How do I improve RC?

bellahyeon14

I think I've been taking quite a lot of pts over the past months but my RC score is the same as the score I've started out with (-9 mostly on the old pts to -13 at my worst, which I get on hard recent RC), which is frustrating.
I do blind reviews and every time I get questions wrong, I make a mental note to myself not to get the same question types wrong again, but I end up getting wrong anyway on different passages. I feel like every time I blind review, I'm just gaining an understanding of that specific question in that specific passage, but not know how to effectively tackle new questions on passages I have never encountered.
Is there a way to improve RC?

VerdantZephyr

@bellahyeon14 It is much more challenging to improve, that is for sure. It took me a long time to improve, and I don't think things clicked for me until shortly before the test. I BR'd with a partner that was quite clever at RC, and that helped. It took me from a range of -3 to -5 (average probably -4) to suddenly getting -1s. That only happened the last week before my test and was a direct result of her insight.

I am a big proponent, especially as you get to the higher scoring levels, of taking tests on your own, then either 2 step BRing where you BR on your own then again with a partner or just BRing together with a partner or partners after you both take the test. Having that debate about why they think whatever answer is wrong or right can teach you to view questions with their eyes. This person also gave me the single most helpful tip for me on the LSAT.

While I started with a pretty high RC score I just was not able to improve it at all and was getting frustrated. But, one of my big struggles was main point questions and my initial improvement came from a tip she gave me. The trick is flag every single main point question. Read them, think about the answers, maybe even answer them if you feel good, but always flag them and come back at the end of the section. A lot of times the other questions for that passage will give you a clue or reinforce what the main point is in the test writers' minds. I started doing that and I went from getting at least one Main Point RC wrong on every test to not getting a single one wrong the last 2.5 weeks of prep for the LSAT. The rest of my improvement on RC came from must learning from her reasoning. I give her and my other BR partners a lot of my credit for improvement. Find people like that to help you. For it to work best they should probably be at least in the 160's and ideally at first you might have complementary strengths. Maybe they struggle more on LG or LR than you but are solid on RC.

If you have a decent amount of time still before your test you could try reading publications like The Atlantic, The Economist, and Scientific American in your free time as well and maybe make your own summaries of articles and work really hard to understand anything difficult. That is a suggestion I have seen floating around but I do not see it being that effective if you have your test in a few weeks.

VerdantZephyr

Also, the recent RC PTs are very different. The older PTs had harder passages more frequently I think, and often the difficulty on hard questions was understanding the passage. The upper 80's PTs often present a selection of not great answers and you have to select the one that works the best from them. There is still one right answer, but instead of multiple answers that are initially similar and appealing there is often something that keeps each hard question's answer from being an immediate slam dunk. That was my feeling anyway. Finding a way to strongly justify a not immediately obvious answer is the trick for late 80's.