Stuck in the mid 160's... again. RC help needed!

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• 3 Likes

  nessa.k13.0 Inactive ⭐

  March 2017 edited March 2017 4141 karma

  Hi @adore-no !

  I'd focus on eliminating issues with flaws. This will help you in other areas of the LSAT because if you can see and understand why arguments are flawed, you should be able to identify the point at issue with other question types more efficiently. Learn flaws well. It helped me a lot to go through the Wikipedia flaws (there are also books on flaws that some sages have read). I wrote notes and made flashcards on the flaws and this helped me immensely. I found that by learning flaws and getting more familiar with how and why they ruin argument validity, I was able to quickly spot holes and weaknesses in many other LSAT question types. After going through those, get to know what kinds of flaws re-appear on the LSAT. If you can definitely look at the LSAT Superprep books and read LSAC's explanations of right and wrong acs as well as their explanations for flaw questions. (Here's a flaw intensive webinar if you are interested https://7sage.com/webinar/flaw-intensive/ )

  For RC, there were some great intensives on how to improve from Daniel, Josh, and David---keep an eye out for those getting uploaded on the webinar page and check them out. Here are some key points from my session notes:
  1. Read actively and get a basic understanding of each paragraph. Don't get caught up in details. Have a big picture idea of the passage.
  2. Know the main idea of each paragraph and how they fit together in the whole passage.
  3. Note (in addition to the main point) the authors tone and argument structure of each paragraph.
  4. To make big improvements in RC it's going to take a lot of deliberative practice. A sage did 2 to 3 RC sections a day to improve.
  5. Develop a good notation strategy to keep track of things like major nouns, tone shift, units and the passage of time, examples of points being made etc.
  6. Refer back to the specific parts that are referenced in later paragraphs while reading about the ideas that you previously anticipated. This is to give yourself a better chance at understanding the reasoning structure.
  7. For parallel and analogy questions look for ACs that keep the same necessary condition as the argument that you need to find a parallel argument for.
  8. With comparative passages, check quickly and see if you have questions about passage A, read passage A then answer those questions on it. Do the same for passage B.

  You're welcome to join the June study group as well. We take PTs and review them each week. We support each other and there's a Thursday night option and a Saturday night option.
  I hope this helps!
• 1 Like

  apublicdisplay Alum Member

  March 2017 edited March 2017 696 karma

  Maybe your drills aren't reflective of taking a 35 minute section? If you get -2/-1 a lot of times in drills but do poorly on the test then maybe timing or concentration is the main issue.
• 1 Like

  adore-no Alum Member

  March 2017 edited March 2017 94 karma

  Thanks for the tips Nessa. I've been meaning to join a BR call but my schedule couldn't accommodate it. Hopefully I can join the next few.

  Timing is somewhat of an issue. I finish just in the nick of time, and my instinct is to generally not skip RC questions.
• 1 Like

  JustDoIt Alum Member ⭐

  April 2017 3112 karma

  Hi!

  Definitely take @"nessa.k13.0"'s advice. A lot of super helpful info in there that took me a long while to learn!

  Also, I would look at @TheoryandPractice 's guide that was posted a few days ago. Sometimes, we can forget to get in the active reading mode or be overconfident but when remember that each part of the passage is building upon another part, we simultaneously active read and read for structure.

  Hope this helps too!
• 2 Likes

  rafaelito Alum Member

  April 2017 1063 karma

  @"adore-no" said:
  Thanks for the tips Nessa. I've been meaning to join a BR call but my schedule couldn't accommodate it. Hopefully I can join the next few.

  Timing is somewhat of an issue. I finish just in the nick of time, and my instinct is to generally not skip RC questions.

  Hey! Definitely take @"nessa.k13.0" 's advice.

  I'll also give you my two cents. I think I am in a similar boat but my RC has been improving. I know you said you went through the CC but did you go through the RC parts and actually listen to how J.Y. breaks down a passage? Maybe you have which would be great but I know sometimes we go through the CC without actually listening. Anyway, in my case I definitely skipped/glossed over RC parts of the CC because that was my strongest section and I was over confident. Then LG improved to the point of -1 and LR to the point of -3 to -5. My BR's are in the 170s consistently so I know that my fundamentals are good (although you can always improve those).

  So with that, I needed to step up my RC game. In general, what has helped me is quite simply drilling RC passages and watching J.Y.'s videos thereafter. More specifically, I naturally came up with a personalized notation strategy. So, through drilling I noticed (just naturally developed) that I circle subject matter, put important concepts in parentheses, underline less important concepts, box dates or kind of the.central.theme/person/scholar etc, and last but not least draw arrows connecting concepts or ideas from paragraph to paragraph (just like JY does). Doing this is definitely improving my reading for reasoning structure, as they say, which conceptually I think we all understand but doing it is much harder.

  Lastly, for drills, I started just saying to myself "main point, author's tone, argument structure" before each passage. I can also tell through using analytics that I was missing a lot of the inferauthorperspective questions, which means I had a weakness in author's tone (why is someone writing this, what is the essence of the passage? what is the purpose?) so I have really tried to focus on bringing out words that tell me the author's opinion.

  Last but not least, use the main point question, which is usually the first after the passage, to confirm certain aspects of the passage. If you are 100% of the main point answer choice use it.

  Anyway, that's what I've been doing and I do see improvements even if I'm not there yet. Also, looking to take it in June. Feel free to let me know your thoughts.
• 1 Like

  adore-no Alum Member

  April 2017 94 karma

  @RafaelBernard thanks for the tips. I think I may have to check out the CC once again because I glossed over much of it as well. It may have to do with overconfidence too, like @JustDoIt suggested. I think I'm going to spend a couple of days drilling and practicing with these suggestions in mind.

  I'll report back and feel free to do the same!