Tips on minimizing misreads Forum

[kaseyb002]

Today after I took PT58 I felt incredibly confident about it only to get a 168 (about a 4 point drop from current average).
LR -4
RC -5
LG -0
LR -4

When doing a quick initial review, I realized that about 11/13 questions I got wrong were due to misreading. This is pretty severe. The good news is that I am finishing all sections a minute or two before the 5 minute mark, so the most obvious correction to take is to just slow down big time and go for careful, slow, quality reading on my first read of the stimulus/question stem on LR/RC (and hopefully eliminating any second reads in the process). Speed reading has been a recurring problem in my LSAT prep and it occasionally creeps back up on me.

Any other advice beyond slow, quality reading? I have tried circling logical force words, but that tends to distract me from the main thrust of the stimulus/passage. Is anyone else experiencing this problem of chronic misreading?

[05062014]

Do better. Finishing with 5 minutes to spare and misreading does not make sense to me. Either you get it or you don't. Misreading makes sense if you're tight on time like I was for a long time and simply did not have the time to do anything but skim a stimulus. If skimming is your default, fix that. If it isn't, I don't know what to tell you

[PDaddy]

Today after I took PT58 I felt incredibly confident about it only to get a 168 (about a 4 point drop from current average).
LR -4
RC -5
LG -0
LR -4

When doing a quick initial review, I realized that about 11/13 questions I got wrong were due to misreading. This is pretty severe. The good news is that I am finishing all sections a minute or two before the 5 minute mark, so the most obvious correction to take is to just slow down big time and go for careful, slow, quality reading on my first read of the stimulus/question stem on LR/RC (and hopefully eliminating any second reads in the process). Speed reading has been a recurring problem in my LSAT prep and it occasionally creeps back up on me.

Any other advice beyond slow, quality reading? I have tried circling logical force words, but that tends to distract me from the main thrust of the stimulus/passage. Is anyone else experiencing this problem of chronic misreading?

You have answered your own question. You have a lot of room to slow down and pay more attention to detail. You could be scoring 173 or so just by doing that.

[cookiejar1]

Circle stuff in the question stem... "which one of the following, if true, contributes most to the explanation of the behavior of ugly ducklings described above"

I missed a dumb RC question that asked for an inference to "recent studies" ... of course I didn't look for "recent studies" (which was the topic of paragraph 2) and just winged it. Oops.

[fruitoftheloom]

I have this issue too. I notice that around question 14, I begin reading faster and paying less attention. Timing is not an issue for me - if I let myself move through RC/LG "quickly" I usually have 10-13 minutes left at the end. For questions 15 - 20 I time myself and FORCE myself to spend 2 minutes (minimum) per question. I don't plan to do this on test day unless I am just blowing through, but since I have done this for the last several tests, I am now able to naturally slow myself down in the middle. I'm consistently scoring 175-177 range.

I also noticed that before forcing myself to slow down, I would consistently miss questions in the 15-21 range for RC/LG.