Been trying for several months to tie down logic games. Hasn't happened yet. I'm averaging about -3 on my last several preptests, but that belies big swings. For example, PT 60 crushed me, PT 61 was -0, and PT 62 was -6.
I don't know if I'm very good at diagnosing my own problems. The only trend I can maybe see -- and this might just be recency bias -- is that I struggle with open-ended and even slightly nonstandard games. For example, PT 62 game 2 is definitely a grouping game, broadly defined, but it's a weird one. Same with game 3 from that test. I've done literally every game ever published multiple times but I don't have the pattern recognition necessary to adapt on my first time through lots of games.
Is there any specific remedy for this type of thing? Should I just keep "foolproofing?" I don't want to keep banging my head against the wall if there's something more targeted I can do, because time is becoming precious for us June takers.
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And don’t worry too much right now @danilphillips . You’re only just getting started. As long as you’ve got a good system and are doing it right, you’ll start getting the hang of it.
Anyway, here’s what I do that has been really effective for me. My only errors are typically careless misreads or things like that, or maybe I’ll stumble over a dreaded miscellaneous game, but even those, I’m improving on. So, like you, I repeat a game until I get it. Then it goes into a rotation I developed for systematically revisiting games. I repeat the game at intervals of one day, one week, and one month. By increasing the interval, the game gets a little hazier with each take. The month retake is very different from the day retake. So when I take the month retake, it has to be perfect- every question right and every game under time. If it is, I retire the section. If it isn’t, it goes back into the rotation from the very beginning.
I’m also a big advocate of not using a timer during drills. I’ve found a stopwatch to be much more useful. If a section takes you 40 minutes at your natural pace, let it. My goal is to get my natural, untimed pace to under 35 minutes. If I’m racing a clock it’s much more difficult to do. I did that for awhile, but since I’ve changed I’ve seen huge progress. I finished one section -0 (a month take) in under 25 minutes yesterday, it was an incredible feeling. And I didn’t rush it. Rushing is bad. Speed comes from understanding, not from moving really really really fast. Until I stopped timing myself, that’s exactly how I’d try to make up speed. Without a countdown, I’m able to relax and focus on learning the things that speed really comes from. I don’t think I could have gotten to a 25 minute pace on even the easiest section without that realization.
So that’s what has worked for me.
Make sure you're not just going through the motions though, and you're not just trying to remember how you solved the game last, but rather use your experience to look for better, faster ways to solve even games you've seen before.
One thing that helped was occasionally doing game "binges" where I'd go through ~15 sections over the course of a weekend. I get into a rhythm that translates into improved performance on subsequent PT's.
But yes, it's a hard, long process for some of us. Keep at it, there's only up from here!