When you drill RC, are you spending time BRing the passages? Lots of people neglect BR for RC and that's why they never improve.CPAlawHopefu wrote:I don't do many mark-ups. I underline only the main points of each paragraph, square around names, and put asterisks next to the author's opinion. By the time I finish reading the passage, I have a good understanding of the flow of passage and how each paragraph relates to another.forum_user wrote:What's your approach to RC currently? How do you approach the passage, and how do you handle the questions? Lots of re-checking the passage once you get to the questions? Any particular subjects that get you? How are you on timing?CPAlawHopefu wrote:I'm averaging -0/-1 on LG and -2/-3 on LR (both sections combined).
RC is what screws me up, I'm still averaging -8/-9. Maybe on a good day, I might pull a very rare -5, but I think this happened maybe twice so far.
What can I do? Please don't tell me to drill RC, I've been doing nothing but drilling RC for a month now from PT 1 all the way to PT 70, and it hasn't doen crap to improve my score. I think there is something fundamentally wrong with my approach.
What are you guys doing or have done to improve your RC score? I prefer to get responses from people who used to struggle in RC but are now doing significantly better.
I almost always get Main Point and Main Purpose questions right. I also don't have much problem with context and role questions ("the expression x most clearly refers to...", "The author discusses x primarily in order to..."). But I always struggle with Detail Q's (what is mentioned or identified by the author) and the Inference Qs. I don't think timing is the issue because I get these questions wrong when I do these untimed, so I think there is something I'm missing.
Timing isn't a big issue, I rarely ever struggle to finish any particular passage in time.
For every single RC passage I had even slight trouble with, I write out a summary of what each paragraph is saying and then go through each and every question slowly, untimed. I knock out every single answer choice until I know 100% certain that the answer choice is correct. For RC, POE is key; there will be some answers where you're like "how the hell is that right." But there are 4 answer choices that are clearly wrong. Every time. The more you go through these questions and their answer choices, the more familiar you'll get with wrong answer choices. And that's the key. There are very few, if any, questions where I'll choose the right answer and move on. I get to the right answer through POE and its helped me a ton with accuracy.
BRing RC is boring as hell. It requires a lot of patience but I think you'll see lots of improvement if you just take 15 passages and do them untimed. Makes sure you get max 2 wrong per each RC section. Spend as much time as you need to get to the correct answer, and every time you get a question wrong throw a dollar out onto the street or something like that lol.
I was someone who was at -8,-9 at RC and now I'm at like -3,-4 on RC. My problem is with timing, I'm a pretty slow reader so I just don't have the time to properly go through all the questions. I always though am able to correct those questions on BR. If you're not struggling with timing, I think you'll be in great shape if you really BR thoroughly. Good luck!!
