Best Practice Read for Humanities RC Forum

lawjag2015 · Post by **lawjag2015** » Fri Oct 31, 2014 9:36 am

What would you suggest as the best practice read(s) for the humanities RC passages?

mornincounselor · Post by **mornincounselor** » Fri Oct 31, 2014 10:56 am

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lawjag2015 · Post by **lawjag2015** » Fri Oct 31, 2014 12:14 pm

Looking for a magazine/book reference!

nlee10 · Post by **nlee10** » Fri Oct 31, 2014 12:55 pm

I would like to know the answer as well...having trouble with humanities too.

lawjag2015 · Post by **lawjag2015** » Fri Oct 31, 2014 1:44 pm

Yes. the September '14 painting passage for example.

Dave Hall · Post by **Dave Hall** » Fri Oct 31, 2014 4:42 pm

lawjag2015 wrote:Looking for a magazine/book reference!

I don't think either of them are perfect for your purposes, but The New Yorker and The Atlantic are two magazines that you may find helpful.

GreenTee · Post by **GreenTee** » Fri Oct 31, 2014 4:48 pm

lawjag2015 wrote:What would you suggest as the best practice read(s) for the humanities RC passages?

The best way to get better at humanities RC passages is to read humanities RC passages.

Reading magazines/books/journal articles is a fine way to spend your free time, but you shouldn't consider it part of your LSAT prep.

mornincounselor · Post by **mornincounselor** » Fri Oct 31, 2014 4:50 pm

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appind · Post by **appind** » Sun Nov 02, 2014 1:47 pm

mornincounselor wrote:I did assume that. I posted those as a way of saying that no book or outside resource can even come close to the effectivness of old PTs. Only if you've thoroughly combed through all those tests would it be necessary (or the most effective use of your time) to turn to any outside resources.

For those who have combed through all PTs what are the good resources to do harder practice than lsat? math/physics majors have math/phy olympiad tests as some of the toughest problem sets, any such thing for reading comp/lr practice?

nlee10 · Post by **nlee10** » Sun Nov 02, 2014 1:52 pm

appind wrote:
mornincounselor wrote:I did assume that. I posted those as a way of saying that no book or outside resource can even come close to the effectivness of old PTs. Only if you've thoroughly combed through all those tests would it be necessary (or the most effective use of your time) to turn to any outside resources.
For those who have combed through all PTs what are the good resources to do harder practice than lsat? math/physics majors have math/phy olympiad tests as some of the toughest problem sets, any such thing for reading comp/lr practice?

I heard the RC on the MCAT is pretty difficult.

hopeboaltberkeley · Post by **hopeboaltberkeley** » Tue Nov 04, 2014 4:53 am

I actually agree that there probably isn't a silver bullet for RC (I'm sure doing lots of RC passages would help some).

But if you're looking for reads that are more literary than the New York Times and The Economist, try magazines like these:

https://www.guernicamag.com/

http://www.nybooks.com/

http://www.lrb.co.uk/

They can be longer form and somewhat less topical that straightforward news sites like the NYT, but that's probably helpful. Especially since they're more likely to cover obscure issues like women's roles in the French Revolution (something I feel like I've read about at least twice in LSAT practice exams lol).

Wieters · Post by **Wieters** » Tue Nov 04, 2014 7:41 pm

My recommendations would be Scientific American, The Economist and the Week. Nothing fancy but get the done job and familiarize you with text-oriented passages.

The LSAT has drawn from SA, and honestly in reading their articles they now feel like RC passages. The Economist is dull, which is helpful as RC passages are purposefully tedious. The Week presents contrasting viewpoints like is done on RC.

The New Yorker rambles on for too long relative to RC passages. I find newspaper editorials to be too opinion-based; while RC passages do interject bias, they are not, well, editorials. Anything nichey like Foreign Policy is too abstract for a typical LSAT passage.

Ron (PowerScore) · Post by **Ron (PowerScore)** » Wed Nov 05, 2014 6:07 pm

Limiting the conversation to non-LSAT RC reading material, I highly recommend the Social Science Research Network, SSRN.com, There are thousands of humanities related articles on that site, some of them poorly written (which is good for RC prep), and all of them free (some SSRN partner publications are fee based).

Also, I find it pretty interesting to track down the publication from which a passage was derived. You can see titles and authors on the Acknowledgements page of each test.

Ron

mist4bison · Post by **mist4bison** » Wed Nov 05, 2014 6:33 pm

Wieters · Post by **Wieters** » Wed Nov 05, 2014 8:27 pm

Ron (PowerScore) wrote:Limiting the conversation to non-LSAT RC reading material, I highly recommend the Social Science Research Network, SSRN.com, There are thousands of humanities related articles on that site, some of them poorly written (which is good for RC prep), and all of them free (some SSRN partner publications are fee based).

Also, I find it pretty interesting to track down the publication from which a passage was derived. You can see titles and authors on the Acknowledgements page of each test.

Ron

Poorly written/tedious is certainly good material for RC prep, but I don't think length is. I visited the site you linked and it seems most articles are scholarly papers and so many pages in length. Am I missing something or are most university publications?

If the LSAT draws from these sorts of sources as you make reference to, do you have any idea how they do so? By this I mean that the RC passages are just a few paragraphs in length, yet they are able to standalone by introducing ideas, presenting evidence and alluding to future studies. Journal articles, though, take many pages to do this. Do they use abstracts?

Ron (PowerScore) · Post by **Ron (PowerScore)** » Thu Nov 06, 2014 12:32 am

mist4bison wrote:Am I missing something or are most university publications?

Nope. You're absolutely right on that. I don't think they are proxies for RC passages, but they display some of the same argumentative patterns and word choice, just on a larger scale. I wouldn't use them as practice for the RC section, but only as an ancillary resource for getting accustomed to the type of topics, language, etc. that you'll see in RC humanities/social science passages.

mist4bison wrote:If the LSAT draws from these sorts of sources as you make reference to, do you have any idea how they do so?

They chop up the articles, reorder segments, drop out evidence, combine with other articles on the same topic, etc.

calmtigers · Post by **calmtigers** » Thu Nov 06, 2014 1:54 am

lawjag2015 wrote:Looking for a magazine/book reference!

Phenomenology of Spirit by Hegel...

HA jk dont ever read that

Wieters · Post by **Wieters** » Thu Nov 06, 2014 9:07 am

Ron (PowerScore) wrote:They chop up the articles, reorder segments, drop out evidence, combine with other articles on the same topic, etc.

Interesting, thanks.

RC is my worst section and I so I am interested in how the actual questions/passages are formulated. Does anyone know if there is any literature out there on this?

mornincounselor · Post by **mornincounselor** » Thu Nov 06, 2014 10:27 am

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Ron (PowerScore) · Post by **Ron (PowerScore)** » Thu Nov 06, 2014 11:14 am

mornincounselor wrote:RC is my worst section and I so I am interested in how the actual questions/passages are formulated. Does anyone know if there is any literature out there on this?

This document is not precisely on point, but will tell you about how LSAC views the structure of a "testlet", be it a stimulus or a passage, as an indicator of difficulty and predictive ability.

This link will point you to some current research on RC by LSAC-related authors.

Finally, this link is to the top level for all LSAC research. It's a treasure trove of dense but interesting research into the test and its construction.

Ron