RC and LR Question

[monicajamaluddin]

Hello,

Question on approaching RC and LR. Have been having a lot of trouble with RC and, to a lesser extent LR. Someone suggested reading the questions before the passage - I tried that with RC and found that I have been finishing with 5-7 minutes, whereas before when I read the passage first I usually always ran out of time. However, I can't say that accuracy has improved much - still missing on avg. 5 questions. Any suggestions on how to improve? I know RC is the toughest to improve on but I just haven't really found any concrete suggestions on how to improve. I tend miss the most questions on expository passages - any thoughts on how to tackle those types specifically?

I try to read the Economist and Scientific American as much as possible to get used to the denser writing style but still hasn't helped.

It's gotten to a point where I dread every time I get to this section (whereas LG I could do allllll day long, love that stuff). There is a possibility I do worse just because of the stress element which I would really like to fix!

With regards to LR - I am missing about 4 on average on each section and have kind of hit a wall with these aside from the occasional fluke where I get 0 - 1 wrong. I have found I tend to miss the ones where there is a flaw in the argument and it is fixed either by adding some missing element or removing/fixing some part of the stimulus. I find that when I go back after the exam I usually can see why I got it wrong but for one reason or another keep missing it when I'm in a timed setting.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

[ManhattanPrepLSAT1]

That's great that you're now completing the RC section with time to spare. Obviously you can use that time to increase your accuracy. Go through the questions you're missing and look for trends. Is there a pattern of missing questions related to the main point, organization of the passage, attitudes held by proponents of positions or the author, specific references of details, etc. Identify those patterns and seek to make corrections accordingly.

For each of those determine the error in your selected answer choice and compare that to the way the correct answer relates to the one you chose. In RC one of the biggest issues leading to incorrect answers is the failure to distinguish between answer choices. Subtle distinctions between answer choices can be confirmed or disconfirmed by referring back to the passage.

In LR time will be your benefactor. It sounds like consistency is the issue, so work on holding your eliminations of incorrect answers to a very high level. Not only should you be able to identify the correct answer, but the more you can discount the incorrect answers (which can be time consuming) the more likely you are to have selected the correct choice. The more time you spend disconfirming answer choices, the less likely you are to be complete the section, so be selective on the areas where you want to spend more time double checking.

It may be the case (and you should look at your misses to check this) that it is the abstract descriptions that are an issue. Flaws in LR and questions related to the purpose of portions of the passage in RC often are stated in abstract language that you may want to take more time on identifying the reference of the abstract description. For example when the answer choice refers to a phenomenon, what exactly in the LR stimulus or RC passage are they referring to?

Hope that helps!