RC and LR Difficulty in PT 70s Forum

[darthrevan92]

For people scoring into the 170s in the PT 70s, did you find the reading comprehension section and the Logical Reasoning section to be more difficult than those in the past PTs? I have been averaging from the low to high 160s in the PT 60s, (some were retakes after couple months of not seeing them) but when I took the recent December 2013 exam, I scored a 159.. In the reading comprehension I would usually get 20 or 21 questions correct but for that particular exam, I got 15/27. Also, for LR, I would usually get -6 in total, but for this more recent exam I got about -12. Do you guys have any advice for adjusting for the new PT 70s, if you have noticed that the LR and Reading Comprehension sections had more subtle answer choices and more complex argument structures. I have been doing BR, drilling problem areas and I have pretty much seen a good majority of all the questions from PT 1-71.

[somethingElse]

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[darthrevan92]

Thanks for responding! I was probably just thrown off during that test, and just took too long for some questions that I shouldn't have. I just wanted to follow up do you think it is disadvantageous if you redid all the exams and ran out of preptests? I have been told that if you run out of material, it is not likely that I will improve beyond the upper range of my score which is in the high 160s.

IMO the whole "70s PTs are tougher than 60s and below" thing is overblown on this forum. I think its more likely that you just had an off day. I've taken every PT in the 70s and I would say that they are roughly the same as those in the 60s - my scores back this up as well.

RC still has the same question types, same kinds of passages, same number of questions, etc. Are there tough questions? Sure, but not any more than the PTs in the 60s had.

LR still has all the same question types, aside from a new, weird kind of assumption question that is both sufficient and necessary (and that one has only shown up a few times). Same number of questions, same progression of easy numbers 1-10 and then tougher 15-25, same stimuli content, etc. As with RC, are there tough questions? Of course. But they aren't any tougher than the toughest ones from 1-69, nor are they really any more numerous. Some PTs might have tougher LR sections than others, but its not something like the 70s are distinctly tougher than the 60s. Same argument structures as well...plenty of the questions in the Cambridge "difficult questions" packet have these same complex structures.

TLDR: The 70s aren't any tougher IMO, its more likely that you just had an off day.

[osgiliath]

While I do believe there are some minor shifts in the 70's PT's, I've found them mostly to be in the LG section, with a couple differences here and there in LR. Regardless of what I might perceive to be the specific differences, none of them should result in ~6 point swings in any sections. I had a couple PT's like that and they were all just bad day type deals. I would take a test a couple days later and see if you bounce back (I did).

[appind]

there is a clear difference in difficulty between modern RC (50s till 70s) and old RC and the RC becomes much more difficult to score as well as old rc beginning late 50s.

there is a slight shift in RC from 60s to 70s, but the overall difficulty of RC section doesn't change much between PTs in 60s and 70s.

[mma_litigator]

there's no difference between the 60's and 70's PT's that isn't accounted for by the curves cuz it's a standardized test. if 70's PT's were harder it would be totally unfair since scores are good for several years and people with scores from high 60's PTs/2012-2013 LSATs can still apply with them.