Hunt Mode LR Questions

CSieck3507

Hello Sagers,

I have been really attacking LR recently and I am able to go -0-1 in BR but my focus now is getting that timed. I am wanting to save time on easier questions/Cookie Cutter questions. Often times you hear high scorers talk about going into "hunt mode" for certain question types. For those scoring in the 170's or high 160's what questions types can you use this "hunt mode" on?

emmorens

Following!

a_pmorenoc

I've been able to up my mid 160 score to 170s by using the "hunt mode" on: SA, NA, Flawed/Parallel Method of Reasoning, Main point and Argument part questions. I find they're the easiest to prephrase/know what I'm looking for, great thing about this is that many of the questions in a section are these question types which gives me generally an extra 5 mins at the end to double check questions I was iffy about

RaphaelP

When you say "hunt mode" do you mean trying to predict the right answer?

If so, then yes, this is valuable. I tell my students to have two approaches - hunting for the right answer, and eliminating the wrong ones. For 90% of questions, the first pass is to predict the answer based on the stim and then hunt for it in the choices. I don't particularly care if you read each choice carefully during this pass - if you predict it and find it, great, then you can do a more perfunctory read of the other choices. But if you can't predict the right answer, then you toggle to the other option - eliminating wrong answers. LR wrong answers are recursive and often have the same types of things wrong with them.

What questions can you predict/hunt on? Most, tbh. The only ones where you really can't are MSS/MBT (because those will be fed to you from the choices - there are an infinite number of things that "could be inferred" or "could be true" and you need choices to see which they went for). Some except questions as well.

Cant Get Right

I never use hunt mode or any other form of prephrasing procedure. It saves very little time when it works, and it can be really time-consuming when it doesn’t. It’s also generally less accurate.

If you understand the stimulus well enough to have a legitimate basis to think you know what the answer is likely to be, that’s great. If the answer is what you think it is, you should know it when you see it whether you prephrased or not. When it works then, you gain very little. If it’s something other than what you think it is—and it will often be just that—now your positioning on the question is in trouble if you’ve solidified your expectations. Worse, the test writers are well aware of what the most likely prephrases are, so it is a very vulnerable procedure when the test writers exploit it, which of course they frequently do.

There are things incidental to prephrasing procedures which are valuable, and it’s important to highlight those. The main benefit is that you aren’t actively resolving every AC as correct or incorrect. This is really important. I have five classifications for AC’s—correct, contender, no clue, counter-contender, and incorrect—and I never go deeper than those initial assessments until I’ve seen the other AC’s and it’s clear that (1) additional work is necessary, (2) I know exactly what that work is, (3) I’m confident that work will meaningfully improve my probability of getting the correct answer, and (4) I’m confident I can do the work in an amount of time which is worth the added value. If any one of those factors fails, I move on immediately.

To whatever extent hunt mode or other prephrasing strategies work, it is coincidental to breaking the need to definitively resolve every answer choice as either right or wrong. “No clue” or “maybe” or “Eh, I really don’t want to deal with that if I can avoid it” are perfectly okay assessments. Especially for OP’s score range. (The success of any strategy or procedure is, of course, contingent on fundamentals.)

But none of this has anything to do with having a prephrase. Flaw questions serve as the best example. You can think the argument is valid for all I care. If your fundamentals are sound, the correct answer should clue you in on what’s wrong. A prephrase is completely unnecessary and is far more likely to misguide you than to be of any benefit.

Let the AC’s prompt you. That is the single most exploitable feature of the multiple choice format. No matter how clever a question they’ve constructed, they’ve got to provide the answer. They just give it to you. It’s right there, waiting to be understood, offering up clarity on the stimulus. The answers, if you exploit this weakness effectively, give themselves up. Prephrase strategies not only fail to attack the test at its weakest point, but they transform that advantage into a disadvantage.