Help! Tips for RC (Struggling with the Answer Choices)

brawl001

Hello All,

Has anyone struggled in RC especially when answering questions correctly and accurately. Any tips for overcoming this or strategies? Would appreciate any help, I'm starting timing but noticing around 2-3 wrong per passage. I'm taking the August-Flex Test.

sa12gill

I'm not sure if this will help you, but I was in a similar position a couple of weeks ago and this strategy really helped me. At the end of each section, I would paste the passages into a powerpoint and just highlight the areas from which each answer came from. Then I would write out the tone of the passage, the structure of the passage, and its main point. This helped me get a general understanding of what the questions are asking for and what to expect from the passages. I realized that essentially the passages are quite similar and the questions are generally asking for the same sorts of things - once I got a general feel of what to expect I dropped from -6/-7 per section to -1/-2 per section.

chisal17

best tip I can give you is to check out @lexxx745 and his tutoring services! I had a similar problem and he really helped me with my RC!

AmericanInJapan

Hey!

I want to bounce off of @sa12gill and not only do the Powerpoint, but also try to write your own questions before actually looking at the questions. Write a few that you think the test will ask about. This really helped me learn how to detect important parts of the passage. For example, generally, if there's a list, they're going to ask about it. Was there an explicit comparison between two things? Gonna ask about it.

Once I got more in tune with this, I was able to do it automatically when I was reading the passage. If I read a list, my brain focused. If there was an explicit comparison, I made a note. Things like that.

Good luck!

goldenretriever

@sa12gill said:
I'm not sure if this will help you, but I was in a similar position a couple of weeks ago and this strategy really helped me. At the end of each section, I would paste the passages into a powerpoint and just highlight the areas from which each answer came from. Then I would write out the tone of the passage, the structure of the passage, and its main point. This helped me get a general understanding of what the questions are asking for and what to expect from the passages. I realized that essentially the passages are quite similar and the questions are generally asking for the same sorts of things - once I got a general feel of what to expect I dropped from -6/-7 per section to -1/-2 per section.

Thanks for the suggestion. Just wondering how you'd copy and paste the passages? When I try to do so, it doesn't let me select the text.

sa12gill

@goldenretriever said:

@sa12gill said:
I'm not sure if this will help you, but I was in a similar position a couple of weeks ago and this strategy really helped me. At the end of each section, I would paste the passages into a powerpoint and just highlight the areas from which each answer came from. Then I would write out the tone of the passage, the structure of the passage, and its main point. This helped me get a general understanding of what the questions are asking for and what to expect from the passages. I realized that essentially the passages are quite similar and the questions are generally asking for the same sorts of things - once I got a general feel of what to expect I dropped from -6/-7 per section to -1/-2 per section.

Thanks for the suggestion. Just wondering how you'd copy and paste the passages? When I try to do so, it doesn't let me select the text.

A lot of the passages are on lsat forums and GRE forums online, another solution is to use the pdf form of the section and mark it up in Acrobat, Preview, etc. The key takeaways for me after placing them on slides was that the passages are generally around 500 words and only fill up one slide in Times New Roman, 12 pt font.

bella_15

@sa12gill This is such a helpful comment and I am going to try this. If you don't mind me asking, is there a reason you use PP instead of word or something? Is that more convenient format wise?

sa12gill

@bella_15 said:
@sa12gill This is such a helpful comment and I am going to try this. If you don't mind me asking, is there a reason you use PP instead of word or something? Is that more convenient format wise?

I think the thing for me about slides was I was used to studying off of them. I was a sociology major in college who took a lot of history and philosophy as well - a lot of my classes were reading heavy and the professors would put pertinent passages on lecture slides.

I think I had really hyped up the reading comprehension section and decided I needed to do something to demystify it. By putting it on a powerpoint, it familiarized it and made it look a lot more like things I had studied for classes. Also, I realized that if I was able to read a slide of text in a lecture in 3-4 minutes then I could definitely read the passage with some semblance of understanding in 2-3 minutes.