What to do at last five minutes?(Esp. RC)

JSL17824

Hello 7sages,

At last 5 minutes, I tend to be nervous and thus become quite inefficient at the last five minutes for each section, especially for RC section
For LG, I might solve the 4th game or at least the first questions of the 4th game
For LR, I might finish in time, but no time to check those questions circled; if I can't finish this section, I will choose shorter one (but sometimes it's harder one).
For RC, when there's 5 minutes left, I still have a whole passage, and I become too nervous to read and can't remember anything.it turns out I will miss the whole passage. I used to use last five minutes to check the previous passages and give up the 4th one, but I'd like to finish all four passages, so I can increase my RC score.

I've practiced 10 PTs, I think what I need to do to improve my score is:
1. Stay calm at last 5 minutes (first five minutes are much more productive): I do meditation from time to time, and it does relieve my anxiety overall, but not really work for this situation.

2. Read faster without sacrificing understanding :I finished Cambridge LSAT Difficult passages recently, but still hardly finish reading new passages in 3.5 minutes (or including questions within 8.5 minutes).

3. Make a good guess: I have no idea how to do it; sometimes read too fast and eliminate the correct answer.

Do you have any suggestion for me?
Thanks for all your help!

shizuokatwin379

If you consistently get to the last RC section with 5 minutes left I say you're spending to much time on previous sections and work on that.

BUT, if you do arrive with only 5 minutes left I suggest reading about and learning how to skim. Effective skimming is an important skill. Read the first and last sentence of each paragraph and learn how to skim the middles to get what you need. Skimming a RC quickly in a minute to a minute and a half, the spending the last 4 to 3 and a half minutes answering its questions as best as you can is the best case scenario I would think.

Cant Get Right

Don’t be tempted to return to the reading for every answer. My problem is that I always want to confirm all of my answers by returning to the passage, but there just isn’t time. It’s hard to forego confirmation when its available. Trust your initial reading. If you’re confident in selecting an answer choice, select it and move on. If you’re not already employing this, it will buy you a lot of extra time.

twssmith

I am with you having taken about 10 PT's and working through a similar process to identify my weaknesses.

Check out the link to the recorded webinars. I was fortunate to attend most of them and they are packed full of strategies that have helped me.

You are as @allison.gill.sanford would recommend - being very attentive to learning from your PT experiences! @nicole.hopkins provides a systematic approach to RC to break down the passages utilizing your "tool box" @"Quick Silver" provides great advice on how to not fall for trap answers. @c.janson35 has great advice for active reading and his pyramid for identifying hard questions to avoid time sinks. All of the instructors give advice on how to pre-phrase/predict answer choices to help to save time on the front end instead of spinning your wheels reading the answer choices.
And there is an entire panel of Sages' webinar for skipping strategies providing different viewpoints to maximize your time during the test to achieve your goals.

https://7sage.com/webinar

Now I just have to figure out how to incorporate all of these people into me:)

Pacifico

For LR you should really be done your first round in 30 minutes or less to give you time to go back to the harder questions. You're likely spending too much time on easy questions as well as hard ones. The former you solve by developing more confidence to move on, the latter you solve by developing more self-awareness to skip and come back for a second look.

For LG the timing will vary but there are few sections that truly take the whole 35 minutes, though when the pressure is on for real it can often take the whole time. If you haven't seen it before, check this out and use it to drill full LG sections so that timing is no longer an issue: http://7sage.com/discussion/#/discussion/2737/logic-games-attack-strategy

For RC, generally speaking all passages should take the same amount of time to read, give or take maybe 15 seconds. They're all about 60 lines of text long and so you should see a general consistency there. An 8 question passage might take 10 minutes while a 6 question passage takes 8, which is totally fine if you can keep your average time down. One of the biggest things is just staying focused and actively reading and not letting your eyes glaze over so you cut down on reading things more than once on the initial read through before going into the questions. Finding the write notation method for yourself is very important to this so that it forces you to stay engaged the entire time. That will mean you can finish reading every passage under 3.5 minutes with a decent enough understanding to answer questions as well as a notation strategy that allows you to quickly and effectively refer back to the passage as needed. I would take a bit of time to drill RC passages individually in order to try and reach this mark consistently. Then when you're finishing one in time then tack on another and another and another until you're back up to a full section.

Before you start all the drilling and such I would recommend taking one more PT and filming yourself taking it. You need to figure out exactly what you're doing that is taking so long in each section and it might be very different from what you think the problem is. Perhaps you're a bit lackadaisical when you start each section because you think you have tons of time. Maybe you get bogged down in the middle or just hit a wall somewhere. Watching yourself will unlock some amazing things about what you're really doing because the camera doesn't lie, whereas your mind can tell you something is wrong when it's really not the main issue. Good luck!

twssmith

@Pacifico you are Awesome!!!
Thank you for your post - insightful as always. I really hope that you will provide a webinar in the near future - I think it would be invaluable for the whole community!

runiggyrun

@"Jason Lai" - some awesome advice above from the usual suspects.
The 5 minute panic is real, but the good thing is that it tends to fade a little bit as you go through more PT's. For RC, use the strategies suggested above to try and cut even a little bit of time off your first three passages, so you're close to done reading the last one before the 5-minute warning. That avoids panic setting in and causing you to not take in anything you're reading. Getting there means shaving ~3 minutes off the first three passages, one minute each. It's doable, and recording yourself, or at the very least using a lap timer where you hit "lap" after the passage and after each question should tell you where your time sinks are.
Then you need to work on avoiding them. Eventually, with practice (whether in the form of drilling in the beginning or more PT's later, with conscious minding of timing strategies) you will develop your internal time clock that will scream at you to move on. I occasionally find questions that I keep staring at without being able to make any sense of them, or questions where I'm down to two answers and can't for the life of me pick one (especially some of the trickier recent RC ones). I find that those are the questions where you can easily waste 4 minutes and still get it wrong, because clearly something is not clicking, so you have to MAKE yourself move on. You could answer 4 easy questions in that time.
One of the tricks that help identify which ones are the time sinks are to always keep in mind what JY says: there's only one right answer, and the other ones are not less right, they are hopelessly, completely wrong. If I can't tell after 1minute or so which is which, I've probably missed a key piece that makes the wrong answers wrong, and staring at it won't help. But moving on and coming back with a somewhat fresh approach sometimes does, and if it doesn't, than at least I've given the easy questions a chance in the mean time.

For LG, practice makes perfect. Foolproof the games until the easy games are really easy and you're deep into the toughest game by the 5 minute mark.

MrSamIam

Don't try to increase "speed." Rather, aim to increase your efficiency. There's a good chance that you're spending too much time on those pesky trick questions.
A buddy of mine mentioned that when he knows that he won't have time to finish reading and answering all of the questions on the final passage, he "cherry picks." He goes straight to the questions, and answers the ones that refer you back to a certain line or paragraph. While I certainly wouldn't promote this over increase efficiency, it's better than missing all of the questions on the final passage.