BR Blues

Darth Jurist

Okay, so I am nearing completion on the core curriculum (woot woot!) and I would definitely say that I am starting to grasp these core concepts relatively well (still have much to learn, still a padawan). Lately, my issue has been in BR. I have had this nack of royally screwing myself over when I BR some of my drills. For example, did a 4star RC passage today. I got it done in 7 min. After this I BR'd the section, like always. My pre-BR score was a -1 out of 7. BR was -5!! WTH??! Is it possible my subconscious intelligence is becoming smarter than my conscious reasoning. I guess this might be a good problem to have, in some respects. The same thing kept happening to me when I drilled a bunch of NA questions yesterday. Pre-BR, on the clock I would generally go -0 for the drill. But, when I BR'd I would miss like half of the questions. This is kind of freaking me out...

Does anyone have any experience related to this issue?

dcdcdcdcdc

Can't offer any specific insights as I am early on in my review process. However, I'm BRing some drills now and noticing some of the same things. It is, as you say, both encouraging and frustrating to perform well under time pressure, but not being able to replicate that when being deliberate in BR. Overall, my takeaway would be that, while intuition is great if you can consistently rely on it, the BR process (even calibrating your over analysis) is still useful in that you are forced to articulate and choose reasons for your actions.

One thing you might keep in mind as well is remembering to step back from the questions or text sometimes. I know a few questions have tripped me up because I got hung up on things like context info or modifiers that turned out to be meaningless in terms of getting the correct answer. Calibrating the prioritization of information and reasoning as well as knowing when to explicitly employ tools like diagramming and indicators, versus relying on a more natural understanding is where I would guess you want to head to close the gap from your BR to your time performance.

Cant Get Right

@"Darth Jurist" said:
Is it possible my subconscious intelligence is becoming smarter than my conscious reasoning.

Probably not. It’s tempting to chalk this up to "over thinking it," but that’s what you’re supposed to be doing in BR. If you miss a question in BR it means you have a fundamental misunderstanding. My immediate suspicion is that you’re half assing your BR, but I always suspect that of everyone, so it’s nothing personal. What does your BR process look like? Are there any specific questions that you feel really capture the phenomenon? Maybe link us to a few and describe your thought process.

Darth Jurist

@"Cant Get Right" I don't think it is half ass BR, I got over that habit a while ago. What I like to do is go over each and every answer choice and articulate to myself why it is either right or wrong. I spend a good 5min/Q on average for BR, but I could be half assing it and not realize it.

I feel like all of the dense pleasure reading I have been doing has kind of increased my reading speed a little bit so when I BR and try to read at a snails pace I do kind of overthink it.

The NA Problem Set #7 is a perfect example. My BR went -3 and after I reviewed the BR wrong answers I was like, "WTF was I thinking??"

PT25.S2.Q12: I got the question done in like 30 seconds. I was 100% when I answered. Then, when I did the mandatory BR i chose (B) instead of my initial answer, (A). Come to find out, I misread the stimulus during my BR. It was a simple readying error. So weird!!!

PT29.S4.Q08: Here I am sure that I overthought the question. Intuition led to me the correct answer, (A), first time around. When I BR'd I kept thinking that the correct answer needed to have some element of the conclusion in it to be right, so I switched my answer to (E). When I checked the question I immediately felt retarded for my second-guessing.

PT34.S2.Q13: Okay, so this one I was not 100% the answer I chose, (B), was the correct one, I got there through process of elimination. Upon BR, I digressed to (E) for whatever reason. It's like it was so clear to me why the BR answer was wrong when I changed my answer.

Now that you say it, I think that I am overthinking things at times. I should probably trust that I am in fact getting better and not second guess so much. I think I have finally dropped the PS methodologies and now the 7sage training is starting to take root. Finishing the core curriculum alone has restructured my though process and I think I might be looking at my answers a little to cynically.

@dcdcdcdcdc said:
Calibrating the prioritization of information and reasoning as well as knowing when to explicitly employ tools like diagramming and indicators, versus relying on a more natural understanding is where I would guess you want to head to close the gap from your BR to your time performance.

Yeah, I have a tendency to want to diagram everything. :S

Thanks you two!

Jonathan Wang

To me, it doesn't matter one bit that you circled the right letter the first time around, because your inability to prove it on blind review means that you didn't get it right for the right reasons. You might as well have just guessed.

"Overthinking" may be an accurate label, but it's not a helpful one IMO. Just like "timing issues", it's the most obviously feel-bad aspect of what happened, but it's not a particularly valuable way to think about things because you can't really work on "overthinking" in any meaningful sense (and no, 'always trust your gut' isn't a solution). How long you think about something doesn't explain you affirming a bad line of logic - at worst, it just provides the time for your mind to start wandering in unjustifiable directions. But actually starting down those bad paths and accepting them is a function of bad fundamentals, not of time.

Your accounting of 29/4/8 tells me a lot. You got it intuitively at first, which I understand to mean that you didn't do the full process under time. That's not necessarily a problem, though it's obviously not the best situation either. But on review, you:

(1) got a rigid notion about the conclusion having to be present in your head (implicating your understanding of the flaw in the stimulus and possibly indicating a problematic reliance on rules of thumb);

(2) allowed it to overrun your thinking to such an extent that you uncritically accepted it as the basis upon which you should judge answer choices (suggests no critical examination of said rules of thumb and lack of understanding of their logical bases, and implicates understanding of proper task mechanics);

(3) didn't trip any warning flags that perhaps you should be careful and at least think twice about the reasons you would have to do such a specific thing before moving forward with it (further implicating understanding of and comfort with proper task mechanics);

(4) after selecting a choice, didn't negation-test to be sure/negation-tested wrong (either poor blind reviewing or bad negation testing mechanics, depending), so you didn't catch it that way either; and

(5) "felt stupid" immediately after checking and proceeded to latch onto the notion that you just had a momentary lapse centralized in blind review, precluding critical analysis of what caused you to switch in the first place (hindsight bias)

I'm not trying to be mean here (please believe me when I say that, as I'm fully aware that I just dumped a ton of criticism on your head). But I have to ask - does any of that sound like it happened because you read the words on the page more slowly the second time around? Because to me, it sounds like your intuition got lucky and your brain demonstrated your intuition's lack of basis by going haywire when you tried to articulate it out.

34/2/13 tracks along the same lines - your intuition eliminated E, but your conscious brain's inability to articulate the proper basis for that elimination allowed it back into the game, and then your skillset got you to talk yourself into a bad line of reasoning without realizing it at any point. That's not an overthinking mistake, that's a lack-of-understanding mistake.

tl;dr - getting something wrong on blind review means big understanding issues, and getting it right under time because your intuition got lucky shouldn't change how you see that.

jessicalj

Personally, I have also run into the issue of arriving at the correct answer under timed pressure, but "second-guessing" my intuition during BR.

@"Jonathan Wang" said:
To me, it doesn't matter one bit that you circled the right letter the first time around, because your inability to prove it on blind review means that you didn't get it right for the right reasons. You might as well have just guessed.

Jonathan's entire post resonates with me as I went into the Feb administration without a strong grasp of fundamentals. This was reflective in the large variance of my PT scores, with BR sometimes lower than timed. In hindsight, it was as if I was hoping to get lucky - which didn't happen on test day.

Let's all keep at this until we're consistently BRing 180 (or else well above our target scores).

Darth Jurist

@"Jonathan Wang" Thank you for your candor and extensive feedback. I really do appreciate it. No hard feelings on my end, I always appreciate the constructive criticism.

@"Jonathan Wang" said:
(5) "felt stupid" immediately after checking and proceeded to latch onto the notion that you just had a momentary lapse centralized in blind review, precluding critical analysis of what caused you to switch in the first place (hindsight bias)

I think you are right, I do have a tendency to try and validate my invalidity, or, in laymen's terms, justify my bull****. For 34.2.13 I really do think it was a case of my overthinking that caused me to err on BR, but, upon review of these questions again, I do think I try to do these mental gymnastics with myself. Maybe it's to make myself feel better, maybe I'm just full of it.

What do you recommend to curb this bad habit? Now that I can see it is a problem, I want to nip it in the butt.

@jessicalj said:
Let's all keep at this until we're consistently BRing 180 (or else well above our target scores).

I can't wait to see the day that I BR for a 180.

Great advice everyone!