MassiveSplit wrote:Thanks all for your thoughts.
Jeffort wrote:
There are patterns to be found in your mistakes if you review every question you get wrong deeply and thoroughly enough to identify specific mistakes/weaknesses in your approach/thought processes. There are common types of incorrect trap answers with RC questions, you need to figure out which types of designed to be attractive but yet are wrong ACs you keep falling for in order to improve/alter your analysis and decision making processes in ways to stop falling for them.
How do you recommend I define each mistake (in order to properly group them to find weaknesses)? Not sure if my question is too vague.
Should I simply group by question type or by specific patterned thought processes?
I can imagine that after reviewing several that patterns will naturally emerge.
Yeah, once you get into reviewing the patterns will emerge.
Don't try to 'define' or form generic labels for mistakes to slap onto answer choices, at least not at first before you've deeply analyzed all your weaknesses/mistakes that lead to wrong answers for a bunch of questions to get a good understanding of how many different types of forms of mistakes/weaknesses you're making. Also, don't try to simplify/boil down missed questions to one single/main mistake/cause or minimize them in simplistic superficial ways such as 'oh, that was just a dumb careless mistake'. There are always several/many mistakes involved in what ultimately caused you to get each incorrectly answered question wrong. The goal of deep review is to find and identify every weak link in your entire chain of thinking from beginning of starting a passage/question up to final answer choice decision, including careful inspection of every single step along the way, things you did do that were bad, things you didn't do that you should have, things you messed up, things that slowed you down/you had trouble with,etc.
Simple way to illustrate that idea is that with every question you get wrong you always have two false beliefs backed up by flawed sets of beliefs/reasons/decisions to start your deep review with. Why did you think the wrong answer you selected was correct/select it even if you weren't certain it was correct? What were your specific reasons/beliefs/decision making factors for selecting it that actually went through your head when you attempted the question? Same thing with the correct answer you didn't pick. Why did you think is was wrong/decide not to pick it? What reasons/beliefs/decision making factors was that incorrect decision based on?
Those are the two main starting points for deep review. Once you figure out your mistaken beliefs/decisions, then you should trace back your entire thought process from the beginning of the question/reading the passage that lead to you forming the ideas and making the decisions that led to picking a wrong answer and eliminating the correct one?
Start with looking at the logic/substance of the answer choices themselves and make sure you figure out and completely understand why the CR is actually correct and why the answer you chose is logically incorrect. Then you dig deep into your actual thought processes, what you believed/had in your head at the time/understanding of the passage, actual step by step analysis and decisions you made each step of the way all the way through from beginning to making final answer choice selection. You need to figure out why you ended up having false beliefs/ideas/reasons in your head that lead making bad final answer choice decision, meaning what steps and analysis and stuff you actually did somewhere in the course of solving the question that put you into the situation of not recognizing the correct answer as correct and instead picking one that is wrong.
There are many different types of mistakes that fall into different categories, the patterns of mistakes for each person will be different than those of others, and the types of errors/mistakes/weaknesses vary by skill level/score range of the test taker.
Try to be as detailed as possible in evaluating your entire step by step thought and decision making processes you actually used in your head to read and process the passage and attack the questions, and carefully examine how you could have approached and thought through the passage and questions better to avoid making the mistakes you did.
Errors can be based on process/procedural/skipping steps types of mistakes because of focusing too much on speed/trying to go faster, such as not being thorough enough by making sure to have solid reasons against contenders before deciding to go with an attractive really good sounding answer that really turns you on. They can also be fundamental foundational problems with ability to properly interpret and understand the substance and basic ideas of the passage itself or what certain cryptically phrased ACs actually mean.
Obviously start by looking for patterns in what question types you miss. Also look for patterns in types of trap answers you're picking regardless of question type, meaning what type of logical relationship the idea in the AC has to the substance of the passage and to the question stem and criteria the stem dictates. There is a fairly small set of common types of attractive trap answers the test writers use over and over that are easy to get suckered by if you aren't aware of their existence so you can make sure to be on the lookout for them. They're basically designed to sound good enough to be correct and pick in situations where the CR is 'stealthed' somehow that makes it difficult to easily recognize as even being a contender or of being able to fully understand is correct with confidence in the face of a super attractive trap begging you to pick it instead.
One common type are answers that explicitly mention details and ideas clearly discussed in the passage using very similar vocab so it catches your attention (I remember them talking about that stuff!) but mismatches an idea with details that were associated with a different idea in the passage or with a different source/point of view. I call these 'blenderized' answers since they basically take things from the passage that weren't directly related and blender them together as if they were. Another common type are ones that state an idea that is established via inference/implication with similar wording/vocab used in the passage but state it's opposite/reverse. One of the main types of common trap answer for high difficulty level questions is one that states something that IS supported by/can be inferred from/is implied by the passage and would be correct if the stem was the generic "Which is most strongly supported by the passage?", but the question stem is asking for something more specific and different than a generic inference, such as a meaning in context/purpose in context question type. There are actually many different RC question types that have much more specific narrow criteria for the CR than just basic generic inference/which can be reasonably inferred from the passage? type and most test takers treat most RC questions as generic most strongly supported type. LSAC test writers like to put 'right answer for a different question type' traps in some higher difficulty level RC questions.
Since you're missing around 6/7 per section according to your post, you're operating at a pretty high level and your mistakes are probably mostly with the high difficulty level questions, usually ones that require high level/big picture synthesis skills where the CR is something that there isn't any specific single sentence or few sentences you can point to that directly support it, but rather it is supported by the synthesis of several big inferences about one or more of the main ideas of the passage and/or by various scattered details and ideas.
For helping you figure out how to deeply review and evaluate the logical characteristics of each of the question stems, answer choices and important types of relationships between them and the passage, identify specific weaknesses/mistakes, and to learn more good stuff to improve your RC perspective/approach/skills/etc. that I think will turn on the light bulb moments of realization that'll help you get to near/hopefully perfect RC performance, I highly recommend to read and really study this article from LSAC about the design of RC question types. It's a goldmine of information for really understanding what is going on with tough RC questions and what actual reading analysis and comprehension skills the LSAT writers are specifically testing. It's a long academic article so it will take a bit of time just to read and much time to fully absorb and translate into your understanding and approaches for the various different RC question types but is well worth spending a lot of time reading and learning from to improve your approach and thought processes/strategies for attacking RC.
http://www.testpublishers.org/assets/do ... l%2013.pdf
High level synthesis questions other than MP are the ones that typically hold people at the -5-8 level. Understanding that they have ACs that there is zero specific small portions of text from the passage you can go back and find to directly confirm it's correct is part of the key to getting them right. With these super tough questions, most people usually immediately eliminate the CR first read since the idea stated is supported by and drawn from big and little things scattered all through the passage in many different places, and almost nothing stated in the explicit wording of the AC are things you remember the passage explicitly talking about, so it sounds totally out of scope on first superficial read. People typically read it, notice there aren't any or many key words about the main ideas of the passage or that were used in the passage, think 'the passage never SAID anything like that', and quickly eliminate it, only to then waste time boxed in debating a few wrong trap answers in frustration for a while before deciding which wrong answer to pick before giving up and moving on. Situations like that created by just a few tough questions effectively waste enough of many test takers time that get stuck on those few to rob them of the time to get to all the questions in the last passage, causing double harm on total minuses.
Anyway, hope this helps.
Thanks again!