The Official September 2016 Study Group - WAKE ME UP WHEN SEPTEMBER ENDS Forum

[Mikey]

That moment when you're trying to focus on structure in an RC passage but the topic literally makes your eyes heavy and you have no idea what the past 3 paragraphs you've read are about.

[Mikey]

Haven't gotten fucked up by an LG section in a while.. Thanks PT 50. Don't know why I struggled so much with it, anyone else think it was a difficult section or do I just suck at games?

Nope, 50 was stupid.

I checked 7sage's LG difficulty thing. PT 50 LG has the difficulty of "easiest". Now I feel like shit.

Dead ass, Cooley early decision here I come.

tbh games i often feel are easy are marked as 'medium' and games i struggle with are marked as 'easy' on 7sage, so i've stopped looking at 7sage's rating bc it just upsets me lol

Haha yeah, I should probably stop looking at 7sages difficulty unless I REALLY get screwed by it but in that case I would look at it wayyy after I'm done with the games

[Alexandros]

How are y'all adjusting your prep for this last month?

I need to study but I've got no energy right now. I dearly hope things will calm down soon and I can really put the necessary time and energy into prep.

[PhiladelphiaCollins]

How are y'all adjusting your prep for this last month?

I need to study but I've got no energy right now. I dearly hope things will calm down soon and I can really put the necessary time and energy into prep.

Until the final week I'm hoping to do tests on Wednesday/Saturday and B.R. the 2 days after, hopefully taking Friday's off. Also hopefully a little bit of drilling in between.

[20170322]

Decided to wait a year until applying. Takes some of the pressure off of this test. Also decided to donate a kidney, so now the LSAT doesn't seem as scary in comparison. Haha

That's awesome man, lots of respect for you.

The necessary assumption is that SweetTort is talking about his own kidney and not one of his extensive collection of kidneys ripped from homeless guys.

You caught me!

[Instrumental]

How are y'all adjusting your prep for this last month?

I need to study but I've got no energy right now. I dearly hope things will calm down soon and I can really put the necessary time and energy into prep.

I've upped the tempo. I had been taking 4 tests a week, but this past week I did five and this week I think I'm going to do six. I'm doing so to fit in seven more practice tests that I wasn't initially planning to take. I'm also a bit frustrated with my inability to consistently get scores above 170.

[Mikey]

How are y'all adjusting your prep for this last month?

I need to study but I've got no energy right now. I dearly hope things will calm down soon and I can really put the necessary time and energy into prep.

PT on Monday and Friday. BR the following days and do light drilling the other days.

[34iplaw]

Today was really unproductive. Not sure why - my head just was not in it.

[appind]

How are y'all adjusting your prep for this last month?

I need to study but I've got no energy right now. I dearly hope things will calm down soon and I can really put the necessary time and energy into prep.

no energy because of work?

i have one or two fresh tests remaining that i will take and would be crucial in knowing where i really stand in scoring. i haven't yet looked at my mistakes in the dec 15 administration yet, so will be reviewing that test closely to figure out what i did wrong.
those who are retaking, is it a good idea to review mistakes in past administration before or wait till a fresh diagnostics?

[appind]

in the library to drill 29 RC

and some lg after that.

[proteinshake]

went back over the two LR sections from PT 67 (that I bombed) and realized I was making really dumb mistakes and misreading/interpreting. I easily went over the incorrect answers and knew why the right ones were right and wrong ones wrong. felt a bit "depressed" after that score yesterday but feeling much better. just can't make the LR flaw of generalizing off of one bad performance

[Alexandros]

How are y'all adjusting your prep for this last month?

I need to study but I've got no energy right now. I dearly hope things will calm down soon and I can really put the necessary time and energy into prep.

no energy because of work?

i have one or two fresh tests remaining that i will take and would be crucial in knowing where i really stand in scoring. i haven't yet looked at my mistakes in the dec 15 administration yet, so will be reviewing that test closely to figure out what i did wrong.
those who are retaking, is it a good idea to review mistakes in past administration before or wait till a fresh diagnostics?

Yeah, work's picked up, and I had a full-day non-work thing yesterday and today. Fortunately, full-time work ends after this week then ... classes (joy) Just did 6 games, going to do ~6 passages, then by-type LR, and hopefully get to sleep early.

Sounds like you've got a solid strategy!

[UtopianCitizen]

Any advice of flaw questions? Those seem to be the ones I'm missing the most.

I remember you made a thread on whether or not to get 7sage. If you did, they have a nice list of the most commonly used flaws (19 I believe) that the LSAT has. Go over those and you should start seeing the patterns in questions, at least that's what helped me a bit.

Other advice that may seem obvious but should be of some benefit is to just see what the conclusion is, and HOW/WHY the argument believes from it's premises that the conclusion is right.

Example argument:

___(some introduction context crap about the LSAT and scoring)____. In a recent study, 4 students took a proctored LSAT without having done any prep and scored above a 170. 1 additional student who studied for the LSAT for 1,000 years and took the exam in the same room as the others, scored above a 170. Therefore, one does not need to prep for the LSAT in order to break 170.

The argument sucks not only because it itself sucks (lol) but because of the many flaws it has. you can't conclude that you don't need to study just because of some stupid small sized study.
1. the sample is unrepresentative. maybe all 5 students are all smarter than the average student or population as a whole.
2. it fails to consider that maybe the 4 students literally all just got lucky

there's more flaws you can probably pick out but those are 2 that stand out to me.

also, the best thing you can do for flaw questions is to try your best to always pre-phrase. not only will this save you time, but it will also save you from falling into any trap answer choices

This.

That list of 19 flaws helped so much.

Any advice of flaw questions? Those seem to be the ones I'm missing the most.

If flawed methods, go over every answer choice to try to get what it means. The answer choices will be right for other questions. What I did is that every time I saw an A/C that seemed to describe circular reasoning, I'd make a little note and count that as a "mini" question. Same for other common ones like Incorrect reversal, eye. It's imports to try to understand what the A/C means even if wrong on these types (and how those flaws would look.)

Other advice: it's not often ad hominem, equivocation, etc. these two are almost always one of the choices, and they are rarely right. If it's ad hominem, it *must* be part of the reasoning and it will rarely, if ever, be subtle.

Edit: added advice. You can't really spend too much time on this question type. It will benefit all others, as strengthening, weakening, parallel, etc. are ALL, more or less, asking about exploiting the flaw.

Holy crap, thank you. I was missing the *first* eight consecutive beads part, thinking so long all colors were present somewhere in a strand of 8 beads or greater it was fine. (so O in 9.) That makes so much more sense now.

NP - it's a super nasty question IMO.

I'm going to do the next lessons game before class. I looked ahead and it's the "killer games" so I wanted to see how I'd do by myself. Toy Dino's -0 in 13 min on first try. That said, it wasn't in a comfortable way. It was more in an intuitive like this mauve crap is super restrictive and I basically honed in on answers that concerned that and ignored any answer on the MBTs that had the ones that had to be g/y. Not the best strategy, but it certainly worked.

Thanks, guys. I haven't purchased 7sage yet, but most likely will in the coming week. I think my issue is for some reason I can't identify the right answe, if that makes sense. Like, generally I know what the flaw is, I see it when reading the stimuli, but the A/C wording throws me off.

[Mikey]

Thanks, guys. I haven't purchased 7sage yet, but most likely will in the coming week. I think my issue is for some reason I can't identify the right answe, if that makes sense. Like, generally I know what the flaw is, I see it when reading the stimuli, but the A/C wording throws me off.

Sounds like you're referring to the more difficult and weirdly worded flaw questions. Yeah, all I can say about that is to just blind review them and really just get familiar with the abstract language they use for the right answer choice. I know that's what you don't want to hear (because it was what I didn't want to hear when I struggled with tougher flaw questions), but it's really the only way.

[Justice4Birdperson]

Two PTs, one last weekend, one today:

PT 67
RC: -4
LR1: -3
LG: -3
LR2: -1
Raw 89
Scaled 169

My mind was really not in it that day. I had taken an unintentional nap that afternoon before taking the PT. Caused me to have serious brain fog. Still not terrible for how I was feeling mentally.

PT 68
RC: -4
LR1: -1
LR2: -3
LG: -1
Raw 92
Scaled 173

My RC's slipping. Not sure why. I probably need to slow down. I actually did not have any extra time for this RC because the word capricious really threw me for a loop. Took too much time trying to figure out what capricious meant. I'm just saying I think I have a pretty good vocabulary and I could not recall what capricious means plus the writing on this passage was nonsense (most likely written that way on purpose). Anyways probably going to need to start really getting intense about this whole LSAT thing because time is running out and I"m too old for this shit. In my advanced age I don't have time for retakes.

[bearedman8]

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[appind]

I posted a thread about this but I was told that I might get better feedback here.

I'm having a tough time trying to improve my RC score. Over my last 10 practice tests, I've averaged:

LR: -1.4 (per section)
LG: -0.1
RC: -4.7 (best is -3, worst is -7)

On my most recent practice test, I missed 7 questions in RC. I won't be satisfied with anything less than a 173, so I really need to improve my average score and consistency in this section. I have all of the RC passages from tests 1-38 available to drill and I've done about half of them. Clearly I'm not drilling and reviewing correctly though because my average score really hasn't increased in RC and I don't feel any more confident on the sections.


Here's my approach to RC and how I'm drilling/reviewing:

On a normal passage, I spend ~3.5 minutes reading and notating each passage. I feel like this is too long, but I'm not sure how to bring this down without affecting my comprehension of the material. I circle all names/dates/organizations, underline sentences that I think might be the main point of a paragraph or that seem especially significant, and box particularly strong language or language that's peculiar enough that I think it might have a specific reference question attached to it. I also write "O" next to any opinion (with a single letter subscript to indicate whose opinion it is), "def" next to any definition, "cc" whenever things are compared/contrasted, numbers next to lists/enumerations, "P" next to portions of a paragraph that completely change topics and might as well start a new paragraph, and up to 1-2 words next to most paragraphs to indicate what it's about (i.e. "critic," "hist[ory]," "ex[ample]s," "counter," "sugg[estions]") when appropriate. I don't go back and add notation, so all of this happens as I'm reading the passage for the first time.

I normally finish reading the passage feeling pretty confident that I know the passage pretty well. I almost never miss main point/purpose questions. When I answer questions, though, pretty often I feel like I don't have time (and with my current strategy, I don't) to refer back to the passage unless I know exactly where I need to look. I rely on memory quite a bit, especially when I feel like I'm crunched for time. I don't know how to effectively refer back to passages and still finish the section in 35 minutes. Indeed, for a lot of questions, I don't even know if I'm supposed to be referring back to the passage or just answering based on my comprehension of the passage.

If I do an untimed passage, I'll normally take ~10-11 minutes to finish everything and be confident in my answers. During a timed section, I'll finish each passage in ~8-9 minutes and will have 1-3 questions that I don't feel confident in my answer in. I pretty often can narrow things down to 2 answer choices and then I'll pick the one I think is correct, but I don't feel like I have time to go and review the passage to prove one is correct/the other incorrect.

After a section, I normally have no clue how well I did until I score it. On LR/LG, I can almost always predict my score within 1 missed question, but on RC I've got no clue if I just went -3, -7, or anything in between. What can I do to improve my current strategy on RC? I don't feel like I miss any particular question type more than others (given their relative frequency in appearing), with the exception of main point/purpose/structure questions, which I normally get correct.


____

For drilling, I normally do one passage at a time. I always time my passages and do them as quickly as possible, but I don't strictly give myself a time limit on each passage. I definitely do better on science and law passages. I find humanities/diversity passages to be the most difficult and the ones that I spend the most time on/miss the most questions on. This is probably because I'm better at answering questions based on my memory for science/law passages.

When blind reviewing, I go through the passage very meticulously and refer back to the it for basically every question until I feel like I'm confident in why my answer choice is correct and all of the other ones are wrong. I normally miss ~3 questions at the end of my blind review. For these questions, I think about what thought process of mine led me to the incorrect answer, why it's incorrect, why another answer choice is actually correct, etc.

I've got a word document of every question that I've missed while drilling and I honestly don't see a pattern to the questions I'm missing.

I feel like I'm drilling correctly, but I'm still inconsistent in RC and generally performing way below where I'd like to be. What advice do you all have for me? I feel solid enough on other sections to devote a considerable amount of time to RC in the next month. Thank you for your help!

are the average scores above from pts in the range of 1-38 or some others? RC has changed a bit in modern tests and that can affect one's score in this section.

[bearedman8]

.

[Mikey]

Some days I feel like settling for Cooley, and some days I feel like I can destroy this test. Today feels like the latter

[appind]

are the average scores above from pts in the range of 1-38 or some others? RC has changed a bit in modern tests and that can affect one's score in this section.

These are the exams that it's from: 48, 51, 49, 11, 44, 61, 63, 39, 40, 60. My best were -3 on PTs 11/49 and my worst was -7 on PT 60. I believe that the comparative reading passages started from 52 onward, so only 3 of them had comparative reading passages.

the 60s ones would be more representative of your score. you should take 60s or 70s rc and use it for the purposes of averaging. how did you do in other 60s rc? have you taken any 70s PTs?

[tofuspeedstar]

Haven't gotten fucked up by an LG section in a while.. Thanks PT 50. Don't know why I struggled so much with it, anyone else think it was a difficult section or do I just suck at games?

Nope, 50 was stupid.

I checked 7sage's LG difficulty thing. PT 50 LG has the difficulty of "easiest". Now I feel like shit.

Dead ass, Cooley early decision here I come.

tbh games i often feel are easy are marked as 'medium' and games i struggle with are marked as 'easy' on 7sage, so i've stopped looking at 7sage's rating bc it just upsets me lol

Haha yeah, I should probably stop looking at 7sages difficulty unless I REALLY get screwed by it but in that case I would look at it wayyy after I'm done with the games

I feel like 7sage difficulty levels are determined by the data inputted by 7sagers and how they fared.


Also LSAC e-mailed me this morning. My request was approved. It's a huge weight off my shoulders..I was so nervous I hadn't taken a PT in 2 weeks since submitting the request..just drilling and reading out of the Trainer.

[34iplaw]

December 1996 Game 1 ... super weird game. I spent around six minutes thinking about the setup, but, once it clicked, the questions maybe took three minutes.

[Alexandros]

I posted a thread about this but I was told that I might get better feedback here.

I'm having a tough time trying to improve my RC score. Over my last 10 practice tests, I've averaged:

LR: -1.4 (per section)
LG: -0.1
RC: -4.7 (best is -3, worst is -7)

On my most recent practice test, I missed 7 questions in RC. I won't be satisfied with anything less than a 173, so I really need to improve my average score and consistency in this section. I have all of the RC passages from tests 1-38 available to drill and I've done about half of them. Clearly I'm not drilling and reviewing correctly though because my average score really hasn't increased in RC and I don't feel any more confident on the sections.


Here's my approach to RC and how I'm drilling/reviewing:

On a normal passage, I spend ~3.5 minutes reading and notating each passage. I feel like this is too long, but I'm not sure how to bring this down without affecting my comprehension of the material. I circle all names/dates/organizations, underline sentences that I think might be the main point of a paragraph or that seem especially significant, and box particularly strong language or language that's peculiar enough that I think it might have a specific reference question attached to it. I also write "O" next to any opinion (with a single letter subscript to indicate whose opinion it is), "def" next to any definition, "cc" whenever things are compared/contrasted, numbers next to lists/enumerations, "P" next to portions of a paragraph that completely change topics and might as well start a new paragraph, and up to 1-2 words next to most paragraphs to indicate what it's about (i.e. "critic," "hist[ory]," "ex[ample]s," "counter," "sugg[estions]") when appropriate. I don't go back and add notation, so all of this happens as I'm reading the passage for the first time.

I normally finish reading the passage feeling pretty confident that I know the passage pretty well. I almost never miss main point/purpose questions. When I answer questions, though, pretty often I feel like I don't have time (and with my current strategy, I don't) to refer back to the passage unless I know exactly where I need to look. I rely on memory quite a bit, especially when I feel like I'm crunched for time. I don't know how to effectively refer back to passages and still finish the section in 35 minutes. Indeed, for a lot of questions, I don't even know if I'm supposed to be referring back to the passage or just answering based on my comprehension of the passage.

If I do an untimed passage, I'll normally take ~10-11 minutes to finish everything and be confident in my answers. During a timed section, I'll finish each passage in ~8-9 minutes and will have 1-3 questions that I don't feel confident in my answer in. I pretty often can narrow things down to 2 answer choices and then I'll pick the one I think is correct, but I don't feel like I have time to go and review the passage to prove one is correct/the other incorrect.

After a section, I normally have no clue how well I did until I score it. On LR/LG, I can almost always predict my score within 1 missed question, but on RC I've got no clue if I just went -3, -7, or anything in between. What can I do to improve my current strategy on RC? I don't feel like I miss any particular question type more than others (given their relative frequency in appearing), with the exception of main point/purpose/structure questions, which I normally get correct.


____

For drilling, I normally do one passage at a time. I always time my passages and do them as quickly as possible, but I don't strictly give myself a time limit on each passage. I definitely do better on science and law passages. I find humanities/diversity passages to be the most difficult and the ones that I spend the most time on/miss the most questions on. This is probably because I'm better at answering questions based on my memory for science/law passages.

When blind reviewing, I go through the passage very meticulously and refer back to the it for basically every question until I feel like I'm confident in why my answer choice is correct and all of the other ones are wrong. I normally miss ~3 questions at the end of my blind review. For these questions, I think about what thought process of mine led me to the incorrect answer, why it's incorrect, why another answer choice is actually correct, etc.

I've got a word document of every question that I've missed while drilling and I honestly don't see a pattern to the questions I'm missing.

I feel like I'm drilling correctly, but I'm still inconsistent in RC and generally performing way below where I'd like to be. What advice do you all have for me? I feel solid enough on other sections to devote a considerable amount of time to RC in the next month. Thank you for your help!

I'm not an RC expert by any means, but the following has helped me get from around where you are to a more consistent -2/-1:
- Do passages over and over again, like you would for logic games. This helped me immensely.

- You might want to decrease the amount of time you spend reading a passage, so you can spend more time with the questions. I find 3 minutes on a passage seems to work, shooting for 7 minutes in total, and taking more time if they're more complex/unfamiliar. If the notation / summaries are slowing you down and not really increasing accuracy, scrap some of them. Find what works for you.

- Most of the questions can be answered by directly referencing the text. There will always be a highly interpretive question or two, but the level of ambiguity in answer choices is really no greater than LR. Cross reference with the text as much as you can (especially on BR, where you have the time.) Don't try to rely completely on memory.

I think those are the biggest things. Not sure if that's at all helpful since it's all pretty obvious. Good luck!

[Rupert Pupkin]

December 1996 Game 1 ... super weird game. I spent around six minutes thinking about the setup, but, once it clicked, the questions maybe took three minutes.

I did this game a few days ago too and similar thing happened. I was struggling hard with the setup, but once I got it- I blew through the questions.

To me, I feel like LG questions are never too hard. Its just about fully wrapping your head around the game, making a strong setup with great initial inferences.

[Instrumental]

Oh my god, the second passage of the RC in PT53 just completely killed my flow. Trying to take in the information was like trying to shove putty through a straw. Actually I felt my pacing on the whole test was kind of off. Maybe that Sunday break wasn't what I needed. Ack. I don't even want to score this test >_<