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Related Discussions
How to review RC
AlexRexeger
Alum Member
So other than BRing PTs, I’ve also started keeping an ongoing list of LR questions I got wrong and going over those when I get a chance. Do you think reviewing RCs you’ve taken before but had trouble with again is helpful at all? Or are you sort of tainted from the fact that you’re already familiar with the passage? Any suggestions are welcome! Thanks in advance!
Comments
I usually review/BR RC questions I've had difficulty answering. RC is my weakness even after CC - specially the inference/author perspective question.
Even if you've read the passage, there must have been something that tricked you into not being 90% sure about the answer. I usually come back and eliminate answer choice while referring to the passage. The correct answer choice has to be proven by the passage. Fore me, the time constraint while PTing makes me slightly panic. It feels like I do not have enough time to absorb, but I think I just need to practice more. I think @"Nicole Hopkins" has a really good technique in improving RC, I combined her technique and JYs. Good luck.
Yes you can revisit them at a later time . You don’t want to use up the newer pts drilling rc sections. Try to prove out why the answers are incorrect / correct . Develop a notation strategy and notice why the author created the structure and the passages in the way they are presented . Spend more time with passage —- it will help you go through the questions faster .
I’m not totally against fool-proofing RC right now. Just like LG, RC is highly, highly repetitive. Redoing RC passages that give you difficulty will help to elucidate the internal structure in the passage, and give useful feedback for the structure of all other RC passages that you will come across.
Interesting. This is very helpful. Plus I’ve been pretty worried since I’m sort of burning through PTs to use for RC
so I guess foolproofing them would be better for me in the long run.
Repetition is the name of the game
Yeah don’t do that , if you’re drilling sections / practicing untimed you don’t want to waste pts .. reusing some isn’t going to hurt you
I have been seeing lots of improvement by recording myself doing one passage and reviewing the recording and looking at where pretty much every second of my time went. It will obviously vary for you but I found that I had room to read the passages much more aggressively and for less detail. This would allow me to bank that time away to take a 15-25 second dip back into the passage if a particular question called for it.I also learned through this how important a solid process of elimination method is, as so many of the trap ACs sound so good and are only off by 1 word. Realizing this made me up my level of scrutiny for analyzing ACs and resulted in more accuracy.
@"Lucas Carter" thanks for the advice! I may sound like a noob so forgive me, but how do you record yourself? Just on like MacBook photo booth or something? Additionally, I’ve heard of people doing that before but I was always a bit wary. I’m just not really sure how you’re supposed to be objective or thoughtful when looking at yourself taking the test? Should I take the video and maybe look at what I do after I BR the test and use it to prompt me to recall my thought process for the test?
Lol! I felt the same way at first. I think your best bet is a goose neck phone mount from amazon that clamps on to the side of your desk. It allows you to get an angle that is above your head so you can see your paper clearly without anything in the way. The main benefit is just to be able to look at where your time is truly going and also to see your thought processes unfold and where you panic etc. I usually BR first and then go over the video to see how my timing was.
I BR by just reprinting the passage and doing an untimed take. I read the passage and do a low-res summary, then go through the qs. I try to answer solely based off my low-res and memory, and then I write down the line number that the answer relates to and briefly quote the part of the passage that the answer relates to. If you cant find the answer in the passage, it's not the right answer. I treat it almost like a [really brief] essay prompt response where you need to incorporate quotes from the passage.
Reposting this because someone asked a similar question!
RC was also my worst section. Two strategies really helped me.
The first was double blind review. I would do a passage, BR it, input my answers, and then see how many I got wrong. Definitely do not look at the answers. But up where the circle is in the analytics I would look at that number. If it was only one wrong, I would go to the question and see which question I got wrong, then try to figure it out. If it was two wrong, I would try to figure it which two questions I got wrong and then try to find the correct answer choices. This really helps you scrutinize. If it was three wrong or more, and also if I got two wrong in a five question passage, I would completely redo the passage instantly.
The second was slowing down significantly. I went from doing passages in 3:30 to 4:30. Then I was able to breeze through the questions much faster. Granted, I do concede that this doesn’t work for everyone. It is just a matter of finding what works for you and I found that this worked better for me.
Also stick to individual passages until you get your habits down.
Hope this helps!
I agree with much of what @JustDoIt , @"Lucas Carter" , and @"surfy surf" commented above. I'm always a skeptical about my scores on RC passages that I've done before. What I've found to be helpful is, in a sense, reorienting the goal of drilling such passages. When I redo passages, my goal is to make sure that I'm following the same strategy for attacking the passages/questions. When it comes to RC, oftentimes, I get questions wrong mainly because of either hesitancy in annotating or lazy reading. This is where video review can be especially helpful, because I can watch myself and figure out when I went off-course, and come up with cues for helping to mitigate this.
To clarify a bit, I was listening to an AMA by @"Cant Get Right" the other day while at work, and he was talking about how he was suspicious of the returns he was getting through foolproofing games that he had done numerous times before. So, he developed a LG flowchart that would outline a process for different games, and evaluating his performance entailed, in part, determining whether he had followed the appropriate strategy. Applied to RC, you can make sure that you're still improving by redoing passages, even if you know that your score is going to be inflated due to previous exposure.
Hope that helps!
Thanks all! All of this advice is incredibly helpful. I'm BRing my test now and I'm trying some of these new techniques!