Hey Patrick, I'm always fascinated by the quality of your contents that you share to the public for free. Thanks for making the process fun and enjoyable.
Hey Patrick, I actually want to thank you because I cracked my LSAT India Exam in 15 days by watching your videos! You made RC so easy and the concepts so clear.. you are the best! And I'm giving another indian law entrance exam called CLAT. And your this RC series is also very helpful in my preparation of CLAT! Please keep posting more such videos! THANK YOUUU :)
Hey Patrick can u bring a video about how to practise and master reading comp next…..I really need some guidance in that aspect…..moreover how to practise in a way that doesn’t cause burnout and an eventual hate for the section….and what might be the right mindset to overcome the laziness we experience on the onset of every passage(as fatigue from the previous passage causes a friction in the beginning of the next one though it eventually becomes smooth if I follow the big picture reading rules that u suggested)?
haha, the short answer is "no, sadly, I can't". These are all videos about how to practice and master reading comp, so I'm not sure what you're picturing. It's not like an entire RC curriculum could be condensed into a ~25 lesson, so I wouldn't feel confident presenting a lesson like, "Here, in 25 minutes, is how to master reading comp". To avoid burnout on any aspect of LSAT, you should be thinking about constantly varying the topic / setting / mode of study. Study sessions should be relatively brief for maximal impact. Learning science finds we get more value out of four 30-minute study sessions than we do out of one 2 hour session. So your goal in studying is to spread it out so that it happens multiple times a day in little bursts/bouts of learning. And you don't get a lot of value out of repeating the same type of thing over and over, so your goal is to vary the topics you're working on. You also want to mix up modalities (timed set? untimed prediction practice? watching a video? doing flashcards? trying to teach a problem you struggled with to a friend / fellow student? etc) When it comes to the lazy feeling, you'll have to find something that works for you. Some things that work for people: - remind yourself how precious life is / be grateful to be a temporary visitor in this universe and be anxious to drink in as much knowledge as possible. Each new RC passage teaches me something I didn't previously know about, so if I can get dopamine / endorphins from 'learning', then I'm positively oriented towards every passage. - remind yourself how effort is one of the ways you're being measured against your peers. Everyone wants a 170+, but that means you have to be better at taking the LSAT than 98% of other test takers. Out of 100 test takers in a room, you're the 2nd or 1st ranked. Why? Why are you better than the other 98? Are you smarter than them? Did you study longer? Do you care more? Do you try harder? If we're lazy about reading passage 3, then why would a law school expect us to not be lazy when it comes to studying for exams? - remind yourself of why you want to go to law school. Have a mental image of the house/car you want, or the family you want, or the client you want to help, and remind yourself of that image at the start of each RC passage to keep your mind feeling determined to succeed at this challenge.
No, they built a search tool into the testing interface, so you don't even have to hit CTRL-F. You just type whatever you want to search for in the search field.
I don't have any advice that you'll like. :) I think RC is a section that everyone, including experts, wants more time on. So part of improving your timing is probably lowering your expectations for what standard of certainty we'll realistically have time for, given the 35 min limit. Thinking through LSAT questions inherently makes us very diligent, skeptical, detail-oriented, analytical, etc. But getting through a timed LSAT section requires more sloppy and approximate thinking. So you have to start by telling your inner perfectionist that we're going for a lower standard here. (to use a legal metaphor, don't use the criminal law standard of "beyond a reasonable doubt" to arrive at your correct answer .... use the civil law standard of "preponderance of the evidence", which will just mean "more likely this answer than any other"). The other levers you can pull are these: - make sure you've mastered a good big picture read in 2:30 or less (maybe once in a blue moon 3 mins on a killer passage) - around 4-8 times in the section, you should be so confident about what the correct answer needs to say that you scan the answers, find what you're looking for, and pull the trigger without reading all five answer choices. - get better at bailing from certain answer choices when you're only like five words in. Sometimes it's seeing a word that's too extreme. Sometimes it just doesn't seem related to what you were looking for. We have to reduce the processing burden of reading all 5 answers start to finish, so try to make your 1st pass a much more dismissive, "Nah, you ain't it." type of thing. If you never find an answer you like, you can always bring those hastily eliminated answers back to life and read them in full with a flexible mindset, but to play the odds on the first pass, you want to exercise some gutsy confidence that if it doesn't seem right, it isn't. - skip the hardest question on each passage (this is especially true if you often don't have enough time to do your 4th passage like a normal version of you). If your test prep platform allows you to do so, you can try removing all the level 5 questions from a given a RC section and see how you would do trying to get through the 23 most manageable questions in 35 minutes. Obvi, it's hard to know on the fly which questions will be the hardest, but we're not totally clueless. We can take educated guesses about which questions will be a time-suck, an accuracy challenge, or both.
@@LSATLab thanks so much! I really assumed it would take longer to read to be able to have enough information so that I don’t have to fully go back on each question. I usually take around 4 minutes on a passage before going to the questions and I don’t highlight/note take because that took even more time. Maybe this is not the best approach?
@@everythingunderthesun5575 , I hesitate to generalize because RC really is a section where different people find different things work for them, but I would say it's probably unrealistic to think that you'd ever remember the passage in enough detail that you're not going to be looking back. They test us on the exact wording of really minor sentences sometimes, so you'd be unlikely to retain crisp enough detail to accurately answer some questions. For myself, I find that even when I read a question stem and have a vague sense of what the answer might say (given my initial read of the passage), I still get a better value out of re-reading the available support text before checking out answers. With a crystal clear memory of what was / wasn't said in the support text, I can go a lot faster through evaluating answers. So even on a question-specific level, there are times where I see students spending more time by initially seeing if they can get the answer without re-reading the text first. But you're right that we don't have time to look back for everything. On our site, we break down a lot of RC questions according to Defined / Semi-Defined / Undefined Target to distinguish between questions where we have no clue what the answer will be and need to just head into the answers (undefined), questions where we can have a very specific idea of what idea or sentence is going to be tested in the correct answer (defined), and questions where there's more than one possible answer we can anticipate or more than one eligible area of support text (semi-defined). That last category is really where life gets fuzzy. It's hard to decide when it would be a good/bad value to go back first. And diff students will have diff preferences. But a lot of students don't seem to have a category in their minds for those Defined Target kind of questions where you should just figure out the detail or sentence being tested ahead of time, before shopping for an answer.
@@LSATLab thanks so much ! I have an account on your website so I’ll look at these videos. I’m taking the LSAT soon (the end of this month to be exact) , so I’m trying to think about if it makes sense to focus on improving this section and timing, or work on getting less questions wrong on my other sections that I do better on.
We didn't delete any. Which ones are you referring to? (if you're referring to Lessons 6 - 12, those aren't removed, they just haven't been made yet) We put them up as soon as we can find time to make them.
Hello Patrick, hope you are well. Patrick no matter how hard I try I still can’t progress in RC section of the lsat can we meet on zoom or on teams maybe you could explain me more in depth?
Hey-hey. Yeah, the RC section is super hard with barely any shortcuts and not a ton of learnable content. We just have to practice being incredibly efficient, interested, attentive readers. I don't have any time to meet up -- if I had any spare time in my overworked life, then we'd have more RC videos on RU-vid. :) I also wouldn't be able to explain anything in more depth without working for hours and hours on RC with someone. There aren't any quick secrets, so in depth means working through lots of individual questions and passages. That's what we do in class / in tutoring / via our explanations on LSAT Lab. If you want to speak to someone about your situation, there is a link on the homepage to sign up for a chat: calendly.com/lsatlab/30min?month=2022-04
On the question at 16-18 minute mark. You can more readily answer the question correctly if you dont cut out paragraph 3. I think doing this made it much harder to find the answer
Yeah, I definitely think you could also get it by cobbling together two different sentences in paragraph 3. ("likewise characterized by a mixture of genres" + "departs even further from the conventions typical of the genre"). Were those your supporting lines in paragraph 3? To me that's about equal in difficulty to supporting (A) using sentences in paragraphs 2 and 4. But that's subjective. Mainly, we were trying to stress the idea that since the question stem is asking for something that is true of ALL 3 autobiographies, it would be more savvy of us to go looking in areas of the text where the author is generalizing about all three, rather than in areas of the text such as paragraph 3 where she is giving specific details about each one.
yup yup, I feel ya, as those are truly THE WORST ... we upload them as soon as they're done ... we just don't have the resources to work on these full time so we have to take breaks and do other curriculum stuff, but I just started working on the Inference one yesterday.
@@LSATLab thank you very much this framework thing is a charm and my exam on 19th july clat plss upload asap uk i think if u guys could include indian lsat n clat stuff cuz english and cr is same you guys can get rich.
