Advice on moving up another tier?

mattwhitworth56

Hey everyone!
I hope things are going well and studying hasn't been too stressful! I'm looking for some tips or advice, I've been plateauing in the mid 160's for about 3 weeks (I'd be content with that for sure, my goal score is right around there), but I was wondering if anyone had tips for the things I should work on to make a final jump? I got my first -0 today in the LG section (from -12 or 13 early on!) and my RC is something I'm pretty consistent with, usually -7ish. But my LR can be crazy inconsistent. Today the PT I took, both LR sections were 3 star difficulty, and I got -1 on one and -10 on the other. I've been blind reviewing and drilling the questions that the analytics page says I struggle with pretty often. I might've hit my peak score band because some of the questions are super difficult for me to understand even after BRing and watching explanation videos. It'd be nice to go up a little though so I could feel more at ease on test day.

Lime Green Dot

One thing that's helped me tremendously when I was scoring in the 160s was focusing even more scrupulously on the BR process: for LR, that meant not just reviewing what I'd missed but making it a point to "blind translate" stimuluses in the 11-25/26 question band, plus any others in the 1-10 band I'd missed, taken too long on, or flagged. Rather than typing, I have written everything down on paper (typing might work for some, but the act of writing helped me flesh out minutiae and make connections b/w the different parts of the stimulus more and thus allowed me to more readily ID gaps for arg-based Qs).

I also gave myself +/- 30 seconds to intake the stimulus, then flipped the screen and wrote things out without a timer. I used a black pen at first, then when I finished writing things out, compared my "translation" with the stimulus again and added critical parts I missed with a red pen, before evaluating A/Cs.

All of this helped me get a much higher BR score and helped me improve my timed runs and timing overall, too; I average between a -3 and a -1 pretty consistently. It's a process I needed to give enough time to see results, but they did come and they've since stuck around! I think it has a lot to do with forcing yourself to be a more careful, critical reader, and writing it out seemed to boost that effect for me.

I also did all this before watching/reading explanations across multiple sites, 7Sage included of course, and sometimes adding my own thoughts in the comments & posing my own questions. It was really surprising to me how much better and clearer I understood things when I really dove deep like this! Plus, I think understanding all the various perspectives people have had, even including flawed ones, helped me hardwire some new neural connections and how I saw and understood LR questions.

Oh, and I sleep more now, and that's helped me with everything in life. 😄

mattwhitworth56

@"Lime Green Dot" thank you so much! Super helpful. I have been trying to "translate" the ones I get wrong and that has been helpful, it sounds like really focusing on that can help.