My LR is sinking the more I study? /cry Forum

[wschultz4]

On my initial diagnostic (after reading 300 pages of LR bible) I missed 4 on each LR section. Since then I've completed the majority of 7sage's LR core curriculum and done 3 other LR sections independently and missed 12, 12, and 9. Has anyone had a similar experience? I gotta get on that blind review, I've kind of been skipping it because I've just been taking them to see if I'm actually learning from the materials I'm taking in. Maybe I should just go back exclusively to the bibles, at this time I just have no idea and I'm looking for any advice.

[twiix]

If you tripled your incorrect answers per section just from looking at additional content, I would say you're trying too hard to follow the content that was learned from the various sources. You don't HAVE to use certain diagramming techniques, or mark ups, or whatever. You obviously had a decent understanding of LR to begin with, so go back to whatever you were doing at first, and then if you get stuck on a question THEN try and use the material you learned to help. If you try and force every question you see into the example problems they showed you then it'll probably take way too long and be too confusing.

[woodchuck78]

Given that the June test is still a month and a half away, try and take a 2-3 day break from LR and focus on other sections. Sometimes taking a break and coming back and refocusing does wonders. I know it worked for me.

[RamTitan]

Both of the posters above me gave good advice: if you were getting 3-4 wrong, you were already close to being a top tier LR scorer. Take a few days to work on games (should aim to have that section on lock down) and even RC (yes, improvements can be made), but know that you must have been doing something right

[JazzOne]

When I teach LR, I try to hard to differentiate between homework strategies and test strategies. The strategies that you read about in books are most appropriate for un-timed homework. When I am doing practice questions, I diagram every conditional relationship; I draw Venn diagrams for group relationships; and I utilize tricks like the negation technique for every answer choice of an NA question.

On a timed test, however, I don't have time for all that. For timed tests, I peel away all the layers of my strategy, and I return to a simple "read and think" approach. What happened over the course of my prep is that I diagrammed hundreds of statements for the homework, and eventually, I got to a point where I could see those relationships visually without a physical diagram. After more prep, I got to a point where I didn't even need to visualize the diagrams; I could simply intuit the relationships by subconsciously analogizing to hundreds of similar examples that I have reviewed previously.

I came up with this strategy because one of my students asked me years ago if I actually used the strategies I was teaching in class. I had to admit that I do not use those strategies on timed tests, but it occurred to me that one of the reasons I am able to understand the relationships without the strategies is precisely because I did the strategies diligently over and over. Pretty soon, the strategies became incorporated into my general reading and thinking strategies.