RC Suggestions? Forum

[coreaves23]

Hello All!

While I have accepted an offer this cycle and currently sit on 7 waitlists, I have decided to take everyone's advice and...... RETAKE.

My prep has been going well and I am up to a 167 average with my top being two 169's. With my 4.0 GPA, I would love to crack 168 at the minimum -- 170+ would obviously be ideal.

That being said, the section that continually holds me back is RC. I will go anywhere from -5 to -8 and wanted to get some suggestions for this last week of prep. I feel confident in LR and LG, so I will be devoting this last week almost solely to PTing and RC drilling. I know that a great number of people feel that RC is the most difficult to improve on (I agree), and right now I am torn between two methods (described below). I just want to go into the test confident that I have a systematic method to confidently tackle RC.

As I have been trying to diagnose the problem, I have found the following: I usually take 2:15-2:30 to read the passage, sometimes moving on without being fully comfortable with what I have read. I then decided that I would make a conscious effort to not move on to the questions until I had a passage map, not just mentally, but written in shorthand. This causes me to take about 3:30 on the passage and I feel more confident in my understanding, however I obviously don't have much time at all to look back at the passage during the questions.

Thus, my question is -- should I quickly read the passage, giving myself time to come back to it during questions, or should I stay with the passage until I feel completely comfortable that I have digested all of the information in it?

Thanks in advance for your advice and thanks for all of your guidance thus far!

[sprinky07]

I used to routinely go -5 or worse on RC. It wasn't until I considerably slowed my reading that I was able to hit -0. Basically, I take around 4 minutes to REALLY read each passage, while simultaneously making mental notes of the main points of each paragraph as well as how each paragraph relates to the previous ones. Now that I'm taking longer to really understand each passage, I find that I rarely ever have to look back at the passage unless it's to quickly double check an answer.

I should note that I haven't read any of the RC prep books, so this strategy is one that I adopted after trial and error and might not work for anyone else.