How can I hit the 170 line before Oct 5?

Auran Buckles

I've been scoring at around 166/167, but because of my not-so-excellent GPA (3.4) I will need a minimum of 170 for my desired school to even consider me. With less than 3 weeks left, do you think this is an achievable goal? Should I wait until Dec? I've already put aside 90% of obligations so I have as much as 6 hours to study everyday before test day.

For those of you who think this can be achieved, what are some recommendations/useful tactics? I've been getting around -5 RC, -0 LG, and -3/-7 LR. It seems to me that the more recent tests always have one easier and one obviously more difficult LR section, so I've been scoring very unevenly in LR.

I hope others who have the same problem will find this thread useful too.

Thank you!

Samar Khan

I'm in almost the same exact position! I sometimes get in the 170s with BR, but never before doing BR and not consistently.

LG was the easiest for me to improve on, and I'm reaching close to 100% on it each time. I improved a little on RC with the memory method in the curriculum and feel more confident about it. However, I haven't really seen much improvement on LR.

I'm planning to go through and thoroughly review my PrepTests, which I haven't been doing as much as I should, and I hope that'll show me what I'm doing wrong and how to improve.

Connor MacLeod

To be honest I think you have enough time to reach your desired score. You just need to be patient.

What are your issues in RC? Is it that you are running out of time or just not fully comprehending the passages? For me personally I found that I could complete RC passages quicker If i spent more time on the article itself fully understanding and memorizing it, and I would only look back to it if the question recalled a specific line, or a specific paragraph.

As far as LR is concerned this is where you should be putting the bulk of your time. -7 is quite a few questions missed. Is there a certain question type you have trouble with? Is it a timing issue? If you can find out why you're scoring low on LR than it will help immensely. For me I usually get around -1/-2 on LR and find that if you blast through the first 10 or so questions really fast it helps with questions 11-20 which are typically harder. The key to do this is to trust yourself with the opening questions since they are not the curve breaker questions LSAC creates to balance out the scores, think of them as freebies, they should not be taking up a huge chunk of your time.

Auran Buckles

Connor, you've pinpointed my problem in LR. I just took a PT and realized this. When I trust myself with the first 10 questions (not reading EVERY answer choice) I am not as rushed during the harder ones and will do well. I got -5/-1 this time on LR.

My initial problem with RC was comprehending the passages (English was not my first language growing up). I made an effort to read outside materials (Economist, Scientific American) and that improved my score a bit, but it wasn't enough since the time needed for me to reach a level of understanding to answer questions is still way too long. I feel like I've hit a stone wall. Should I focus more on RC by just reading a lot everyday and using the memory method?

Also, I feel that recent RC questions have become more paragraph/line/word-specific and unpredictable, which makes me think that instead of taking the time to understand the whole passage, it's better to just get an overall understanding of it and look back at it more often during questions?

Thanks for all the helpful advice.

Connor MacLeod

To be honest RC just came naturally to me. I am a history major/Econ minor, so I read a lot of dense passages every day. In my opinion you should see what works best for you: either being the memory method that 7sage suggests, or just blast through the passage reading at like 450+ wpm and just getting a basic understanding of the layout and then look back for every question and once again read quickly. The former works better for me, but that may just be because i'm used to having to recall information from dense passages all the time. So yeah I would just experiment with different methods until you find which one gives you the better average RC score. Generally I get -2/-3 in RC so i'm definitely not perfect and cannot claim to have an overall "best method."