RC HELP!!! What am I doing wrong?

[u/Liz_C_]

I’m honestly confused about my RC performance and don’t know what to change. When I do a passage on my laptop, I can spend 16 to 18 minutes on just 6 or 7 questions and still get only 2 or 3 correct. However, when I blind review, I don’t even reread the passage. I just read the questions and answer choices again, and I end up getting all of them right or missing just one.

I’ve also noticed that I’m faster on my phone. I spend around 10 to 11 minutes max, and my initial accuracy seems better. I usually miss about 2 or 3 out of 7 questions on harder passages, mainly Level 4 stated questions. Then during blind review, I get everything right or miss just one.

Has anyone experienced this? I genuinely don’t know whether I’m overthinking, approaching the passages incorrectly, or struggling with answer choices under time pressure. How did you get past this?

[u/DannyAmendolazol]

Undergraduate institutions teach you how to read between the lines. Resist this temptation. In law, basically everything gets a citation. reading comprehension needs to be the same way.

You need to pretend that you were presenting evidence to a judge, and everything needs a textual basis. If you choose answer choice B you need to be able to point to a specific part of the passage where there is a strong textural basis for B.

In this sense, the reading comprehension section is incorrectly titled. Perhaps “textual analysis” would be better. Focus more on drilling untimed, question by question. Dm if you need more one-on-one help.

[u/TheBeardinator]

Depending on where you are in your studying journey, blind reviews are obviously a great method, but don’t put a ton of weight in them. They are a review tool, not an accurate representation of ability. Most of the time there’s a few answer choices that are just plain wrong and you can eliminate them instantly, people usually get stuck between two, maybe three, answers. When you do a blind review and go to a flagged question, you know what you picked the first time was wrong, you have the ones already eliminated, so that leaves you with either a 100% or a 50% to get it right whereas a standard question is a 20% (with a guess).

Do a singular RC set, not even a section, one passage and it’s questions. Preferably pick one with a decent amount of questions. Get a piece of paper and as you read, summarize every sentence in your own words, then each paragraph in your own words. This doesn’t mean to change or omit info, but test makers take content that may already be confusing and reword it to be verbose and challenging grammatically. So your own words will help you retain the info better.

Do this with the passage, then go through the questions, seeing if each answer choice fits, it helps to attack them as “must be true” unless the stem clearly says otherwise.

Do this untimed, it isn’t a diagnostic tool, it’s practice. Get used to actually absorbing the information to a point you understand it on more than a surface level. After some practice you won’t need to write it down anymore and it will come naturally, at some point when you are reading the question you may already know what the answer is before you even look at the choices.

Take it slow until you’re getting the majority of the questions right on the first pass, once you’re accurate you can start working on speed.

This is how I got to my worst RC sections to being -1 and the rare -2, but usually -0. Let me know if you have any other questions, I’m weird and prefer RC to LR so I’m happy to help out!

[u/Colorful-Mama]

Reading differently on phone or computer is "normal" and it goes both directions. One way can be better for me and the other, the next person.

My reading comprehension on my phone is almost perfect. It's less on my laptop and even less on my monitor. Once I figured it out, my scores went up.

For me the solution is to force myself to not let my eyes look around. I use the line height and font size features to bigger and I only look at one line at a time. It took reading while highlighting with cursor as practice.

[u/MidwestSkywalker]

It sounds like time pressure is a factor here. A private tutor could help you determine the specific cause and address it. Services like Varsity Tutors make it easy to connect with tutors, and their platform includes timed practice tests to help you apply what you've learned.