Struggling with Implied / Stated questions across all passage types

sanashetty99

My RC score is the only thing really holding me back from breaking into the higher 160s and low 170s and I find that like 80% of the RC questions I get on a PT are implied or stated questions (mainly implied). There's only one page in the syllabus for implied RC questions and I am not really sure how to drill them, does anyone have any advice about how to improve on these types of questions or what to do to practice them more often?

PriYanksya

These questions tend to be the source of my errors on RC too. When drilling passages, anytime I see a stated question, I force myself to go back and read the section where the idea was discussed - low res summary helps a ton with going back and finding the right section. Use the search function to find the word or related word if you remember it being brought up but not exactly where. Reading the passage slower and making good low res the first time around has helped a ton with not needing to go back and reread any sections.

With implied questions, I treat these as MSS questions. Basically the same rules apply to the ACs: 1. they can't be too strongly worded, and 2. they MUST be supported by the text. If I read an AC and any part of it is questionable, where I know in my gut that the AC is misrepresenting something the author wrote, I eliminate it. Especially if the first half of the AC is perfect, the second half can say something so tangential, it's just wrong. Unsupported text = get that out of here. The ones where I'm not actually entirely sure, I leave the AC open and check back with the text. A lot of the time, I can POE my way to an answer that feels so obscure, but can be the only one right because it fits those MSS criteria, especially that first one.

TigersEye

Something that helped me was being told that implied questions are NOT asking you to speculate about what the author might agree with. Don't try to guess what you think the author might say, choose an answer based on what they actually said.

That can be especially tough when the correct AC is linked to a higher-level feature of the passage or seems unsupported because it's just not explicitly stated (I think PT135 S3 Q16 is a helpful example of this [https://classic.7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-135-section-3-passage-3-questions/]). When in doubt, POE--especially when it feels painful!