#reading comp

How the heck do you read these things so you understand what you read without spending a million years reading? How do you keep engaged and focused on the world’s most boring reading passages?

Blueprint classes for the June LSAT are underway—most students are a few lessons in at this point. If you’re studying for the June LSAT, let’s talk about what should and shouldn’t be important at this point.

As of now, what’s important is really getting the concepts down. Conditional logic? Study those sufficient and necessary condition indicators until you’re automatic. Like a machine. Quantifiers, too—get those down pat. The same goes for the standard rules in ordering game. Know your blocks from your dashes, your options from your arches.

You should also focus on understanding and following the approaches for the kinds of questions you’ve covered so far. What are you looking for in the stimulus of a Soft Must be True question, for example? What should you expect out of the answer? In the world of logic games, what should you be doing to set up a game? How should you approach the different kinds of questions? And for reading comp, focus on extracting the points of view from a passage: who’s arguing what, and how is it backed up? Where does the author stand?

The emphasis should be on doing things carefully and according to the steps you should be following. That means you shouldn’t worry about how long it takes you. I understand why that 35-minute time limit on each section can cause a bit of a freak-out. You may even think, after your first practice test, that timing is your biggest issue.

Even so, take the time pressure off for now. There’s a very good reason for that. By far the best way to get faster at this stuff is to get really good at it first. If you know what you’re reading for, you know what to expect out of the answer, and you know what makes answers right and wrong, you’ll eventually start to go faster without even trying. On the other hand, if you rush yourself now you’ll just get in the way of developing a good approach. And that won’t help you get better or faster.

Along similar lines, hold off on taking any more practice tests for now. You may be tempted to try out everything you’ve learned so far. But while everything you’ve learned is important, it’s only a small part of the LSAT. You’re better off practicing the particular types of questions you’ve learned so far and really mastering them. There’ll be a time to take plenty of extra practice exams. That time is later, once you know how to do most everything you might encounter.

So study hard, but have patience. If you really get those concepts from the first few lessons down, it’ll only help with the lessons to come. Before you know it you’ll have a fairly complete understanding of what’s on the test.

Reading Comprehension is probably the most ignored section of the LSAT. People tend to think something like, “I’ve been reading since I was five. If I can’t get it by now, I’m just gonna have to live with it.” But, Reading Comp isn’t reading as usual, so putting in the practice does pay off. Reading Comp’s peculiarities are most evident from the Comparative Reading passages. You get two passages and a single set of questions related to one or both passages. When’s the last time you had to go through something like that reading, say, the Huffington Post?

In case you’ve been struggling with Comparative Reading passages, we’ve got your back. Here are some of the strategies our students find helpful.

Step 1: Tag the crap out of the first passage

Reading Comp authors are notoriously bad about using paragraph breaks. Paragraphs are rare, and they show up without much reason at all. Instead of relying on an author’s paragraph breaks to give you the structure of a Reading Comp passage, you need to tag each complete thought in the margins yourself.

Ideally, you want to tag role elements: support/evidence, studies, hypotheses, experiments, examples, causal claims, questions, answers, problems, solutions, criticisms, and so on. If you can’t spot a structural element, then your second best option is to us a subject tag. Role tags answer, well, Role questions, that’s why they’re awesome. Subject tags will at least help you navigate the passage and remember what the author said.

Tagging the first passage really well is absolutely the key to doing well on Comparative Reading passages. This is because Comparative Reading questions will often as you to compare the two passages. But you can spot Comparative Reading questions the moment you flip the page and see two passages. So don’t wait until you get to the questions to start thinking about how the two passages are related to each other. Start right away by getting to know the first passage. You do this by tagging the crap out of it.

This way, when something new, same, or antithetical comes up in the second passage, you’ll be a lot more likely to notice it.

Step 2: Reading for agreements and disagreements from the second passage

Before I move on to the second passage, I like to quickly review my tags for the first passage. I tend to have a lot more tags per line than I would in a normal Reading Comp passage. This way, when I start reading the second passage, all the ways in which the two passage relate jump out. Here, during your second passage, your tagging strategy changes a bit.

Every time you find an agreement in the second passage, write a little (+) in the margin. If you find more than one, then start numbering your plusses: (1+). And, every time you find a disagreement, tag it with a (–). Feel free to write a word or phrase next to each (+) or (–) to help you remember what the agreement or disagreement is.

Step 3: Don’t forget your other strategies!

Often people get so overwhelmed with tracking agreements and disagreements that they forget to use their other Reading Comp strategies.

Remember, each passage will have a primary structure (Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis), secondary structures (examples, questions/answers, causal claims, classifications) and a number of other elements we usually keep an eye out for (experiments, named advocates, studies, and so on).

Also, you should be using your Logical Reasoning question type strategies during Reading Comp. Each Reading Comp question has a corresponding Logical Reasoning question type. The work of typing Reading Comp questions is a bit harder, but it’s definitely doable. At the very least, try to figure out which question family you’re in (Implication? Operation? Characterization?).

Hopefully that helps. If you have any questions, feel free to post a comment.

It’s just words, right? WRONG.

If you’re planning to take the LSAT, there’s a pretty good chance you’ve taken other standardized tests before — the SAT or ACT, perhaps even the GRE or GMAT. These tests all have one thing in common: reading comprehension.

On the surface, all reading comp looks pretty similar. There’s a passage followed by a bunch of questions about it. Compared to logic games or even to logical reasoning, the reading comp section of the LSAT may seem reassuringly familiar.

Don’t be fooled. LSAT reading comp is its own special beast, and it’s a tough one to conquer. LSAT reading comp distinguishes itself from most other reading comp in its focus on arguments and argument structure. Most reading comp asks about the information in the passage. The LSAT asks about that, too, but also asks loads and loads of questions about the argument in the passage: the passage’s primary purpose, the role of a claim in the passage, the passage’s structure, what would address someone’s objection to an idea, and so on.

Therefore, LSAT reading comp requires its own special methods. You need to read the passage not as much for the information presented as for the arguments. Someone’s making an argument. Quite often, there are opposing arguments. What are the points of view? Who’s behind those points of view? Where does the author stand?

If you’re a Blueprint student, that last bit probably sounds pretty familiar. It’s the information that should go in each passage’s primary structure diagram. Draw that diagram. Seriously, do it. The mental process you need to go through to isolate the points of view and put them in the diagram will help you understand the passage better. And even just a glance at the diagram will help you answer a number of questions.

You may find reading comprehension passages boring. Banish that thought. They’re fascinating. The best. Believe me. But seriously, one way to stay engaged is to keep your task in mind. You’re not reading the passage. You’re finding points of view and breaking down arguments. Don’t think of what you’re doing as reading. Think of it as chasing the author down a dark alley, throwing the author against a door and asking, “where do you stand?”

And when you get to the confusing nitty-gritty details, don’t let them suck you in. The most important thing to know about those details is: why are they there? What claim do they support? If you know that, you understand the passage. And if you have to go back to the passage when the questions ask about those confusing details, that’s fine as long as you know where to find them.

Above all, practice your reading comp. You can improve your score, but it takes time. There’s almost no chance of cramming it in at the last minute. You have to start now if you want results.

I have to answer questions on this???

Interesting question, if coarsely phrased. Very few students finish any of the sections on their first practice exam, but with Logical Reasoning and Logic Games, after a few months of practice, most can get to the vast majority if not all of the questions in the time provided.

Then there’s Reading Comprehension.

People who got through two passages might end up at three. What’s worse, those who started out at just enough time for three passages now finish three passages in about thirty minutes, and then get to the last passage with five minutes left, which leaves just enough time to read the passage before guessing on ALL the questions. In that case, you should’ve just spent an extra five minutes on the three passages you already did, right?

“So, Blueprint instructor man,” you say. “What’s the secret?” I wish there were a secret, which there is not. That doesn’t mean there’s just no chance of improving, but before we talked about how to improve, let’s just set the terms of the discussion:

The whole point of Reading Comp — unlike the other two section types — is the time crunch. Each section tests a different skill necessary to succeed in law school, and the one that Reading Comp tests is your ability to read titanic loads of information in a short period of time and speak intelligently on the topics therein. When you’re in law school, you’ll walk home with 200 pages of dense reading for the next day. If you don’t understand that stuff, you’ll be humiliated by a sadistic professor with a fondness for the Socratic Method.

That’s why what I’m about to tell you is not a hack for timing on Reading Comp. In my experience, there is no such hack. I’ve heard rumors — the most common being that you can just read the first and last sentence of each paragraph and answer the questions on that basis — and all of them strike me as nonsense. Instead, it’s all about putting in the work up front to make the questions go more quickly:

1. Read for big picture structure.

Blueprint students are taught to create a Primary Structure diagram which includes the important arguments in the passage as well as the proponents of those points of view. If you figure those things out, even if you don’t get every juicy detail, you’ve got the right answer to the Main Point, Primary Purpose, and Author’s Attitude questions.

2. Understand the argumentative purpose of each paragraph.

Every paragraph in a passage is there for a reason. One might have a claim by a certain party, which means the point of that paragraph is to announce a conclusion. Another might have an experiment supporting a conclusion, making that paragraph one big premise. Other common argumentative tropes: raising an objection and dismissing it, making a prediction based on the information in the passage, or qualifying a conclusion somewhere else in the passage, i.e. the conclusion doesn’t apply as broadly as one might think.

Doing this will invariably get you the Role and Organization questions.

3. Make sure your tags are coherent and systematic.

Blueprint gives students a comprehensive set of conventions for tagging passages. If you know exactly what your tags mean, then any time you need to refer back to the passage, you don’t actually have to read the passage. You just take a glance at your tag, and the answer jumps off the page at you.

I see a lot of students who just haphazardly underline and write crazy little notes in the margin, and then they have absolutely no idea what those tags mean and they’re back filtering through the passage on every damn question. Time wasted.

Seriously, this step is going to get you all of the other small-bore questions like Inference, Specific Reference, and Parallel questions.

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I hope you can see that the advice I gave you does NOT include reading faster. It actually will slow you down in the short term. But that’s the only possibility for success. Everyone thinks the points are to be found in the questions. They’re not. You get points by reading the passage correctly and comprehensively the first time. When you do that, you pick up time by answering questions quickly.

A corollary: Never get bogged down on a question. Any question. A point is a point, and you can always come back to it.

When you finish a 3.5 hour-long practice test, the last thing you want to do after scoring it is to go over the questions you got wrong. But reviewing practice tests is ridiculously important. It’s as valuable as taking the practice tests in the first place, if you go about it strategically.

First of all, don’t review your test right after you score it. You’re tired and frustrated – at least in my personal experience. I recommend reviewing each test the next day. At that point, you’ll still remember the gist of the questions, but you’ll also be able to see them with fresh eyes.

The first step is to do a “blind review.” To do this, you have to score your answer sheets without marking up the test booklet. Just identify which questions you got wrong without marking the right answers. This will let you re-do the questions you got wrong or had to skip. Giving yourself the opportunity to figure these questions out yourself, rather than just looking up the answers, is great practice and can help build confidence. It will also give you insight into what’s going wrong. If you get a lot of these questions right on your second pass, your main problems probably have to do with anxiety and time management. If you get a lot of questions wrong on your second try, you probably want to revisit the relevant fundamentals.

The next step is to add your wrong answers to your “error bank” – the running list of questions that you get wrong. Keeping this list helps you learn from your mistakes and avoid repeating them. I use a table in Microsoft Word, but use whatever format is easiest for you. Information to include: the test and question number, the question type, a summary in your own words of what went wrong, and a takeaway, something that you will try to remember on similar questions in the future. Here’s an excerpt from my error bank, back in the day:

PT 58, 1.24, LR – Weaken: I was looking for an alternative explanation to a correlation/causation fallacy. Actually they slipped in an equivocation. The premises were about the preserve, a part of the valley. The conclusion was about the valley. The answer choice was about how the valley has seen a decline in population, so of course the valley’s population won’t increase. Be hyper-attentive to the terms in the conclusion and keep in mind that there can be more than one flaw in a given argument.

PT 58, 4.7, LR – Explain: The best place to dry popcorn is in the sun. I dry it in my house, though. Explain? The two answers I looked at were a specific one – it’s cloudy during the time of year when you need to dry popcorn – and a general one – there are other effective ways to dry popcorn. The latter must be true – there’s sun drying and in-house drying. We know there are multiple ways. So adding that as a premise doesn’t help. Sure, there could be multiple ways – but the sun is still the BEST way – so why doesn’t the farmer do it? We need a positive answer, something that gives you a reason to dry popcorn in your house, not just establishes that it’s an option. Think about logical force and don’t confuse operation and implication question criteria. The answer on an operation question is not something we already know.

Writing out your errors is tedious, but it’s really useful for the same reasons that your English teacher made you hand-write the vocab words you had to memorize. You don’t have to add every wrong answer to your error bank. Choose the ones that you think you can learn from, and as the list grows, review it every few days.

Note: the less time-consuming alternative is to cut out or take photos of your wrong answers. That’s good too.

The last step is to analyze your test to look for trends. Identify the question types on which you’re underperforming. Also analyze your pace. I like to write down time markers periodically throughout a practice test – at the end of each game and passage, and after every few question on Logical Reasoning. Review these time markers to see where your pace is slackening and which question types are slowing you down.

So remember not to skip reviewing your practice tests. It’s like you’re a football player reviewing the tape from yesterday’s game. Only more glorious.