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RC improvement success stories?

Reissie73Reissie73 Member
in General 81 karma

Hey guys,
RC is a section I consistently have trouble with. A lot people say it’s the most difficult section to improve in although there is debate on that. I really need to see more progress myself and was thinking it would be AMAZING to hear from some of you ppl about an initial difficulty in this section followed by a very significant improvement and what made the difference. Also for the sake of others here with my same difficulty of course! Only a bit more than a week for me before the big test and it would be a dream come true to even have a mini breakthrough.

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  • saraheq1saraheq1 Alum Member
    122 karma

    Hey, so this is some advice that's pretty frequently mentioned on this site, but by increasing the amount and caliber of materials you're actually reading every day, RC starts to become a little more manageable. This may not be great advice for only a week or so to go, but in the months before I took the test, I cut out social media and tried to avoid other mediums that run on small tidbits to convey most messages. This turned into me reading more newspapers, actual books, and verbose materials like The New Yorker & The Economist. I can't tell you how that impacted my score yet (if it did at all) but it definitely made the act of accomplishing RC during test day much easier than in previous PTs I'd done.

  • UrbanNerdUrbanNerd Alum Member
    edited June 2018 12 karma

    @saraheq1 Hello, I'm thinking about doing the same. I'm taking the test in September. How much of a point increase did you see?

  • WellSeeWellWellSeeWell Alum Member
    42 karma

    When I started studying, I was averaging anywhere from 10-12 wrong in RC. As I started to do better and solely focus on LR, my RC improved to maybe -9/-10. For the longest time, I neglected RC and also neglected MSS / NA questions on LR. I took the next steps around the same time so I am not sure what truly improved my score, but I was averaging 3-5 wrong just before this June test. Although I studied for several months, my RC improvement happened to click within a period of a month.
    - Before my largest improvement, I was writing down a few words for each paragraphs main point taking about 4.5 min to read and write each passage.

    • With the help of a tutor, I bettered my understanding of MSS, NA and Main Conclusion questions in LR which transferred to RC to the point I no longer needed to write down anything while reading, cutting down my reading by a min

    • I checked out some RC guides online (eg. Voyagers) and tried a few things, taking what I felt worked best for me (boxing names, circling shifting words like "although", and underlining key phrases that indicated main point contributions)

    • I started practicing speed reading with Spreeder app, but I don't think this helped largely. Instead, I started aiming for a min per question per passage which includes the reading time (eg. 7 min for a 7 question passage). I rarely made this mark but it helped me start to grasp reading comprehension passages within 2 - 3 minutes.

    • I drilled the RC passages from tests 1 - 20. These seemed more difficult to me as I rarely got perfect scores for these while getting much better scores on the newer tests. While reading over 40 passages, I started to find an interest in any of the passages since they are usually about some uncommon subject that I had not learned before, which for me became a fun thing to me. I dreaded an LSAT / PT that had an experimental RC but was glad I got one on the June test.

      • At first while drilling, I did maybe 10 without time and making sure to check my answers and find the phrasing in the passage where I was wrong.

    After a while I started to feel a pattern in the passage structure and understood it well enough to go back to the paragraph which the question was asking about. I started to get better at sensing trap answer choices which were really not much different than the MSS, NA, and MC traps.

    I got a subscription to The Economist and read a few toward the end of my studies and found them interestingly similar to RC passages, but there really are plenty of RC passages to practice on. My friend goes 0/-1 on RC and he naturally reads dense material like Darwin or Sartre, but I find that tactic to not be "me". I did begin reading The Concept of Law which takes a certain level of logical reading and I think that helped me some too. Good luck! Hope at least some of these things work for you

  • Reissie73Reissie73 Member
    81 karma

    @WellSeeWell
    Thanks a lot for your answer, so encouraging! This definitely gives me some ideas of what I can do. How did you drill RC when you did time?

    Also, could you suggest any tutors to me? I’m looking for one at the moment. Feel free to private message.

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