Reading comp help

mlhinkle

If anyone is scoring great in rc and has tips / does tutoring please let me know I am missing all my points in rc. I am missing like 13 in rc and -2/3 in everything else. SOS.

Jerry

Biggest thing that helped me: read dense academic materials about topics you do poorly in.

Cant Get Right

That’s a really big discrepancy in your error rates. With LR at -2/-3 should be able to make significant gains on that. Can you elaborate on what’s going wrong? How does the section normally play out?

noonawoon

Are you rushing through the passage and then finding yourself going back to it a lot? You can save a lot of time by reading the passage more slowly/carefully so you only have to refer back for line-specific questions

mlhinkle

I’ve tried a few things. I’ve tried passage mapping and then going into questions and then I’ve tried also just using the highlight feature to refer back. I guess the issue is I’m not retaining the information to be able to get the big picture in harder passages which puts me at a huge disadvantage to answer questions

Lana Kane

RC is also my worst section and I've been working really hard on it and beginning to see improvement. My last PT I only missed 4 and was -0 on BR which has never happened. What I did was read A LOT of passages and I actually took a week off of PT-ing and just studied. When I'm actually taking a test I find the science passage and do that one first, I'm a STEM major and these are usually easy for me so I do that one first to warm up my brain. Then I tackle the two with the most questions next, leaving the shortest one for last so if I end up close on time at least I have less questions to answer.

While I'm reading I ask myself, why is the author telling me this and why should I care? This was a natural result of me thinking "oh my god who cares?!" for weeks since the material is so foreign to me. I think this is what has helped me the most. I also highlight the main point of each paragraph and words that point to the authors opinion.

It was a lot of trial and error to see what worked best for me.

Markmark

Try reading with an eye for the author's opinion / perspective, and when answering questions look for misplaced adjectives, superlatives, modality.. Ie if an AC says "all" and what I need is just "some," that's a big no no. Paying attention to adverbs and adjectives helps a lot too in the questions.

For main point / main purpose sometimes the answer can be weird and not what I think it should be, but in general you don't want to leave out any substantial points the passages makes. If there are gaping holes in the AC you want to catch that.

Markmark

O yea JY has a strategy too for the two-author passages. You read passage A and go through the questions, eliminating as many ACs as you can. Then you read B and try to eliminate and choose ACs. This style works for me.