I am once again asking for help! LR - Getting from 165s to 170s!

Olivia Benson

I asked before with some help with LGs and now have perfected those! Now I am onto conquering RCs, and LRs. LR is where I think I can make some decent improvement.

Overall on my PTs I can get 163-166.
RC ranges from -4 to -7. That I am seeing a little improvement here and there.
LR can range from -4 to -7 as well.

LR I feel like I've been on a struggle bus. I work full time, so I do one PT a week, BR, and then try to review it. I also have tried to add some drilling of LRs I feel weak in. (Particularly NAs, PSAs, sometimes MSS).

One thing I have noticed is sometimes I make mistakes from reading a question stem, ac, or stimulus, and miss a VITAL Word! so sometimes I make dumb mistakes here and there....ugh

I am finding with my wrong journal-ling/BR, I know the question stems pretty well and what to do. I often just fall for traps answers as well. In particular the last 5 questions of the section usually beat me up.

I kinda also feel like drilling has made me worse?

Anyways, any advice or tips would be helpful! Is it dumb to drop LR drilling, and just review my wrong journal?
Any tips of how to review wrong journal better?

Cant Get Right

Don’t characterize your errors as dumb mistakes. Even if they are, and they’re probably not, such mistakes aren’t really correctable, so you’re dead-ending your inquiry into this really vital set. Rather, overlooking a vital word should be thought of as a more fundamental failure. You need to identify why that word is so impactful that missing it changes the whole meaning of the argument or AC. Then you need to develop that understanding into improved recognition. Learn to issue spot. Words like “may” or “likely” could easily fall into the type of thing your talking about. The reason they are so impactful on meaning is because they change a statement from a definitive one to one of probability. Having identified that in review, you can better develop sensitivity to the presence of probabilities. The goal, next time you come across it, would be, first, to recognize it and, second, to treat it with the proper meaning. You’re unlikely to fix these kinds of errors after only a single encounter. After a while though, you get sick of seeing the same thing come up in review and the reinforcement starts spilling into timed work. But for that to happen, you can’t have written it off as a careless mistake.

There’s probably some timing errors as well which are robbing you of the time you need for processing the harder questions. Especially if you’re typically getting those final questions right in BR, look over your timing reports for opportunity to improve efficiency and bank the time you need from elsewhere in the section.

brydenwright

I find it helpful to highlight the premises in yellow, sub-conclusion / major premises in pink, and conclusions in orange. Building the habit takes some patience but it should soon become second nature. Separating the three visually makes it so much easier to grasp the structure of the argument.

brydenwright

Also, make sure to skip difficult questions and come back to them later. If you're losing steam towards the end, it's probably because you exhausted too much energy / time in the beginning. Trading two medium-difficulty questions for one high-difficulty question is never worth it.

Good luck!!