new personal high on RC! -2! (PT55) thoughts & reflection

tealeavesbreadloaves

I don't really know what's wrong with me, but after finishing my final exam for my summer class today, I decided to do a section of RC, lol. Yesterday, I took a section of LR from PT 55, so I figured it made sense that if I were to do another section, it should also be from PT 55 (I've decided to sacrificed this one long ago).

Here are some thoughts and reflection from multiple attempts at RC to get a perfect score from an English major ... (take it with a grain of salt, maybe the terrible heat finally triggered something in me, IDK.)
0) it might be possible
1) TRUST YOURSELF!! This is something I so deeply struggle with on the LSAT. But if there are any fellow English majors out there, or any avid/good readers, trust yourself! I can't tell you how many times I've second-guessed myself and went with a very attractive and popular wrong answer instead. This has happened to me on BR, too (overthinking is definitely a thing on the LSAT), and on the real thing, where I change an originally correct answer to a wrong one. If you're a good reader (and you know if you are, so keep telling yourself that), I want to say your intuition is likely going to be correct. For me, like the metaphor JY uses, there was a "little spark" in my understanding that was correct, and that led me to choose the right answer, but my self-doubt and extraneous (to passage) anxious thoughts extinguishes those little blooming sparks under timed conditions.

2) Sometimes, you don't even have to waste time thinking through a lot of the answer choices to get to the right one. I think this especially applies to method and purpose questions (but definitely NOT parallel/analogy questions). This kind of goes with #1 and especially applies if you have a prephrase. This saves a LOT of time. You can always go through the wrong answer choices on BR and critique them and find what's wrong with them, but you probably won't have time on the real thing to do this for some questions.

When I first started using JY's methods of low to high res/memory method, I struggled a bit and saw my score drop, mostly because a lot of the times I was thinking, "are you kidding? I can read. I'm an English major!" But I kept doing it (per some redditor's advice I think), started with writing out the low-reses during testing, and then eventually not having to write things down, just reviewing in my head what I read/what the author is saying after each paragraph. Another thing I found really helpful for me was to highlight the transition words, instead of sentences/things that are more related to substance. I had trouble with keeping up with both a substance- and structure-low-reses at the same time, so I found this method (highlighting transition words) to be very helpful. It eases up the amount of things you have to keep in your head, giving you visual cues just like the diagrams you draw in LG do.

Overall, the most important thing is to keep a positive mindset and keep affirming yourself with all that you are and all that you've accomplished in your LSAT journey so far! Don't let a stupid LSAT writer trick you into thinking you were wrong. I think it's a very delicate thing to know/figure out where you actually have no idea what the right answer is, versus where you do know or have an inkling. When it's the latter, go with your "intuition." (I put scare quotes around intuition because it's not really all intuition--you've read and understood the passage.)

If there are any scorers who do extremely well on RC, please give your two cents, too! I would love to hear what you think.