Improving retension, need tips please!

[MatthewE311]

Hello,

I’ve noticed that my accuracy on RC passages goes down catastrophically whenever I time myself. When I blind review my answers, I’m normally able to get them all correct or perhaps one wrong per passage. So, I don’t think understanding and making inferences is my problem, but my being able to dig out information in a quick and efficient manner. Has anyone else experienced this and improved by doing anything? It’s frustrating because I feel like I have the potential to go -0 to -2 on an RC section. Starting with PT 7, for the past two days, I’ve been drilling single RC passages with 7sage’s memory method. I plan spending the next week solely on RC—am I taking the right course of action? Perhaps I just need to get used to reading a lot because as an Economics major/math minor I’ve not read much at all for the past few years. Thoughts?

[ohthatpatrick]

Some tips:

- time yourself on individual passages ... if there are only 5 or 6 questions, 7.5 mins ... if there are 7 or 8 questions, 9 mins.

Before you worry about doing entire sections efficiently, worry about doing individual passages efficiently. Ideally, you have a stopwatch going that has a LAP function. You can click that when you're done reading the psg, and click it after you answer each question. That way you'll have a record later of where you spent your time.

Once those 7.5 - 9 mins are up, do a blind review and see if you'd change anything. Check the answers/explanations and generate some specific takeaways. Write those takeaways down (both because the act of writing them forces better retention and because you might look at these later and find a recurring pattern).

- sensitive yourself to strong claims and comparative claims ... WITHOUT reading an RC passage, go through all the questions and put a "-" next to answers you anticipate will be wrong answers. Put a √ next to an answer you think might well be the correct one.

This drill forces your brain to really think about the strength / style of claims, and in the heat of battle part of what saves us time is bailing from bad answers without reading them all the way through. You should hit the stinker of a word and move on to the next.

- do an untimed RC section where you cover up the answer choices and write down your own predicted answer for each question (for questions where that's possible)

Developing a strong ability to prephrase a correct answer (or to locate the correct "Proof Sentence(s)" in the passage) before you've looked at the answer choices can create time-saving opportunities.


The time constraint is purposefully there to squeeze many of us out. They're not only looking for people capable of strong legal reading/thinking (people who can miss only a couple on blind review). They're looking even more for people capable of doing that incredibly quickly (missing only a couple in 35 mins).

The time constraint is intended to be too little time for most people's processing speed. I'm a supposed expert and many RC sections are pushing me to the brink of what I can read and thoughtfully analyze in time. So a certain part of this is just the name of the game: a challenge that doesn't necessarily have an answer.

If the time constraint seems to trouble you less because it doesn't allow enough time to analyze and more because it creates a stressful feeling that makes it hard for you to concentrate, then you may want to look into a daily regimen of 10-15 mins of mindfulness breathing. It's the best antidote we know of for training ourselves to be more in control of our emotional responses to the present.

Good luck.

[MatthewE311]

Thank you so much for the response, I’m actually doing exactly what you mentioned in the first part of your post and I’ve seen improvement. I really like the idea of the untimed pre-phrase strategy. I can see how that could wire one’s thought process to be more efficient in a timely manner. I’ll definitley try that out, thanks again.