CR - RC Time Management - A Big ISSUE

[KM]

Hi Stacey,

I am struggling with CR & RC timing issues. I am currently a student of MGMAT online course where we talk about writing down strategy for CR/RC.

I tried doing this in the class, it worked for some questions. Here's my actual problem.

I noticed that if a sentence is about 15 words, I generally take about ~23 secs to write down a paraphrase of the same. In a typical CR it is more than 50 words.

So, I take about 1 min 30 secs to write down what is there in the CR. Add another 15-20 secs to chart out P & C.

By now it is 1 min 50 secs. Start reading answer choices - atleast 30 secs to read & understand. Mark an answer another few secs. So overall I am taking close to 3 mins per CR.

RC:: Last week I took MGMAT - 2 where I got 3 RC's of length more than 75 lines within first 25 questions, which threw me off timelines ultimately hitting me very badly in the last 10 questions.

Another point I noticed in RC is this: I tried following MGMAT approach on RC. However when I do that for specific question types, I panic reading the paragraph & do not comprehend there by taking a hit at accuracy. So I am not skimming paragraphs but reading thru & making notes in the first read itself. am I doing correct ???

Because of the above method, I am taking approx 2 mins per question if we have atleast 4 questions in a passage. It is same 8 mins even if the passage throws in only 3 questions.


Sorry for the long post. Please take your time and help me clear the air.

-KM

[StaceyKoprince]

It takes a lot of practice to read and process the information efficiently. One of the things you should do during practice is go back over your notes for a CR or RC after you've done the problems. What that you wrote down was useful? What wasn't useful? With hindsight, is there a way you could've guessed that some of the info probably wouldn't be useful before you wrote it down? For the stuff that was useful, how could you have written it down more concisely?

Also, make sure that you have the right mindset here - I know that the class notes say you should write as though you're taking notes during a lecture, but I don't like my students to think of it that way, actually. When we take notes during a lecture, we know we're not going to have the test for 2 or 3 weeks, so we have to write pretty comprehensively in order to make sure we remember the info a couple of weeks from now. For this test, however, you only need to remember the info for the next 2 min (for CR) or 7-8 min (for RC). So take notes accordingly - abbreviate in a big way. Never write out full words; use abbreviations of one or a few letters. Use symbols - arrows are great. Horizontal arrows can be used for cause and effect. Vertical arrows pointing up or down can mean higher, lower, increasing, decreasing, etc. Use < and >. Etc.

If you can put away a diagram for two days and then pull it out and look at it and basically recreate the argument just from your notes (without re-reading the original argument)... then you did not abbreviate severely enoough. You should be abbreviating so much that you actually can't really remember the argument just from your notes after a couple of days!

Also, on RC specifically, they'll typically write 7-8 questions per passage but you'll only be given 3-4 of them. That's why it's important not to get bogged down in all the details on the first read-through; you're not even going to have to do half of the questions! Know what kind of information exists and in which paragraph - but don't worry about trying to take the time to learn all of the picky detail unless and until you get a question about it. Then use your outline to figure out which paragraph you should go to, and NOW take the time to read the relevant sentence(s) and understand the detail.

(It's fine to read it the first time through if you understand the info - but if you're starting to get totally bogged down there, DON'T get sucked in. Start skimming. You may not even get a question about that info.)

Also, FYI - our CATs have a narrower window than the real test does, so it seems like you're getting a ridiculous number of lines if you just look at the line numbers. The real test has more words per line. :)