Quick Tip: Waiting for Results
What should you do when you’re waiting to hear back about your score? This is probably the most excruciating part of your LSAT journey, because it feels completely out of your control! And it is! Once you’ve taken the test, there’s nothing else to do. You could perhaps study for a future administration (if it’s, say, the next month), but my advice would be to just put aside the books and not think about the test. The exception to this, however, may be those who are taking the next administration (finding out their score only a week before the next test). But for most of you, this wouldn’t apply. If, worst case, you do need to retake, you’re going to feel much better about it if you didn’t spend the past 2 weeks worrying about things that aren’t in your control.
Discussion: Notes on RC?
A question I’m frequently asked by students is whether to take notes and, if so, what purpose they serve. My answer is always the same: I recommend taking notes, but the form those notes take will depend on you as a learner.
Why take notes? The reasons are threefold. First, they force you to be an active reader. Too often, we just read information passively, absorbing bits and pieces. Techniques like highlighting aren’t helpful because they are also passive—you might just move your mouse across the page without thinking much about what you just read. But reading actively is essential for comprehension, especially when you’re being asked detailed questions that ask you to synthesize information from the passage. Notes ensure that you’re reading it closely enough to actually write something down.
Second, notes can provide a status check. If you didn’t understand something, it’ll be hard to write down a summary of the paragraph! This can be a warning sign that perhaps you need to reread a particularly confusing sentence before hitting the questions. Otherwise, you may discover that you didn’t understand something among the questions, which makes going back far more costly.
Third, notes can help you read for structure and keep yourself organized. Thinking actively about “What point does this paragraph serve?” “How does this viewpoint relate to the authors?” and other questions can help facilitate a deeper understanding, useful for those questions that hinge on purpose.
Now, many people wonder what purpose these notes serve, as a number of students say that they don’t ever find themselves looking back at their notes. In all honesty, I rarely looked back at my notes either. But the aforementioned reasons for notes were useful by themselves; I would enter the questions with a deeper understanding of the passage, the relationship between parts of the text, and how the pieces fit together. The understanding engendered by taking the notes is valuable enough, even if the notes themselves aren’t referenced during the questions.
In sum, I’m a fan of taking notes. Of course, notes can be overdone—they shouldn’t take more than a few minutes or be paragraph-length—but in moderation, they are a plus. Taking notes has helped me—and my students—to better break down the passage. What form those notes take will vary, of course. But I’d try to devise a note-taking system that works for you, in whatever form that may be.