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Question about BRing PTs for 170+ scorers.
BRing doesnt take that long for me. I usually only circle 5ish questions a section if that.
This last PT I took, I circled 7 questions in one LR section. I had a few minutes left of the section, so I had time to go back over 4 questions. After going back over them, I felt 100% certain about the AC I originally chose. So I put a cross through the circle to indicate that I actually feel 100% about it and dont feel the need to BR. This left me with only 3 questions to BR. I still BR'd all 7 questions anyways bc I do think it could be a good use of time to keep writing out explanations.
I'm wondering how exactly other people go about BRing. Maybe a better use of that additional/unnecessary(?) time I spent BRing could've been spent on drilling a new LR section or doing some logic games.
I got -0 on the section before and after BR.
Comments
My BR is pretty similar, usually doesn't take me any more than an hour to BR my full PT. I'm a lot more cautious with my BR though and I'll circle anywhere from 7-11 questions per section.
Usually all that's required for me to get to 100% confidence is just another read of the stimulus and the ACs.
My BR is typically 178-180.
If you have additional time during your PT to go back over some questions you circled, do you still leave them for BR if you feel certain about your AC?
I basically went about BRing the same way as you, and I am almost always somewhere between - 0 and - 2 on LR (combined, both sections). Got a 172 on the real thing in Feb., but currently planning to retake for 175+ in Sept. since I'm reapplying. Sounds like you are well on your way to 170+ !
It is very smart to use the extra time at the end of your timed section as sort of a "pre-BR" to confirm your answer choices/thought process. Having the extra time to do this after getting faster was when I saw my LR score improve from -4/-6 to -0/-2, so I definitely recommend to continue reviewing your circled Qs at the end of the section.
With that said, as for BRing after you already review—ABSOLUTELY keep at it. You will never learn more than you will when you reinforce your successful thought processes. This is the difference between high-160s and 170+ testers in my opinion. Continue figuring out exactly why you picked the AC you did in a question you circle, ESPECIALLY when you get it right.
When you start scoring at this level, any additional marginal gains are very hard to come by. The only way to guarantee that your continuing improvement is not merely due to luck is to make sure that you completely understand and reinforce your correct reasoning and completely abandon and replace any incorrect thought processes you may have developed.
While doing more PTs/drills will definitely be helpful and necessary, at this stage it is more important to get the most out of every question you complete. Keep on doing what you're doing, and maybe even put some MORE time into BRing Qs that you circled, reviewed, and got right during timed PTs.
Keep building on the thought processes that work for you, and you'll hit 170+ on the real thing no problem!
@"surfy surf" said:
Yes, always. Because if I circled a question, then that means it gave me a hard time on my first pass. When I do BR I try to figure out why it gave me a hard time, and what I could do better to get it on the first try the next time.
Thank you!! this is what i needed to hear! I wasnt sure if I was wasting my time and building up like, under-confidence by going back over questions that I ended up having time to pretty much BR during the exam.
This is a good point!!
I'm going to push back on the emerging consensus here. Marking a question for BR means that you aren't sure you understood it. So if you are confident you confirmed/corrected it in your second round, how does this qualify for BR?
Building up under-confidence is exactly what you're doing here. By BRing these questions, you're indicating that your understanding wasn't good enough. Yet. . .
So if this isn't good enough for you, what is?
As you begin your push into the 170's, it's going to be increasingly important to learn to trust yourself. 100% confidence is actually too high a threshold at this level. Working your way up to the 170's, I think it's really important to hold a strict 100% standard for foregoing BR. Once you get there though, you're entering a new stage of the game. It's a stage where you've got to be willing to take a few gambles and let the probabilities on those high, but sub-100%, confidence questions play out. If you're 90% confident on a question and you miss it, that's a big problem, and you should treat it as the over-confidence error it is. My threshold to BR is 80% confidence. If I'm 80% and I miss it, it's an overconfidence error. Experience has shown me that I should answer correctly any question that I feel 80% confident on or better. You don't have time to get to 100% across the board, so you need to focus on getting as far as you can. I rarely go all the way to 100%, but I guarantee that if you average everything out, my confidence is higher for the section than almost anyone aiming for 100%.
The other thing this does is it reveals smaller cracks in your foundations that you could otherwise cover up. There are a lot of workarounds for when we don't fully understand--and these are really important tools--but in practice, they're often effective enough that we rely on them too much and thus avoid having to address remaining errors of understanding. When you force yourself to be comfortable with a lower standard of confidence, you'll make a few extra mistakes that you may not have otherwise. This is a good thing; this is how you push already solid understanding further because the errors demand your attention when you make them. Give small mistakes consequence and you'll be forced to confront them head on.
@"Cant Get Right" I think this is great advice too, and it is not something that I considered in my original post!
However, I think that since it sounds like @"surfy surf" is still trying to consistently break the 170 barrier, reinforcing a higher level of confidence may yet be appropriate.
Also, I think the underconfidence threat is highly dependent on the individual test taker and how they approach/respond to BR. The added benefit of BR vs. quick end-of-section review could be the chance to write out explanations and thereby further reinforce confidence in the AC and thought process. You can be sure you get the Q correct without understanding why. The second part is more important when trying to make progress at this level. At least that is how I have been treating it.
Obviously others may react in different ways, but I don't think that BR necessarily involves questioning/losing confidence in your reasoning—it can just as easily be characterized as explicating and thereby reinforcing thought process at the 170+ level.
This helps me, at least, to approach similar questions with higher confidence in the future, even as my PT trend has been 175+ lately.
That is what I always did. Knowing the right answer is half the battle. The whole point of blind review is that it is better at identifying the areas where you still have room to improve. Having to come back to it to double check means there is still room to eek out some improvement. Why wasn't it obvious the first time? How can you get to 100 percent confidence on a similar question faster and without having to come back to it the next time?
It certainly depends what level a student is at, and I think that's a really important point of clarification. This comment is based on having seen surfy around for awhile and being under the impression that we're pretty advanced on LR.
This is really well reasoned, and I think it gets to the core of why BR works and is such a vital study tool. It's made me reconsider a few things actually, so thank you for your response.
I think the other element that is important to recognize--which is where I'd still push back--is that OP has a pretty good section strategy that allows for corrections when things don't immediately click. That strategy is a part of the process which should also be reinforced and trusted. Most of these that are corrected to 100% confidence in the second round are not missed on the first because of a fundamental misunderstanding but because of a loss of focus, critical misread, or sometimes just a deliberate decision to deal with a harder question later. I never was able to eradicate these types of situations, or honestly even to reduce their occurrence by much. BR didn't address these types of problems for me, but I learned how to deal with them by developing good strategy and by trusting it when it counted. Against the weight of taking the real exam, many people abandon their strategies and subsequently crash and burn. It happens all the time, and it almost happened to me. After a bad LG in section one on Sept 2016, I got really conservative in LR for section two. It felt safer, but it was a deviation from my strategy which I had consciously developed and really learned to trust. Even though it felt reckless and unpredictable, I relied on past success, executed my strategy, and salvaged the test. Just as reasoning must be reinforced so that we can trust that it will come through when it counts, so must the process of taking the test. By BRing these, we're telling ourselves that something wasn't good enough, something was wrong. If our reasoning is ultimately at 100%, then the only thing left is our process. To me though, the process was as perfect here as our reasoning ultimately was and is what really pulled us through. It provided the framework for our reasoning to succeed. So I feel like BRing undermines our trust in our strategy here. And without trust in our strategy, we're much more likely to choke when it counts. I suppose it's more psychological than anything, but I think that carries enough weight to act on.
@"Cant Get Right" that 80% confidence level mind-set is gonna be tremendously useful to me, thank you. Although I am really at my first PT since going through the CC for my 2nd time ( @LastLSAT was right to point that out), I had been focusing on LR for 3 months straight and I've drilled so many LR sections. With LR at this point it really is just about making the most of my time and focusing on strategy and technique. I know the answers, just need to be time efficient and keep my head on straight.
I think for now I am gonna keep over-BRing until I start consistently scoring in the 170s, but I really like the 80% confidence concept and I'm gonna use that while I drill and PT. Sometimes I dwell on questions a lil too long even though i'm like 90% sure of the answer and I'll even re-read answers that I know 100% are wrong and I just get in this re-reading spiral for no reason.
I do think that BR is flawed in its own ways in that you cant really address where exactly your head was at during the PT, and it does encourage under-confidence in a way. You cant really address your technique for that specific question during BR.
Sometimes I'm just like what the shit I have to read almost a mini-RC passage about duck breeding right now there's no way i'm reading this and I just skim really hard and get the gist of it and move on. Although I'll circle qs like that for BR, I think a good 90% of the time you dont really need the details and just need the general idea (i.e. this is a part to whole flaw), and it doesnt really matter that I didnt process that this is specifically about green-breasted ducks living in Irish ponds in the 1800s who breed exclusively in Amsterdam during 60* weather when it's humid and dark outside but never when it's raining or whatever. I dont necessarily need to go back over qs like that during BR to re-process pointless details and reconfirm that those extraneous details were in fact pointless.
And honestly a lot of times I just circle things for BR that I thought were stupid topics. Like I was just mad that I had to read something about detective stories and I circled it bc I moved on from that thinking WTF about the LSAT writers choosing that topic, but not WTF about my answer or my understanding of the stim.
I think circling less will actually help me bc then when I have extra time left over, I'll go back over the ones that I really might have gotten wrong, instead of just reconfirming questions that I'm almost certain I got right.
Haha I'm dying. This is the most perfect summary of the frustrations of LR and BR that I have ever read.