So everyone talks about BR, but what do you do after BR is of little to no help anymore?

mgzero2

I've hit a plateau in the high 160s where it seems I keep falling for dumb answer choices and when I review I don't have a hard time noticing what I did wrong. Should I make notes of things I fall for and try to correct that now? In LR the closest thing to a pattern is which of the following most weakens or which of the following is a flaw except. I'm going to review that, but honestly it's not like I miss many of those in the section or very often. I tend to get the questions wrong more for misreading the question or stimulus rather than not understanding the flaw, especially later in the test where I feel the time encroach on me. If I could correct this in the next two weeks I would be in a pretty decent position to take the December test.

In RC I notice a lot of pacing issues where I will finish but clearly make mistakes or make less mistakes but feel very pressured because I spent too much time verifying my answer choices. I don't know if slowing down helps. It doesn't seem to make much of a change and I'm not sure what to do to correct that either. I'm not even sure what BR is really like for this section. I started off doing the best here. I just take my sweet time during BR to find the answer in the text, and it isn't exactly helping me get less wrong in the next test as I usually have only circled about 2 or 3 out of the potential six I get wrong in RC. My accuracy isn't bad to overthrown my whole system either. I've changed what I do a lot on this section back and forth and I'm not sure any change is improving the consistency. I'm kind of at a loss of how you progress here into the 170s when understanding isn't your main issue. When I took the test officially once I actually did better in RC than before implementing a system although I don't attribute the extra miss or so to the system but rather to the lucky passages I got on the test and don't want to have to rely on luck on my next one. I think it is more accurate than it was before and I feel more confident going about it this way but I've improved about zero in RC. The only pattern is that humanities passages have the worst scores for me. Usually -3 in a Art history passage and -0 to -1 in Law or Science. Should I drill just a bunch of humanity passages I find and train myself to maintain focus(I find them very dull)? I'm not sure that's the way and that's exactly what is so nerve wracking about being stuck here and hoping I can take the Dec. test, not knowing how to improve.

TLDR; I don't know how to improve after this point where I'm sure my foundation and basics are solid. I tend to fall for a lot of answers or to fail to maintain focus on certain passages. Not knowing how to proceed on fixing these issues is anxiety inducing.

AllezAllez21

Unless you BR a 180 nine times out of ten, you've got more to gain from BR.

Once you're in the high 160s I suppose it's fair to start focusing on execution strategies, though you'll have more to gain from learning as well. Watch the webinar on skipping, that should help with LR.

I also think you're being too dismissive of the questions you got wrong. Many times when someone says they've misread a question, it's because the test takers designed the question to get you to misunderstand. You need to work on not falling for those traps. If you're just straight up misreading words then you need to discipline yourself to slow down and read correctly as well as build a process that makes you double check things to avoid such errors.

For RC, don't spend too much time on any one question. At some point you've got to just select an answer and move on. Force yourself to choose and move on. I think BR for RC is super valuable. That is when you take the time to really delve into the structure of a passage and figure out what's going on. It's less about understanding the content and more about understanding the underlying structure and how the argument is built.