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I am out of reading comprehension passages for the LSAT. If I had to choose between the GMAT and MCAT for reading comprehsion passages, does anyone have any opinion on which one is more comparable to the LSAT? Also I am planning on going through the critical reasoning from the GMAT. Has anyone had experience doing this and thoughts?

tsbotros wrote:I am out of reading comprehension passages for the LSAT. If I had to choose between the GMAT and MCAT for reading comprehsion passages, does anyone have any opinion on which one is more comparable to the LSAT? Also I am planning on going through the critical reasoning from the GMAT. Has anyone had experience doing this and thoughts?

Are you missing questions after reading every single RC passage?

I would suggest going over the ones you already did. It was my experience that they never stayed fresh in your head, especially if you did them a while ago. just my $.02

passages i usually get no more than 1 or 2 wrong....but every now and then there is a passage where i will miss 3...on tests I am getting like 21 out of 27 right on the test

Have any of you guys tried out passages from the MCAT and GMAT?

this is my 3rd time taking the test...so i have already been through every passage ever given at least twice.

It sounds like you should be taking full tests. RC is about reading while you're exhausted.

Yeah I have taken all the passages in a test. I have been through most of the tests twice already. So I feel my memory is picking up on a lot of the big details in the passages.

If you're still missing that many on each passage, then there is no point to doing more RC from other tests like the GMAT / MCAT. You need to spend time not doing the questions necessarily, but studying the text passages to note wording that you are overlooking or not noting as important. RC isn't necessarily about the understanding of sole words, it's about understanding the relationship of the entire text to forward, refute, or explain a position. If you've done every RC passage and haven't gotten it down to -1-2 per 27 q's (assume those misses were misreads / recording mistakes) then you blew through the prep material without understanding your mistakes.

My suggestion is redo the passages and improve your diagramming and the passage structures better and improve your vocab.. because well, vocab helps even if tangentially.

If the second time through you aren't 100% right on every question, then you haven't learned 100% from your mistakes.

I teach both the GMAT and the MCAT (along with the LSAT — it's what I get for getting 180 LSAT, 770 GMAT, 13 MCAT Verbal), and you'll find that neither is a perfect match for the LSAT. One small advantage the GMAT has is that it's relatively easy to get pencil and paper copies of real test questions (just buy the current 12th edition official GMAT book), whereas it's harder to get real P&P MCATs. The GMAT is closer in style to the LSAT, but the passages may be rather easier and the questions somewhat more straightforward. The MCAT is comparable in difficulty but the passages (and questions) differ in style somewhat.

So I suppose in addition to reviewing LSAT passages really, really carefully, I'd say do a few GMAT passages out of the 12th edition GMAT Review (a sort of maroon-ish/burgundy book).

Instead of using GMAT/MCAT RC passages, why don't you give fake LSAT RC passages a try? Princeton Review and Kaplan seem to train enough people to perform well on the LSATs with their fakies.

EdmundBurke23 wrote:Instead of using GMAT/MCAT RC passages, why don't you give fake LSAT RC passages a try? Princeton Review and Kaplan seem to train enough people to perform well on the LSATs with their fakies.

If you can get your hands on kaplan test books they switch the passages around as well, taking multiple RC sections from different tests and mixing them up. Other than that I would just start reading a ton of boring very wordy articles, books, etc.

I did GMAT passages, and I don't think it's worth at this point. GMAT could be useful BEFORE you get to the LSAT, not AFTER you've exhausted your prep materials. I also tried a few MCAT passages, and I saw nothing in common besides the fact they were all testing your inderstanding of the text.

Bottom line: you're better off by taking LSAT RC over again. The only exception to this I could see is if you've miraculously taken all of them in the past, say, 2-3 months and you have a really good memory.