetry reading. So it actually could be every Wednesday.

You have to look for the patterns in answer choices. Reversing the correlation is one of the oldest tricks in the book. As soon as I saw that I knew E was right. Even if some of the other options seem tricky or you're not exactly sure what they're saying, if you can spot the pattern the other ACs should have no sway over you.

I got this right, but strictly through POE. So if someone makes an argument, and you reject their principle premise, that doesn't mean you can outright reject their conclusion?

Maybe this isn't helpful but I didn't even bother really trying to go deep into what the argument is saying. If you think about the fact that you have at the most really about 2 minutes to do this question, I'm not sure it's worth it. You would have to be insanely good to really understand this stimulus and find the right answer in 2 minutes, after already doing 22 questions. I kind of had a surface level idea of the argument and then just based on the phrasing B really stood out to me, I was actually pretty confident it was correct, it wasn't a blind guess, even though I didn't understand the argument very well. Just going from B you can make a checklist, is that phrase an observation, yet it is, is it a concession, yes it is, is it ultimately insufficient to justify this bad argument, yes it is, we know that from the last sentence and the word "mistake" in the first sentence. If we go to to AC A for example "it is a claim for which the argument attempts to provide justification", it's clearly not doing that, you don't even really need to understand the argument to see that's not the case.

I'm taking in April, currently scoring in the high 160s to low 170s, but willing to give it a try.

This is a tough question, no doubt. But I'm wondering, did you guys think this was tough because of the stimulus or because of the answer choices. Idk, I managed to figure out what the stimulus was saying, and was able to rule out AC D because I realized that contradicting beliefs is an acceptable characteristic of our definition. And by process of elimination I arrived to E, but I still think it was the answer choices that were rough.

I got this right originally, but I spent so much time on it. For some reason I could not wrap my head around what the stimulus and what C was saying, and only got it through instinct and process of elimination. Coming back to it a few days later, and my mind grasps the logic so quickly and so easily. Amazing how these things work sometimes.

Process of elimination is your best friend on this question. I really hope you're not picking C or D, those should be instantly out. B and E are pretty easily provably wrong. You just have to understand that you only need 1 of the 3 things to solve the paradox.

This is just a RC question. If you're focused and read carefully, you should get it right. I agree it's a mean trick though.

I'll throw in my two cents. I found this question easy kinda by just using a common sense perspective. I read the stimulus and immediately realized they are basically just saying the two(concern for beauty and calling for intervention or arousing anger as a legit aim), are mutually exclusive. That's the implicit conclusion, so you just need the AC that says the the ideas are mutually exclusive and that's what AC D does. This is nice because it lets me drown out the noise. I don't even have to really know what the other answer choices are saying as long as I know it has nothing to do with mutual exclusivity.