Ultimate Advice for RC Compilation Thread Forum

[RamTitan]

Since a lot of people have issues with RC, I figured that a thread where high-scorers (consistently get 2 or less wrong in RC) shared some of their strategies and tips would be super helpful. Also, if anyone has found that a particular method has increased their score substantially, then share it as well!

[RamTitan]

For those who are fast readers, what do people think of reading the passage twice?

[Blueprint Mithun]

Since a lot of people have issues with RC, I figured that a thread where high-scorers (consistently get 2 or less wrong in RC) shared some of their strategies and tips would be super helpful. Also, if anyone has found that a particular method has increased their score substantially, then share it as well!

Doing well on RC requires prioritizing and concentration. A lot of information will be presented to you, but there are a few important larger ideas that you should focus on identifying: the main point, author's attitude, major perspectives, and the structure of the passage. That may sound like a lot at first, but think of those 4 elements as being the framework for every passage.

Most of the questions will revolve around these concepts, and since they deal with fairly abstract ideas, you'll save a lot of time by looking out for these during your first read-through of the passage. If you need to go back and figure out what scientist A, for example, was arguing for, then you didn't effectively read the passage. Don't worry about remembering details - if you understand the framework of the passage, it won't take long to find the answers to detail-oriented questions. It's the bigger picture questions that can be tricky and time-consuming, unless you prepared for them ahead of time.

Let me break down those 4 elements a bit further:
1) Main Point - What is the thesis of the passage? If there is one perspective presented, it will line up with that one. If there are 2 or 3 major perspectives presented, the scope of the answer should include them all. The answer to main point questions also tend to be slightly biased in favor of the author's opinion, if he/she has one.

2) Author's Attitude - Is the author expressing an opinion, or just reporting on an issue? When there are multiple perspectives, does the author favor one over the other? Watch out for qualifiers like "fortunately."

3) Major Perspectives - How many different opinions were presented on the issue at hand? In some passages, there will be speakers defending each perspective, while in others, a single author will summarize them all.

4) Structure - How is the passage organized? How does the argument flow? Does it start with one opinion, follow up with a rebuttal, then move on to a synthesis of the two ideas?

Always be an active reader. Do you take a second after each paragraph or so to quickly recap what you've just read? Doing so can really help you understand the big picture behind the passages better. It also improves your knowledge of the flow of the passage, and where different details that you might later have to search for are located. Are you consciously looking out for author attitude and different perspectives/POVs on the issue?

If you know your weaknesses, try to work on those. If it's a specific subject, read a few magazine articles in that subject per day to get a better feel for their internal logic. I read articles from Nature and Scientific American to get re-accustomed to science writing after 4 years of mostly humanities in college. I've seen plenty of people dismiss this method, and while nothing really beats doing actual RC passages for practice, it's a good way of mixing it up.

If your weakness is a certain question type, like author attitude or organization questions, be on the lookout for those aspects as you read passages for the first time. The biggest and most common mistake I've seen students make is that they read too quickly, rushing through the passage, forcing themselves to backtrack constantly while answering the questions. The more important cues you can pick up on during a first reading, the more time you'll save. And the better you understand the passage, the more likely you are to do well on big picture questions. Detail-oriented questions can always be answered quickly if you know where to look for them.

As for your question about reading passages twice - you shouldn't have to if you read effectively. And honestly, you won't have time.

[WaitersIsland]

For those who are fast readers, what do people think of reading the passage twice?

You'll have to try it out and see how it works for you. I would read each passage twice, once at a very fast pace to determine the structure/main points of the passage and once again at a slower pace to reaffirm the details. I would finish each passage in 2:30 - 4 minutes, depending on the difficulty of the passage. If you are able to attack the questions and spend less time on them this can be a good strategy, you just have to try it out for yourself.

[forum_user]

[all very good advice]

I'll probably end up repeating a lot of the same things Mithun just laid out. I recently 'figured out' RC--I would always miss 3-4 and always felt really pushed for time. In the last couple weeks, I've had a breakthrough of sorts, which is to say I've started going ~27/~27 with a minute or two to spare. Here's my process, in no particular order:

Reading the passage:
--Only read once. I think if you read twice--once fast and once slow--you'll lose a lot of the details, instead focusing on what you think the passage should be about based on your initial reading. Give it one, careful reading, comprehending each and every sentence.
--Summarize each passage, but otherwise annotate sparingly, if at all. It's important to read actively. I used to annotate for the hell of it, circling certain words, and that helped me focus a bit initially. I think it's more effective to write 5-8 words in the margins after reading the entire paragraph (or what seems like an entire paragraph if it's a wall of text). So, if I'm reading a passage about the role of serotonin in carbohydrate cravings and there's a paragraph about the process by which eating carbs stimulates the conversion of tryptophan into serotonin, you might write something like "carbs > ^tryp. > sero." This brief summary of the content (eating carbs leads to an increase of tryptophan which converts into serotonin) is more useful than if you simply summarize the role of the passage (something like "how carbs lead to increase of serotonin"). And once you have this, it'll be easy to see the role it plays in the passage as a whole.
--On a related note, the act of writing the summary is as important than what you actually write. It's all to help you recognize what the paragraph is about and then committing that to memory. The more you commit to memory, the less time you have to spend referring to the passage. If it helps to say something out loud, mouth a summary of the paragraph.

As for the questions themselves:
--Generally, here are ton of ACs which say the opposite of what the answer is. These are pretty easy to pick out, so don't be afraid to move on as soon as you know an answer is wrong. If the passage's author is enthusiastic throughout the entire thing and there's an AC about the author's apathy, stop and move on immediately.
--Answers to main point questions should encompass the entire passage. A common trick is very neatly summarizing just one paragraph. If you have trouble with these, go through each AC and ask yourself, what would the passage look like if this were the main point? If a passage is about a scientist's groundbreaking experiment, an AC about current scholarship on that field isn't going to be quite right, because you only got one scholar's study.
--Suggests/inference questions are all about context. If the question refers to a line in the passage, reread the sentences before and after the given line. Oftentimes the correct response is just a rewording of one of the following lines.
--Speaking of line references, sometimes these can be used to trick you. If the passage is arguing against some advocates, for instance, a question might refer to the stance of "advocates mentioned in line 14," even though these advocates are referred to throughout the passage. This is where careful reading comes in handy.

And for the section as a whole:
--I try to knock out the first two sections in 15-17 minutes. This gives me a comfortable 9-10 minutes for each of the remaining two passages.
--I usually spend about 3-4 minutes reading each passage, including writing summaries, and then another 4-5 minutes answering the questions.
--Don't be shy about referring to the passage again. If you need to take an extra 20-30 seconds to reread a paragraph in order to get a question right, do it.
--And, as always, blind review is key. I can't wait to find out how I do, so lsatqa section grader is a big help there (I cover up the section where it shows you which you missed and just look at the number I got right. But once you know how you did (or, ideally, beforehand if you can wait), wait about an hour or two. You kind of want to be in a different mindset so that you know your thought process is consistent no matter how you're feeling. You essentially want to do the whole section over again--don't use your answer sheet, come to the right answer again, referring to the passage as much as possible, and figuring out why everything is right or wrong. It really, really helped me to talk this through with a friend, but that's just me.

Other things that can (maybe, just maybe) improve RC:
--Some recommend reading specific publications. I've started reading the New York Times, maybe an article or two per day. I haven't been able to determine a specific link between that and improved RC performance other than temporal coincidence. At any rate, it certainly can't hurt to read more.

[ccmart]

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[RamTitan]

As for your question about reading passages twice - you shouldn't have to if you read effectively. And honestly, you won't have time.

Awesome post!!!!!

[RamTitan]

I'll probably end up repeating a lot of the same things Mithun just laid out. I recently 'figured out' RC--I would always miss 3-4 and always felt really pushed for time. In the last couple weeks, I've had a breakthrough of sorts, which is to say I've started going ~27/~27 with a minute or two to spare. Here's my process, in no particular order:

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This is why I started this thread!!!! Thanks for the great advice

[RamTitan]

For those who are fast readers, what do people think of reading the passage twice?

You'll have to try it out and see how it works for you. I would read each passage twice, once at a very fast pace to determine the structure/main points of the passage and once again at a slower pace to reaffirm the details. I would finish each passage in 2:30 - 4 minutes, depending on the difficulty of the passage. If you are able to attack the questions and spend less time on them this can be a good strategy, you just have to try it out for yourself.

It sounds like I need to try this strategy, and also try out the annotation strategy for each paragraph.

[RamTitan]

Hey everyone, just wanted to say I started to employ some of the strategies today; on a section where I had gotten -7 before, I missed 4. And something I noticed is that I would have gotten those four correct if I had gone back to the passage where my lil passage summary the answer exactly. So, I smell progress!

[RamTitan]

So, I've been doing the brief paragraph summaries, and I feel like they will help and get my score up (eventually). However, I think rereading is something that works for me as well. Timing is rarely an issue for me (I almost always finish my sections with extra time). Rather, it's getting tricked by one word or picking seemingly attractive answer choices, which tells me that I'm not fully understanding the passage.

Something I've else I noticed is that science passages are more detailed orientated than the other ones (then again, maybe this just seems this way because I'm bad at them lol).

[CPAlawHopefu]

--Answers to main point questions should encompass the entire passage. A common trick is very neatly summarizing just one paragraph. If you have trouble with these, go through each AC and ask yourself, what would the passage look like if this were the main point? If a passage is about a scientist's groundbreaking experiment, an AC about current scholarship on that field isn't going to be quite right, because you only got one scholar's study.

I disagree with this. I find that main point questions almost always summarize the Author's opinion of the topic in hand, which is often limited to a paragraph or even a couple sentences.

So if the passage consists four paragraphs structured as - 1. Background, 2. Proponent's view, 3. Critic's view, and 4. Author's Opinion - then do not expect the correct answer for Main Point questions to address or summarize the entire passage; it could only summarize paragraph 4 (Author's opinion) without paraphrasing anything from Paragraph 1, 2, or 3, and still be the right answer.