Posting on Behalf of a 7Sage User: How to drill LG, LR and RC in between PTs to strengthen weakness

Cherry - Student Service

[I am posting on behalf of a 7Sage user. Please feel free to leave your comments below. Thank you for your help!]

I need some guidance on how to drill LR, LG and RC. Basically I need to practice LR, LG and RC in between PTs and I’m trying to mirror the drill to PTs so I can practice individual sections and hone in on weaknesses. What’s the best way to do this?

180______

following

Cant Get Right

The first thing is to determine specifically what your weaknesses are. From there, you've got to craft exercises that will be well-suited to addressing them. So start by listening to the PT to really hear what it's telling you. If you're just starting out, you may notice that your LR errors are correlating very closely to question types. If so, untimed problem sets by question type, with review of the curriculum, seems like a pretty good response. If you're a little later on in your prep and your errors aren't correlating to question type so much, you'll need to dig deeper into each error to figure out specifically what you misunderstood. Compare and contrast what you thought it said versus what it actually says. The critical error will be somewhere in the distinction, and there will likely be a more general principle or mechanic which the misunderstanding reflects. I always wrote out reports in order to keep myself honest here. It was amazing how many times I said "Ohhh, now I get it," and then went to explain myself and had no clue what to write. Written reports were pretty critical for me.

And it's essentially the same thing for the other sections, but it tends to look a little different because of the different kinds of challenges that come up. Once you've hit a more intermediate stage of study in RC, I think it's really important to restrict your review a bit. Don't dig into the passage to do whatever it takes to confirm each answer. Instead, start with a really intensive and focused read of the passage. Take your time, do what you need to do to comprehend it. And from there, restrict yourself to strategies and procedures in the Q/A that you expect you'd actually be able to manage under timed conditions. Take all the time you need to figure out what those are and then what to do with them, but too much allowance is counter-productive in a couple of ways here. First, it's not a methodology which translates into the real thing. If your review and study strategies don't develop skills that can transfer, you're doing something wrong. The second reason is that the answers to many questions simply aren't in the passage, and you need to be comfortable with untethering yourself from the text for these and relying on your comprehension. This might not always be appropriate for every issue that might arise, so again, start by figuring out exactly what the problem is.

For LG, try out different approaches to any game you've struggled with. If you spent ten minutes splitting game boards and then found it didn't even help you that much in the Q/A, try fewer/no splits and see if the game goes more smoothly. If you just applied rules from your rule list to an empty master game board, reconsider your representations and if maybe representing a rule with split game boards might not make for a more optimal setup that's easier to progress through the game with. Very few games are hard once you find the optimal set-up, so if you struggle with a game, try out different approaches to see if you can make it easy. If you can't, figure out what you're going to do for those types of games.

I know this is all pretty general, but the specifics tend to be narrowly tailored to the exact problem at hand. So the main thing is to define exactly what the problem even is. And that is not an easy thing to do, which I think most people don't actually realize. So reject easy answers, they're almost certainly wrong or lacking critical nuance. Study anything you struggle to understand very carefully to figure out exactly why you're struggling with it. If you can figure that out, the solution on how to address it is often self-apparent.

JGWentworth877cashnowlol

@"Cant Get Right" said:
The first thing is to determine specifically what your weaknesses are. From there, you've got to craft exercises that will be well-suited to addressing them. So start by listening to the PT to really hear what it's telling you. If you're just starting out, you may notice that your LR errors are correlating very closely to question types. If so, untimed problem sets by question type, with review of the curriculum, seems like a pretty good response. If you're a little later on in your prep and your errors aren't correlating to question type so much, you'll need to dig deeper into each error to figure out specifically what you misunderstood. Compare and contrast what you thought it said versus what it actually says. The critical error will be somewhere in the distinction, and there will likely be a more general principle or mechanic which the misunderstanding reflects. I always wrote out reports in order to keep myself honest here. It was amazing how many times I said "Ohhh, now I get it," and then went to explain myself and had no clue what to write. Written reports were pretty critical for me.

And it's essentially the same thing for the other sections, but it tends to look a little different because of the different kinds of challenges that come up. Once you've hit a more intermediate stage of study in RC, I think it's really important to restrict your review a bit. Don't dig into the passage to do whatever it takes to confirm each answer. Instead, start with a really intensive and focused read of the passage. Take your time, do what you need to do to comprehend it. And from there, restrict yourself to strategies and procedures in the Q/A that you expect you'd actually be able to manage under timed conditions. Take all the time you need to figure out what those are and then what to do with them, but too much allowance is counter-productive in a couple of ways here. First, it's not a methodology which translates into the real thing. If your review and study strategies don't develop skills that can transfer, you're doing something wrong. The second reason is that the answers to many questions simply aren't in the passage, and you need to be comfortable with untethering yourself from the text for these and relying on your comprehension. This might not always be appropriate for every issue that might arise, so again, start by figuring out exactly what the problem is.

For LG, try out different approaches to any game you've struggled with. If you spent ten minutes splitting game boards and then found it didn't even help you that much in the Q/A, try fewer/no splits and see if the game goes more smoothly. If you just applied rules from your rule list to an empty master game board, reconsider your representations and if maybe representing a rule with split game boards might not make for a more optimal setup that's easier to progress through the game with. Very few games are hard once you find the optimal set-up, so if you struggle with a game, try out different approaches to see if you can make it easy. If you can't, figure out what you're going to do for those types of games.

I know this is all pretty general, but the specifics tend to be narrowly tailored to the exact problem at hand. So the main thing is to define exactly what the problem even is. And that is not an easy thing to do, which I think most people don't actually realize. So reject easy answers, they're almost certainly wrong or lacking critical nuance. Study anything you struggle to understand very carefully to figure out exactly why you're struggling with it. If you can figure that out, the solution on how to address it is often self-apparent.

ivansergeyevsky

Thank you for leaving such a detailed response. I understand your advice and see that to improve and work on weaknesses I first need to identify them clearly and define what the problem is. You mention that I need to listen to the PT reviews. How can I best go about this? I am able to see and filter what questions I get wrong and the platform lists what type of question each mistaken one is. I have taken 4 so far and have that data - I did not know how to best chop and organize it up so I made a spreadsheet to try and identify reoccurring instances of wrong answers and their according question types - do you recommend a better way to review the data? How would you listen to your PTs? How do you recommend to best review as to point out specific weaknesses? Also, can you please expand on your concept of creating reports?

ivansergeyevsky

@"Cant Get Right"