I've been preparing for the GRE for almost a month now and so far the results have been far from encouraging. My performance on the verbal section is especially poor. This is especially disconcerting because I'm a Social Sciences Major (with a GPA of 3.8) and reading complex and dense theoretical texts is what I've been doing for the past two years. But somehow I perform poorly on the RC questions. I'm doing pretty well on the SC & SE portions but the RC questions are proving to be a disaster for me.
For my prep, I've been studying from the Manhattan Prep Guides (8 books) and I've gone through all the drill sets and practice problems and I wasn't doing too badly on them. But after finishing those I picked up the 5 lb. book of practice problems and there my performance has been simply poor (out of the 80 odd RC problems I've attempted I've scored around 40 correctly). I've stopped now since its just too depressing...
The reason for writing this long and drawn out story is to explain to you guys what I've been doing and to ask you if I'm doing anything wrong. I mean I simply can't figure out why I'm getting the RC questions wrong. I'm able to understand the passages (or at least I think I do) but the answers are almost diametrically opposite. Plus I don't have a problem with language, like I wrote earlier I'm used to reading dense texts from both the arts and sciences and I do pretty well on all my courses...
To be honest, I'm kinda shocked at how bad I'm doing on the RC. It's certainly a chastening experience and I've started to doubt myself and my abilities after this, which is pretty depressing...But I still have a month before my exam is scheduled and I'm looking for some advice on how to improve my abysmal performance on RC questions. Help.
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- ozzymendiaz
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- tommywallach
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Re: Problems with RC
Hey Ozzy,
So sorry to hear you've been having a disappointing time. Don't worry; you are certainly not alone in this. It's very possible to be skilled at actual reading and still struggle with RC. Truthfully, I would recommend sitting down with a tutor. It doesn't have to be one of ours--I'm really not into the whole upselling thing--but the only way I could tell you what you were doing wrong would be to say the actual way you do questions.
Three general things to keep in mind:
1) RC is actually made up of two distinct types. What I call "Real RC" (medium-long passage with MULTIPLE questions) and what really ought to be called "Critical Reasoning" or "Logical Reasoning" (short passage with ONE question), but which GRE insists on calling RC still (this divide exists on both the GMAT and the LSAT, but on those tests it's called CR/LR). Notice if one or the other is giving you more trouble, and focus your attention there, because the methodology is quite different.
2) Make sure you are doing questions differently now than when you started. Are you taking notes on all long RC passages? If not, well there's your first mistake. Don't expect to improve unless you're actually changing something.
3) Remember that RC has rules that are not real-world rules. For example, in the real world, "infer" means "make a logical guess." On the GRE, it means "what is 100% true based on what we already told you."
Good luck!
-t
So sorry to hear you've been having a disappointing time. Don't worry; you are certainly not alone in this. It's very possible to be skilled at actual reading and still struggle with RC. Truthfully, I would recommend sitting down with a tutor. It doesn't have to be one of ours--I'm really not into the whole upselling thing--but the only way I could tell you what you were doing wrong would be to say the actual way you do questions.
Three general things to keep in mind:
1) RC is actually made up of two distinct types. What I call "Real RC" (medium-long passage with MULTIPLE questions) and what really ought to be called "Critical Reasoning" or "Logical Reasoning" (short passage with ONE question), but which GRE insists on calling RC still (this divide exists on both the GMAT and the LSAT, but on those tests it's called CR/LR). Notice if one or the other is giving you more trouble, and focus your attention there, because the methodology is quite different.
2) Make sure you are doing questions differently now than when you started. Are you taking notes on all long RC passages? If not, well there's your first mistake. Don't expect to improve unless you're actually changing something.
3) Remember that RC has rules that are not real-world rules. For example, in the real world, "infer" means "make a logical guess." On the GRE, it means "what is 100% true based on what we already told you."
Good luck!
-t
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