Struggling with easier but not harder questions?

bruhmoment

Wondering if anyone else has had this issue. I have noticed that I get a far greater proportion of 4/5 level difficulty questions right while missing a lot of 2/3 level qs. This is mostly for LR!!

Most of my PTs have been mid-high 170s. I always BR and take diligent notes about why I got something wrong and I think I may somehow just still be falling for traps?? Or alternatively drifting through questions I can tell are on the easier side rather than really focusing?

But I don't know how to stop. Would love any advice if someone else has dealt with a similar situation!!

silkiestangel

If you're scoring in the 170s definitely STOP looking for clarity within the difficulty of qns and focus instead on the qns you are getting wrong because those are YOUR 5 star difficulty qns, although they may be labeled as 1/2 star. There's obviously HUGE (that's what you need to see them as to improve) gaps in your understanding of SOME passages since you're not scoring 180 and since you apparently keep making the same mistakes. And those "traps" you keep "falling for", you just aren't reading carefully enough on ALL passages to conclusively prove the wrongness of the 4 wrong answers and you also probably do not know clearly what you're looking for in a correct answer. If you "fall for a trap", you most definitely did not understand something in the passage and you also allowed yourself to pick a wrong answer. But how do you understand the passage better? Start with the mistakes you have already made in your understanding, keep reviewing them, and make a promise to yourself to that there is only ONE correct answer and all the others are wrong and for good reason, and so should never be picked. If this means literally spending 5 mins on a qn you think is 1/2 star, do it because that's what a complete understanding may require of YOU for that question.
Also since you're in the 170s, stop taking notes that you're not going to read or live up to by making the same mistakes. I'd rather you just not make that mistake again instead of writing about it. Making a mistake should be enough to make you not want to do it again. If you're writing about it, and then making the same mistake, who are you fooling? Yourself. The way you know you understood something is when you don't even have to refer to notes to do it right. Just like during the LSAT, you know you understood the passage when you pick the correct answer on your first pass through. If you cannot tell what the correct answer is, usually then you have to go back to the passage, which ultimately means you did not understand something in the passage. And it could be that there's a phrase you did not grasp or just did not spot the main point.

mwoodenlaw

Timing. That's what it often is for me- I miss easy questions because I spend less time and am more likely to skip a key word or misinterpret the answer I've chosen because I've been too hasty. Try to focus on not misreading things, and always drill timed.

bruhmoment

@silkiestangel Thank you so much for writing such a thoughtful comment; this is really helpful. You're right; I am just fooling myself. I need to remove the judgment factor regarding easier v more difficult qs and really just sit with these qs for a long time until they legitimately click.

& it's also a good pt that viewing them as minor mistakes is not helpful; I need to see them as big errors that require a great deal of attention.

This reframing is super helpful!! We'll see how it goes !

MattyCzar

For the first 10 questions of the section, I would almost turn my brain off and think to myself "The answer is going to be the most obvious of the answer choices. You aren't going to need to diagram (for the most part) or spend three minutes thinking about every minute detail of the sentence structure." I found it helped me get more of the early, easy questions right.