Only have 1 month to study for RC

claw2023-1

For those of you who have struggled with reading comp & improved greatly or even those of you who have always been great at reading comp, could you please give me advice on what you consider is the best way to study for reading comp? Is the CC's reading comp section good/ worth it? Or should I order a book from other test prep material? I have studied well for LG & LR, but I only have a month left to study for RC ( tragic, I know) Any advice would help. Thank you!

UPDATE: I'm taking the November LSAT as a trial run, so I can complete my study schedule (including at least 2 1/2 months of RC) to get the highest score possible in January. Thank you all for the suggestions.

melsathope

Don't waste time reading books about RC because you don't have time and ultimately you are not getting practice. Do RC drills with passages that are mid and high level of difficulty (I think all of us should be good with the super easy ones). Practice your reading pace and focus on the questions you got wrong.

claw2023-1

@melsathope thank you!!

prettygirlJD

Check out Reading Comp hero!

Cant Get Right

Depending on where you’re scoring, the answer changes dramatically. A lot of people actually do worse on RC after “studying” it. Especially in the -4 to -8 range, people got to be careful.

claw2023-1

@prettygirlJD thank you!

jason.ruggeberg

Hi Carolyn,

RC can be tough - we spend the majority of our academic career learning to read for detail, but that strategy isn't necessarily optimal when reading dense passages under the time crunch of the test. I'd definitely recommend giving the core curriculum on RC a look. It's relatively short and provides an excellent introduction to reading for structure, which I think is a more effective strategy. In effect, this boils down to two parallel processes: identifying the overarching argumentative structure of the passage and learning to effectively locate details within that structure. Give the CC a a listen for more detail on this!

If you'd be interested in hearing how a tutor could assess your reading strategy and give you individualized coaching on how you could improve, feel free to use the following link to book a consult with one of our tutors at 7Sage: https://calendly.com/7sage-consult/7sage-tutoring-free-consult?utm_source=ST

claw2023-1

@JasonRuggeberg Will do! Thank you

okkkkkkkkkkk

@"Cant Get Right" said:
Depending on where you’re scoring, the answer changes dramatically. A lot of people actually do worse on RC after “studying” it. Especially in the -4 to -8 range, people got to be careful.

Any reason for this? Genuinely curious and asking.

Cant Get Right

@okkkkkkkkkkk said:

@"Cant Get Right" said:
Depending on where you’re scoring, the answer changes dramatically. A lot of people actually do worse on RC after “studying” it. Especially in the -4 to -8 range, people got to be careful.

Any reason for this? Genuinely curious and asking.

RC is just so fundamentally different from the other sections. In LR and especially in LG, the bulk of our work is in developing new skills. Not the case in RC. Most of us have been reading and comprehending things for a long time. So we come into the section with the core fundamentals already at a fairly advanced stage of development. It's more a process of adapting existing skills than developing new ones. There are certainly fundamentals that are important to build, and those will differ from student to student. But a lot of times people miss the point and just straight-up stop reading for comprehension. They replace comprehension with LSAT exercises rather than using the exercises to help adapt, refine, and supplement. This can result in a very gimmicky approach to the section where literate adults seem to have forgotten they know how to read. Unsurprisingly, this approach is not very effective. I see students drop from their diagnostic range all the time. Exercises and drills are for developing skills. They are not always intended as a final test-day strategy.

helmym1

I would say go through the RC CC on here because its relatively short (most of it is just drills which is what makes up the large quantity of hours). J.Y introduces a new technique which is the low-res summaries and I would say that 100% helped me personally on RC. I improved a lot on the section from implementing that technique alone. Another thing I find useful is to keep the 5 question passage to the end. This is because it's better to rush the lsat passage with 5 questions than a longer one with 8 and risk getting more points off. Lastly, slow down when reading and really focus on the passage. I would say if anything spend more time reading the passage than answering the questions (for me when I really understand the passage, I find that the questions go by way faster). Similar to how once you spend the time upfront setting up a game board on LG, you can fly through the questions and they're way easier.

isaiahgingy

The RC Curriculum is awesome, but the one thing that helped me improve a ton was writing a 5-10 word summary of each paragraph that I read. This strategy basically means that instead of needing to digest 400-600 words all at once, you can digest 100-150 word chunks. It also narrows down where certain answers are in the text if you ever need to look back in the text to find an answer. If you write a summary longer than 10 words it will eat up time and it forces you to reread a lot, so avoid anything over 10-15 words if possible. The own downside of this strategy is that it can be time consuming, so obviously practice with it before test day to get the time down. Personally RC has been a breeze for me since I employed this strategy. I just drilled this and got a 12/13 on 2 medium difficulty passages and got a 7/7 on a harder difficulty passage earlier this week.

ProfLayton

I'm bad at RC, but I went from being garbage (talking -16) to doing a lot better by focusing more on ruling out bad answer choices.

I usually would be able to rule it down to 2 choices. If I'm struggling, I leave it and go back to find what word choice makes it wrong. Too narrow? Too strong word choices? It does suck when you feel like some questions are guessing between two, but it beats randomly guessing

Also, yes low-res summaries really help. Like, do not avoid doing them, especially for hard passages and the comparative ones

WhatIsLife

I haven't tried this strategy myself, but I've read on a few different forums about how some people started reading passages twice. Once for structure and then speed reading the second time. Some people swear by it. Maybe try doing that for a problem set or two