Reading Comprehension Help

Comments

• mikalyn.greenzweig Alum Member

  May 2023 514 karma

  Following.
• 1 Like

  candacestubblefield Member

  May 2023 87 karma

  Are you doing the blind method when you pretest and are you using the wrong answer journal and making sure you understand why each of the wrong answers are wrong and what makes the right one right? I am in a similar funk right now as well and I have found that much of it is due to my not being more dedicated to following up with the wrong answers and why I missed what I did. Additionally, something I have found really helpful is to print or set up drills of easy RC and I take them with me in the car or anywhere I have to wait for long periods of time and I pull them out and work on them. (I do it with LR and practice getting them answered in less than a minute as well and its a huge help) It helps strengthen your core skills on the the easy questions and it helps you make sure you get at least that many questions right if you're practiced at answering them quickly. That leaves time for you to focus on the tougher questions as well. Best of luck to you!
• 4 Likes

  Ravinder Alum Member

  May 2023 869 karma

  For RC, I recommend practicing spaced repetition and recapping every 3-5 sentences. LSAT hacks has a good article on space repetition. The next thing that helped me was to read each answer slowly clause by clause and kill any answer choice that is inaccurate very early. By going slowly you can often kill most of the wrong answers after the first clause or two without even having to read past the first line. Third, I always do a vertical scan of the answer choices to just check the first clause or even just the first 3-4 words and often can eliminate one or two answer choices quickly and then just focus on the ones that are left. Just eliminating even one or two answers saves time and builds confidence. I can share more RC tips if this seems helpful.
• offy0c-1-1 Live Member

  May 2023 256 karma

  I agree with Ravinder. The way in which you can improve on RC is by focusing on the questions. The wrong acs would be wrong bc it introduces ideas that cannot be reinforced by the passage or they flat out conflict with the passage. They purposely place acs that seem to fit well in the outside world but they just don't receive any support from the passage or they directly conflict with the information given. So I would also recommend focusing on the questions.

  For the passage I would stress to try to get a general idea of what the passage is saying (without skimming). The way in which the paragraphs are constructed tends to be consistent throughout the passages: they give you a core idea followed by elaborate sentences that either refute or support that idea. Even if you confront a passage that tends to be very dense/hard to deconstruct just focus on what you understand and the povs that are given.
• 1 Like

  Cant Get Right Yearly + Live Member Sage ⭐ 🍌 7Sage Tutor

  June 2023 edited June 2023 27902 karma

  If you keep getting the same results, you need to do something different. How are you studying? Whatever the answer, it is clearly ineffective.

  I agree with above comment that clause-by-clause breakdowns are very helpful. Both in the AC's and in the passages. In the AC's, you just have to be careful that you study each answer to make sure it says exactly what you think it says. RC is all about precision and many answers would be right but for a word or two. Deconstructing answers is an effective way of learning to spot these subtleties. In the passage, I try to break down any sentence that contains multiple assertions, which is most of them. Single clauses are typically limited to single assertions, so the clause level is a great one to read at. Sentences are often written to cram tons of different ideas and assertions into a single sentence which thereby becomes confusing and overwhelming. And a paragraph is WAY too complex. If you're only reflecting at the paragraph level, you're in so much trouble.

  I also agree that recaps are a very important active reading tool, though I don't think anything should just be arbitrarily utilized based on something like regular intervals. Recaps help us solidify understanding when we're a little overwhelmed by too much information at once, consolidate meaning when confronted with a series of complex causal relationships, repair confused presentation that needs to be re-stated in a more straight-forward way that will better communicate the meaning, etc. They're also good because they force us to stop and do a lot of the other things we should be doing anyway. If recapping at regular intervals helps force the reader to do it, then I suppose I have minimal complaints: It's somewhat arbitrary, slightly rigid, and at least a little sub-optimal. But this can be so much better than so many of the most common alternatives that I've come around on it, for most purposes, through writing this.

  RC is mostly an exercise in successfully employing active reading strategies. And active reading does not just mean "pay attention." The just-pay-attention characterization of active reading is ubiquitous, destructive, and so frustrating. People also get way carried away with things like "read for structure." Sure, pick up the structure. But structure will not supply comprehension. If it's all you read for, you will not perform well. Active reading strategies include but are not limited to: Think and react; notice when thinking wanders or meaning breaks down; identify specific obstacles obscuring meaning; connect new information to known information; wonder and question; make inferences and predict outcomes; formulate our own interpretations; differentiate the essential from the peripheral; summarize and recap; rethink misconceptions and revise thinking; form opinions; learn; etc; etc.

  Low resolution summaries will also not save you if attempted without the comprehension resulting from active reading. Low-res summaries "unfold." If you do not comprehend, you cannot unfold. And anyway, your summaries will be not-very-good in the first place.

  OP has not necessarily indicated that they're making any of these mistakes, but the low performance and lack of improvement despite lots of time invested in studying is highly suggestive. Active reading really is 90% of it, and all too often in OP's score range, students are trying to replace active reading with "LSAT strategies," which are terrible when attempted in place of, rather than in addition to, active reading.