How to Improve from 170- to consistently Above ????

Alon Dasa

Hi guys I'm in a rut. My Last 7 exams were 169/169/174/172/170/171/169. Wanted to know if anybody has been stuck in this range before and have gotten out of it. If yes what were some things that you did that allowed to you get out of this range and get consistently into the upper echelon of the score range?

TomHagen

Hi Alon, I was actually in this exact situation and I totally understanding how frustrating can be, given that a high score feels so close but yet so far. On average I was missing 2 or 3 points in LG, and then around 5 or 6 total between RC and LR. On good days I would miss a few less and break 170+, but if not I’d get 169 or 170.

From searching on the boards I found that a common piece of advice was to train yourself to consistently be able to go -1 or -0 on one section. This allows you to deal with variability in the difficulty of the other sections while still comfortably getting above 170 on a consistent basis. That’s not to say it’s the only way to break 170, it’s just anecdotally the best way to do it consistently. For most people the section they chose to “perfect” seems to be logic games, because it’s the most learnable and arguably the least variable, save for the occasional misc game. This may not help you if you’re already consistently killing a section, though.

Some other things that helped me to break from the low 170’s into the high 170’s were a couple of tricks I picked up on RC and LR to save time. For LR the main one was for the parallel reasoning questions, which have very long but highly similar answer choices designed to confuse you. They were a huge time sink for me, but some videos online showed me that you don’t actually have to closely read every answer, and can eliminate some right off the bat because they alter key terms in the argument (I.e. change “some people” to “most people”, change “should” to “may”, etc.). For RC the main one was to read each passage closely once, and then take the time to quickly skim the main points right afterward. It may not seem like much, but I found that it materially improved my ability to recall details and often stopped me from having to waste time going back to the passage for easier questions, which left more time for the harder ones. That being said, I still personally feel like there’s a lot of luck involved in getting scores in the high 170s. I got a 177 on test day, but the score band reported for my exam was all the way from 173 to 180.

Let me know if you’d like more clarification on something I said. I can’t guarantee that my advice will be useful to you, it’s just what I did and saw results from. Regardless, your scores are already great, and I’m sure you’ll do fantastic on test day!

ryantimothywarren

Just a hunch: a) break apparent ties on RC by selecting the more modest answer (which often goes against the instincts of competitive and thoughtful students, who want to say more); b) focus a bit more on question type process for LG, so that if you run out of directives from the rules, you are testing answer efficiently; and c) remember that you are most in control of the order in which you approach questions, so attend closely to any inefficiencies in your priority setting while reviewing tests. Good luck - hope that helps.