Knowing which LR questions to go back to during timed PT after 1st round?

Forever Addicted to Coffee

Hi guys,

I just finished the CC and took a diagnostic June 2007 timed PT. 160 timed and 170 - 174 BR. My target is 172 - 175.

I also just finished BR'ing, watching the videos, and doing some careful analysis. One question that I am still having trouble on is the following:

I usually do a first pass of an LR section in 25 minutes. That leaves me 10 minutes to go back to questions that I circled to try and answer them before the time is up. At this point, I usually have about 3 questions unanswered and probably about 10 total questions that I circled for BR.

My question is... after my first pass, when I have 10 minutes left, how do I know which exact question to turn to for maximum benefit? I would assume that it would be the lowest hanging fruits. So far, I've just been going back to the first circled question and working my way up.

Thank you!

jmarmaduke96

I certainly had the same thought as you did for awhile, going back to the first circled question to start my second round. However, the difficulty of the questions does not always scale up perfectly throughout the section. Sometimes there are very challenging questions fairly early on and the last question might be fairly easy by comparison.

I ended up bringing this problem up with my tutor, @Sami, and she suggested going back to questions according to the amount of work left to do to feel confident about that problem. If I flagged question #20 and I already have it down to two answer choices and I know my confusion is coming from the first line of the stimulus, I'm going to come back to that question before I come back to question #15 if that question is a necessary assumption question where I read the stimulus and the gap was so small I thought it was valid at first and none of the answers jumped out at me. In this scenario it is likely that if I invest maybe 75 seconds into question #20 I will be able to sort out my confusion and get the correct answer. In this hypothetical I might drop several minutes into question #15 and only begin to get a hazy understanding of what is going on. It would be a shame to drop half of my round 2 time into one question only to have mediocre odds of getting it correct.

So, to put it more simply, I think you are right that you should go back to the lowest hanging fruit first on your second round. However, just because a question is earlier in the section does not mean that it is easier. Furthermore, and this is something I am still struggling with, just because the 7sage analytics tells you that a question is "easy" doesn't mean it will be easy for you. There have been tests where I answered questions of 5 star difficulty in under a minute with complete confidence but had to spend three rounds coming back to a 2 star question that I did not quite understand. So you will have to use your best judgment to know where on the section YOUR lowest hanging fruit is. If you only just finished the CC it will probably take a few PTs to get feel for it, but that is the end goal to strive for. I hope that helps!

EveryCookCanGovern

I do as you described. The rationale being that you are more likely to find the correct answer with questions in the beginning than toward the end, because the general trend is that the questions do get more difficult as you get further in, despite outliers.

Forever Addicted to Coffee

Thanks guys!

Jonathan Wang

I'll give a slightly different perspective on this. Most people don't really think about this because time is such a big issue on this test, but I will submit that there is such a thing as going too fast. And I think that finishing a section in 25 minutes with 3 blanks and 10 circles surpasses the threshold for 'going too fast' by a country mile. You're finishing in about 70% of the time allotted, but are unsure of 40% of your work. Does that sound right to you? (Yes, I understand there are degrees of not-sure, but the point remains).

I won't contest that skipping is important to have in your toolbox - it literally saved my score - but sometimes the correct answer to questions like these is "this should never happen". There will always be questions that throw you that you'll have to take another look at, but it absolutely cannot be 10 questions out of every 25. And whether that uncertainty is a confidence issue or a skills issue, the point is that there's a big problem either way that isn't resolved by just strategizing around it. If you're aiming 172-175, you have 5-8 questions worth of leeway across the entire test; circling 10 questions in one section just isn't going to cut it. So you shouldn't waste your time refining your strategy for this situation when you should just be resolving the underlying problem to begin with. In other words, you're worried about test strategy when it seems to me that you really ought to be more worried about the fact that you are unable to conclusively deal with nearly half the LR questions on your first pass. And if you solve the latter problem, the former problem suddenly disappears into thin air - because it was never the actual problem to begin with.

Instead of spending time trying to organize which of the 10 questions you circled to go back to and in what order, I'll suggest that just slowing down in the first place and taking an extra 30 seconds on each of those 10 questions would have done you more good. Yes, that means you 'only' have 5 minutes to go back and review instead of your current 10, but now you can focus those 5 minutes on 2-3 questions that really got your goat and give them a legitimate, thorough second look as opposed to trying to run-and-gun your way through 10 whole questions again. You cut the overhead of having to think about and organize your order of what questions to go back to, as well as the overhead of having to refresh your memory and reconstruct your thought process once you get back to the question. And on a macro level, you aren't wasting time in your PT-ing infancy worrying about things that won't be relevant once your skills develop further.

Forever Addicted to Coffee

Instead of spending time trying to organize which of the 10 questions you circled to go back to and in what order, I'll suggest that just slowing down in the first place and taking an extra 30 seconds on each of those 10 questions would have done you more good. Yes, that means you 'only' have 5 minutes to go back and review instead of your current 10, but now you can focus those 5 minutes on 2-3 questions that really got your goat and give them a legitimate, thorough second look as opposed to trying to run-and-gun your way through 10 whole questions again. You cut the overhead of having to think about and organize your order of what questions to go back to, as well as the overhead of having to refresh your memory and reconstruct your thought process once you get back to the question. And on a macro level, you aren't wasting time in your PT-ing infancy worrying about things that won't be relevant once your skills develop further.

Hi Jonathan,

Thanks for the post! I will definitely try this out during confidence drills in the next few weeks. I don't think it's my underlying fundamentals that is the issue here--after all, with a fresh look during BR, I usually go -0 or -1 in LR. But you are likely right that having less questions to return to could lead to better results.

Planning on doing some confidence drills to work on my underconfidence problems (circled about 4 - 5 questions that I did not need to). And go from there.

Thanks!

studyingandrestudying

I think if you read it and you're getting confused at any point--stimulus, applying the stem to the stimulus, or the ACs as applied to the stem and/or stimulus, and the confusion isn't resolving on the first round, then defer to the 2nd round.