Confidence Drills for RC

youbbyun

hey all,

so I've heard from @"Cant Get Right" and others the importance of doing confidence drills for LR.

I was wondering if you guys did confidence drills for RC?

My guess is that confidence drills helps people with pacing, speed, and confidence. I think those skills are also very important in RC, as well as in LR. So i was wondering if ppl had experience doing confidence drills for RC, or if they have any advice or suggestions?

thanks.

LAWYERED

what are "confidence drills"?

Cant Get Right

Hey, this is a really great question, and the skills you've cited are absolutely essential to success in RC. It's widely regarded as a section that is enormously different to improve, but I've never found that barrier to be too thick. I think it's the hardest section to improve to levels of consistency which are more common in LG, but I think the overwhelming majority of us would be happy somewhere shy of -0.

It starts, as with everything else on the LSAT, with good fundamentals. You can't do confidence drills without solid fundamentals. Once you know what you're doing though, a good time management strategy is the next step. What I do for RC is a little more indepth than confidence drills, but I think it's what you're asking for. Hope this helps!

So my first rule in RC, and where I start with developing a time management strategy, is to read at a comfortable, natural pace. You need to move with a sense of urgency, but don't try any of this stuff about speed reading or eliminating subvocalization. Your comprehension declines rather sharply as you get further and further away from your natural read. I’m a slow reader and I need to budget 4 minutes per passage. Find out what your time looks like and start from there.

Then, do the math. So for me, I need to plan for 16 minutes reading passages. That leaves me 19 minutes to answer the questions which averages out to about 40 seconds for each question. That tells me my strategy, and that strategy by necessity of time is highly aggressive. I don’t have time for a safer, more careful strategy. I don’t have time to confirm my answers in the passage, I don’t have time to agonize over contender answer choices, I don’t have time to hunt for answers if I have no idea where to look. There will be questions that will take me longer than 40 seconds, and to answer those I’ve got to beat 40 seconds on others in order to bank that time for where I need it.

This ultimately means that my optimal section strategy is very different from what feels the most comfortable. But I don’t get to feel comfortable in RC. It’s too much information to process in too little time. So the task with the section strategy is to provide the framework in which you will execute your fundamentals. The rest—how you actually perform within that framework—is up to your fundamentals. Even the best strategy can only set you up to maximize the returns on your abilities.

The best way to approach developing this is to record timed sections. Then, watch it back with a stopwatch and account for your time objectively and empirically. Enter the data into a spreadsheet and then see how it all adds up. Make adjustments based on those results and try again. Repeat until you’re able to manage your time effectively and consistently.

And of course, address issues in fundamentals as you go!

youbbyun

@"Cant Get Right" thank you so much! i really appreciate the help and insight

TheDeterminedC

@"Cant Get Right" I actually had no idea what to gain from looking over my RC section recordings, thanks for this advice!!

Sami

I love the response by @"Cant Get Right"

I'll add a bit more details to this process.

I have often found that we can get so scared of missing details in RC that we end up trying to memorize all the details when we are reading the passage. When people do that, their reading time ends up being very slow and/or the understanding is not that great of the passage. So focus on your fundamentals: doing low resolution and high resolution and connect backs after reading each paragraph and be confident in that process.Then as Josh said, you need to do each question in under 40 seconds, so you don't have time to go back to check your answers or agonize. This means you have got to be confident of what you read and the your low rez summaries and use that to answer questions first without doubting yourself. If it turns out you made a mistake you can always figure that out in blind review and fix it for next time.

So practice doing fundamentals first. Take the section you took under time and see if without time your low resolution and connect backs are different. If they are, see if you can find what lead you to not have the correct understanding and low rez under time. When you watch your video and if you see yourself agonizing over a question, see if you remember what was going on in your head and try writing down how you would react differently to that information next time. For example, if I have a 50-50 and they are true 50-50 where I am not already leaning towards one and I don't know how to resolve it, I am going to next time circle one of the answer choices without agonizing, circle the question, and come back if I can bank time in this section.

youbbyun

@Sami thank you!