RC Help

jaxsonrolfe83

I have been studying for the LSAT for nearly a year now, and I have managed to get to the point where I am consistently scoring -0/-1 on LR and LG. However, for RC I am still scoring between -3/-5 consistently (this has never improved from when I started to study). Is there anything I can do to score more consistently? I really want to be in the -2/-3 range before the august LSAT. What have you mid to high 170's scorers done to raise your RC?

Thanks

Cant Get Right

In that range, it’s hard to offer meaningful advice without more. Those final points can come from a lot of different, so more in-depth analysis would be necessary. All things considered though, I think you should definitely be able to push into your target range by test date if you can diagnose the actual issues. Hardest to do in RC because it’s the most abstract skill which is least reducible of all the sections.

So what seems to be the problem? How do you go about taking an RC section and where do you think things are going wrong?

jaxsonrolfe83

@"Cant Get Right" said:
In that range, it’s hard to offer meaningful advice without more. Those final points can come from a lot of different, so more in-depth analysis would be necessary. All things considered though, I think you should definitely be able to push into your target range by test date if you can diagnose the actual issues. Hardest to do in RC because it’s the most abstract skill which is least reducible of all the sections.

So what seems to be the problem? How do you go about taking an RC section and where do you think things are going wrong?

I have tried to approach RC in multiple ways and no matter what I do, I don't seem to see any improvement. I generally get 2 or 3 "5/5 difficulty" questions wrong and then a few random ones as well. It makes no sense to me.

Cant Get Right

I’m still mostly just guessing, but I figure your passage read is likely pretty good. Hard to do as well as -5 with bad understanding of the passages. But for starters, stick to a slow and steady pacing to read the passage. You can’t expect to score well on a test designed to test reading comprehension if you didn’t comprehend the reading all that well. Can likely improve on some things, of course, but honestly, slowing down, reading at a comfortable pace, and taking time to work through things you don’t understand is the bulk of it.

I’m guessing your problem is mostly over in the Q’s & A’s. There’s a lot more subtlety in RC than in LR. For one, the questions themselves actually have a little nuance. They don’t all neatly conform to clean universal categories like they do in LR, so make sure to actually read the questions and take note of the specific task. On a main point question in a comparative passage you might get into trouble if you miss that it’s not asking for THE main point of both passages but rather A main point of both passages. If they ask for an inference, that’s a little different from an implication or something explicitly stated. There might be other things going on in these kinds of situations, but not doing yourself any favors by not quite knowing what the question is.

Third, and I think probably most consequentially based on what I know about you, the AC’s are worded very specifically and you have to know how to go about working them. If you’re prephrasing here then that’s really great because it’s such a bad strategy for RC (and LR..) that there’s a really decent chance that making that one adjustment might get you most of the way there. If they ask what’s the purpose of the second paragraph and then your contenders are “demonstrates the phenomenon introduced in the first paragraph” and “gives an example of the phenomenon introduced in the first paragraph,” you better have something more ready to go than a prephrase. You’ve got to realize that the question isn’t about the purpose of the second paragraph anymore—if that’s the question your asking yourself, you’re in trouble. The real question now is what the difference between an example and a demonstration is and which one does the second paragraph most closely exemplify. If you understand that that’s the real question here, I bet you’ll get this one way more often than not. Otherwise, you’ll take far heavier losses on these than you have to.

If you don’t have this kind of more specific and particular process for attacking RC answer choices, and you’re just kinda looking for the right answer without a well defined plan of action, I’d bet that’s the main thing you need to develop in order to see consistent improvement.

Again, impossible to say with much confidence without actually talking to you, but this is what I’d generally start off suspecting for someone in your score range who’s tried a lot of different approaches and performed pretty much the same regardless.