Not quite.SunDevil14 wrote:I am leaning toward taking in December. 99% or bust. I will give this method a try. To clarify, read the passage as slowly as need to answer all questions without referring back to the passage?
Not having to look back is more of a byproduct of understanding the material better because you read the passage slowly; by reading the passage slowly and spending more time up front to organize all of the essential elements of the passage, I was often able to move through the questions quickly and accurately without referring back to the passage--but it wasn't a standard I strived to achieve.
Think about logic games. It's uncontroversial that spending time up front to setup a diagram and understand the rules is essential to efficiently answering the questions (furthermore, I would argue that some people still don't spend enough time understanding the game completely, but that's an argument for another time). They spend that time upfront so that they can go through the questions quickly and accurately. You already know that. The problem is that people don't take the same amount of time to create a mental "setup" of the passages in RC. Maybe it's because they don't need to, or maybe it's because they've developed an annotative method that works well for them. For me, marking up the passage so that I could refer back to it wasn't my style, so I invested my time on the test into my "mental setup" of the passage before I went to the questions. The pressure to get to the questions is big; I often had to remind myself to slow down and think about the passage more, and it always helped when I did.
Some things to remember:
1) This method will supplement your RC performance and isn't meant to be a "holy grail" technique or something you can substitute for sheer mastery of the RC fundamentals. It's meant to maybe push you over the edge but not take you all the way;
2) the technique did actually do a lot of work shoring up my RC section in general, but, almost contrary to what I've been saying, improving my fundamental skills of analyzing the material and increasing my exposure to the material is what gave me the last boost to get to -0s on RC. At first, I used slowing down as a general technique to improve quite a bit on my RC section (quantitatively, let's say I went from -6/-7s to -3s). It was pure exposure to RC questions (What is typically right? What is typically wrong? Stuff like that) and getting better at seeing the relationships between the passages that really helped me get to -0. Using the "more time up front" technique was better suited for me, though, because I had more time to think about how the passage was working, the purpose of various elements, the authors tone, etc. I was able to use these analytical skills I was honing more often because I took more time to read the passage; and
3) do what works for you. Take my advice. Think about it. Use parts you like and discard things that don't fit well for you. I'm confident that merely spending a crap-ton of time on RC will help you improve. Like I said, many people spend disproportionately small amounts of time on RC and then conclude that it's the toughest section. I thought that too at first. But then I realized that I could improve quite a bit with some self-reflection and time and I began to think that RC is actually one of the easier sections if you compare the amount of time needed to improve in RC to a section like LR. But maybe that's just me.
Let me know if you need anything else.
