Quick Tip: Practice Passage Timing
Students often find themselves accidentally spending too much time on reading the passage in Reading Comprehension (RC). Usually, this isn’t intentional—rather, as one reads, time just slips away…and time can accidentally get spent on just reading one passage.
Don’t let this happen! The dirty little secret of RC is that most passages are around the same length, so each given passage should have the same number of words as you’re used to. Set a benchmark for how long a typical passage read-through should take. Then, do old passages and drill them relentlessly. With enough practice, you should find yourself consistently hitting that benchmark.
Discussion: Question Order on Logic Games
When practicing Logic Games, is there a particular order you should answer questions in? Should you proceed in the order of the questions, or should you skip around?
I recommend skipping around. To understand why, though, it’s important to first look at the broad approach that I suggest for Logic Games. I suggest being “board-centric” and avoiding the “brute-force” approach of testing each answer choice. When being board-centric, the objective is to create as many boards as possible. This entails splitting the gameboard up when possible, and then drawing new boards while attempting questions. If a question requires drawing a board to add a new rule to the scenario or test a certain answer choice, you should keep that board. As a result, your page will soon be filled with possible gameboards that satisfy the rules, or boards that “work.”
This is valuable because keeping boards that work (from the set-up and a few questions) is a freebie: you get to keep, at no cost, a bunch of possible answers for all future questions! Then, instead of testing each answer choice on difficult questions, you can look back at your prior boards you did to see if the right answer can just jump out at you.
Given the value in saving your work and generating several successful boards, one should skip around the questions and prioritize those that yield new boards first! Here’s a suggested order:
First, do the question which asks for which situation (gameboard) is acceptable under the rules of the game. This is the easiest (and usually the first) question and an immediate opportunity to identify a board that works (which you can then write down on your page).
Second, do questions that start with the word “If.” These are the questions that supply you with a new rule, such as “If A is in both groups, what could be true?” These questions give you an easy hook to start diagramming from, since they make the gameboard more restrictive; the result is that you can produce one or more boards that work. (However, note that the “If” rule added in this particular question doesn’t have to apply to all other questions!)
Save for last the open-ended questions, like “What must be true?” These are challenging questions that often involve more of the “brute-force” approach, and the work that you did on earlier questions can come in handy here.
To conclude, there’s no reason you have to answer Logic Game questions in order. Skipping around purposefully allows you to build on work you’ve done previously, saving time and effort.