level 4 and 5 difficulty questions...

jayc1993

I'll get straight into it. I have no problem getting the correct level 1, 2, 3 star questions (as labelled by 7sage), but i tend to get level 4 and 5 questions wrong more times than not.

This applies to both logical reasoning and reading comprehensions

For logical reasoning i would get questions ranging from 16-25 wrong and for reading comprehension, just when i think i am going to get all the correct answers for a particular passage correct, i end up finishing 5/6 , 5/7, or 6/7 ....

its difficult to diagnose exactly why i got it wrong...

lack of TRUE understanding of the passage/stimulus?
time pressure?
misread?
etc etc etc

Point is, i am not sure and because i am not sure i fall repeatedly into getting these 4 level and 5 level difficult questions wrong.

I feel like i am at a point where if i can just have this one last breakthrough and conquer these 4 and 5 level questions that i will be well on my way to consistently get the score i want with confidence.


Can anyone share how they overcame this temporary hurdle?

desire2learn

More and more and more practice. And even then your progress will not necessarily be linear or guaranteed. But if you work on 1 passage at a time that can help with speed. If you work out your exact timing strategies for exactly when and how you will skip that will help with timing issues. Misreads will happen but you can try to be more careful if you seem to hit a particularly tough question. Just try to do your best to address each problem type.

MsM1998_

Same problem here, and I myself am going through the curriculum still. I think that it actually does boil down to practice and familiarity with the different stimuli. Seriously, I feel that the most important part is being able to understand the stimulus very well. Sometimes this boils down to reading very carefully and trying to play the stimulus out in your mind, other times it may just depend on your need to simplify the stimulus so you can understand it (science type questions aren't my forte). For me though, it feels like its usually because I miss something in the stimulus, a tiny error perhaps, but one that definitely can make or break whether I get the answer right or wrong. I asked a similar question a few days ago in a discussion of my own, and I think its common to experience this when you're getting through the curriculum. You're not expected to get perfect on each set, and probably not as much on the hardest difficulty sets. Just keep working at it, make small notes to yourself about what you should pay more attention to, how you should've gone about analyzing the stimulus, etc. Hopefully we can both work our way up through these sets. I know it's disheartening, I experience it too... Just keep going at it and do your best to highlight your errors. Be critical of yourself and your strategy in tackling the questions. This is all I do, and I'm hoping it'll gain me some improvement.

Alex

@jayc1993 said:

Can anyone share how they overcame this temporary hurdle?

Yeah as @desire2learn said practice with a few things and progress will not be linear... So so true.

I had the same problem for a while when I plateaued. I would go -6 on LR and I would almost ALWAYS miss the last 6 from 16 - 27. On my diagnostic June07 I got #13 wrong (or something like that) and like from 19-27 all wrong in a row! haha.

What helped me was getting better at LR all together. I found that I was getting questions right in the wrong ways. I didn't truly understand conditional logic. Instead I was using gimmicks like looking for strong language to get SA questions right. It worked for the easier level 1-2 but not the curve breakers.... I simply went back and revised JY's lessons on conditional logic and got faster. This in turned saved time, and gave me more time on the harder questions.

Implementing skipping strategies helped a ton. I would get stuck on harder ones and spend 2-3 minutes agonizing over it to get it wrong anyways. I got better and started skipping hard questions. This allowed me to finish with about 5-8 minutes left to go back and do the 2-4 or I had skipped. I felt was less stress knowing I was done with the others and have the time I needed to tackle the harder ones. I also was able to maintain my pacing by skipping them in the first place.

Don't have much advice on the RC front as I am still struggling with those demons myself.... The only thing that has helped me get better is getting quicker and finding contextual evidence to prove my answer choices. I think getting better at the Memory method in general and The LSAT Trainer along with Manhattan RC helped me with that. And I am working my way through the Cambridge Packet RC PTs 1-38 and doing every single passage timed and then BR'ing...