Feeling stuck and burnt out

adam12saleh88

Hi everyone,

I've been studying for almost a year and I have put in a lot of hours but I'm not making any more progress than I already have, especially in LR and RC. My diagnostic score was a 141, my personal best is a 155, and my goal is a 165.

Does anyone have any tips or recommendations to improve my LR score? It's getting very discouraging to invest so much time and money into this test and not get the score I want after so long.

I've done nearly the entire core curriculum and hundreds of problem sets in drills but it's not translating on actual prep tests and I'm very nervous to not get the score I want for when I take the test in April and June.

Any bit of help is greatly appreciated, even just saying what your strategy is for each question stem if it's different compared to what I do or what JY does.

Thanks!

jiwoonyoon.sg

Hi, I feel what you're going through. Just wanted to encourage you that improving LR and RC as much as LG is indeed possible (I've seen the results; from avg -5/-6 to -2~1 for both parts) and you still have a lot of time! Before trying different strategies, you need to believe that you've got this, because really you've got this.

For LR, I think the key is setting down your own approach and not adopting anyone else's. Yeah JY is great, but especially with LR everyone has a different logical approach to the right answer. When you review, you need to ask yourself if you REALLY understand what the right answer is and why, or you're not sure but just blindly going through the explanations.

Then, structure your own approach to each question stem with a wrong-answer journal. I take note of these following elements: 1) Question type 2) Flagged (Yes/no), 3) Approach (Eliminate/Prove), 4) Why I got the answer wrong (Was the stimulus difficult? Was I missing any details?) 5) What makes the right answer right, and how I can pick out that clue in similar questions. Just keep doing this. Your strategies will be different from anybody else's, but believe me it will work and you will begin to see.

For RC, I'd say a LOT of drilling only for the most difficult passages and trying out different notetaking strategies worked for me. Again, I think everyone has a different approach, so try experimenting. For myself, limiting notetaking to about half a page and splitting the notes into Cornell format is the key.

What a whopping long comment, but I hope it helps! You've got this.