Description
Reading Comprehension is the hardest section of the LSAT to improve at. And, it’s getting harder. New LSATs feature reading comprehension passages with logical reasoning style question. This is a recorded seminar with advanced strategies for RC. This seminar has three goals:
- Give you the tools to quickly and easily understand RC passages.
- Show you how to retain that information while going through the questions
- Show you how to eliminate RC answers quickly, and how to predict right answers
This class is aimed at advanced students. Beginners can still get value from it, but I won’t be slowing down to cover basics. I’ll assume you already know basic ideas about reading comprehension (passage subjects, passage organization, structural words, etc.) and have done at least ten reading comprehension sections. I will be referencing things like structural words, but I won’t be giving a thorough overview. The seminar is in two parts:
- An overview of RC strategies that you can use on all passages + how to think about the section in general
- Walkthroughs from hard passages from a variety of subjects. I will show exactly what I was thinking on each question as I solved it, and habits you can use to do passages faster.
There’s also a Q and A covering common questions. You can ask other RC questions in the comments sections as well, and get a quick reply. Total seminar time: Roughly six hours. Cost: $199
RC Seminar Description
RC is the hardest section of the LSAT to get better at. A lot of people just give up. But there are ways to get better at RC, quickly. And there are a lot of points at stake: RC typically has 27 questions, the most of any section. Most students go into the questions without fully understanding the passage. This leaves you bogged down and spending too much time choosing between trap answers. The key to getting better is learning to break passages down structurally. This seminar aims to show you how to do that. Most LSAT courses explain what’s going on in passages, but almost none teach you to think like an LSAT instructor. This seminar will show you my thought process. I’ve selected a representative set of passages. What I’m going to do is solve them, timed, the day before the seminar. I will take detailed notes on exactly what I’m doing and thinking at each moment. Then in the seminar I will walk you through the passages as I saw them, highlighting key points, and reasons why certain answers can be skipped. This seminar will teach you what qualities distinguish a correct answer from an incorrect one. Often, students can narrow down the 5 answer choices to the two best, but ultimately choose the wrong answer choice between those two. I’ll show you my thought process as I decide between those two choices. I’ve written detailed explanations for around 150 RC passages, and worked through countless more with students. Seeing the same passage over and over and over again forced me to become more efficient at them, and this efficiency is central to how I teach RC. I can’t stand a method that is logically correct, but slow. So in this seminar I’m going to show you how I do reading comprehension. Quickly, efficiently, and simply.
FAQ
Do I still have time to learn? Yes. While RC is generally the hardest to get perfect on, it’s definitely possible to make gains in a short period by analyzing your approach. This seminar is designed to make your RC study time more effective. Too many people spend months doing passage after passage, but not mastering them. The seminar is designed to let you quickly master passages and see their inner structure. Are there any prereqs? Not formally. But, I’m going to assume everyone in the seminar has the following:
- You are familiar with the basic game structure of passages: paragraph organization, transition words, regular vs. comparative, etc.
- You are familiar with the main types of topic RC passages will have
- You’ve done at least 10 RC sections
This webinar is for people that already know things about RC, and want to take it to the next level. I will be referencing the topics above, but I won’t be giving an A-Z overview. What will be covered? The initial webinar will be in two parts:
- I’m going to go over how I do RC, optimizing for speed and efficiency. This is the most important part: solving specific questions comes from a good grasp of the passage, and good processes for assessing your understanding.
- I’ll be working through difficult passages from a variety of topics, commenting on what I’m doing, and why. These processes generalize to passages of all types.
I will be taking the bulk of the passages from preptests 62-64, to avoid using up too many preptests. However, I may select a couple of passage from other tests if they’re important to cover. The topics will be announced in advance. You’ll be able to do the passages in advance, in order to follow along. Or, read the passages only, if you prefer.
Xin Yao (verified owner) –
Lsathacks review
This course is for advanced learners who are aiming to break the 170 scores.
Content:
It contains 6 long hours of videos and some notes, explaining Graeme Blake (LSAT 177, Lsathacks founder) test-taking strategies.
Covering:
* Answer choice prediction, skimming, and quick elimination
* the best way to read and reread (to maintain details)
* passage analysis beyond basic structure and main points: tone; distinction, concepts and the applicable range of concepts, metaphor, analogy,
* walkthroughs of harder passages (all passages are from PT 61-PT70, NOT all passages are explained)
How I find it so far:
It is recommended to finish in a short period. I finished 5 hours of it and have been practicing for the past few days. Already I can feel my grasp of the passage is getting faster and better! I’ve taken down my progress in a detailed manner:
* huge improvement for main point questions! (from 1-2 each section to 0)
For some reason, although I only got about 3-5 questions wrong in each section, I keep getting these wrong.
* faster time for comparison passages (from 11:00 minutes to 9:33-9:52)
This has been the most difficult passage for me since I tend to forget the first one after reading the second and I keep choosing the choices that are familiar enough to be mistaken.
* I get better at endless double-checks (I tend to double-check many answers—one of the main reasons why I am so slow), instead, I do quick skimming/re-reading in less than 30 seconds
* I pay more attention to ATYPICAL attitudinal details (for example, ‘while’ indicates controversy, and misrepresent is STRONGLY opinionated).
vonrus1 (verified owner) –
Graeme bills the seminar as seeing how a high scorer works through their section, and that’s what you get. I found it to be valuable as I try to squeeze the last few points out of this test.
He goes on at length about how he maps a passage in his head, and what he considers important words or phrases to look out for that make referencing the back to the passage more manageable. I’ve been able to incorporate his timings and read-for-understanding-then-read-for-structure approach with some degree of success in the sections I’ve done since finishing the seminar.
The videos are compact and to the point, for the most part. He utilizes RC sections from a narrow range in the 60’s in order to avoid burning valuable prep material.
If you’ve found yourself at a point where your RC fundamentals are strong and you just need to dial it in before test day, do yourself a favor and spend a weekend with the seminar.
Alice (verified owner) –
Thanks to Graeme’s RC mastery seminar, I was able to know exactly how a high-scorer reads a passage, approaches a problem, and eliminates or confirms each answer choice. I usually had no trouble understanding explanations of RC problems given enough time, but could seldom finish the section in 35 minutes before my first LSAT. For this reason, seeing the thought process of a high-scorer (Graeme!) is really enlightening. After purchasing and watching the seminar a week before the test, I was able to finish all sections on time during my September LSAT and got 167. In the following months, I followed Graeme’s advice, read The Economist in my spare time, and took more practice tests – and I got an unbelievable 177 in my February LSAT this year! This mastery seminar is the only course I enrolled in to get from 159 diagnostic last August to 177 this February (in addition to practice tests and The LSAT Trainer, but they are not “courses”). I highly recommend this course to anyone who wants to improve their RC.
ksandberg@g.harvard.edu (verified owner) –
I was hesitant to purchase Graeme’s RC seminar, as I tend to work best when I self-study. However, the RC seminar was definitely worth it (the Reddit discount code makes it even more worth it). For me, the best parts of the seminar involved his discussion of the most relevant information to focus on when reading passages, his instruction on time-management, and having the opportunity to develop insight into his thought process as he eliminates answers quickly. I have read all the Powerscore books as well as The LSAT Trainer. What Graeme discusses in the seminar is not something that you can get from these books or any of 7 Sage’s explanatory videos. At this point I cannot quantify my progress as a result of this seminar, but I can say that the course allowed me to gain well-founded confidence. For the first time since I began studying for the LSAT over a year ago, I do not feel like my RC score is a spin of the roulette wheel. I have tried a lot of techniques including highlighting, underlining, speed reading, and taking notes. I always felt rushed and none of these techniques felt natural to me. Graeme’s seminar has allowed me to find flow in RC. I think this seminar would be helpful for people at a variety of levels. Thanks Graeme!
evan3619 (verified owner) –
I think Graeme’s RC seminars are extremely helpful. And though my progress may not be a huge leap immediately （-15 to -10）, I just keep improving by the right way he taught me which is very important I think. Looking forward to ur LR seminar!
J –
This seminar was really helpful and I highly recommend. I have tried other strategies/tips for quite some time on RC, and after an initial boost had plateaued (I would say it was more-so just gaining experience that led to the boost). As a result, I had just tried jumbling together a few of my stray observations/methods to improve my score on this section, with limited success. With this seminar, I finally witnessed a more effective strategy to RC that works well. I have noticed a 2-3 point bump on RC just by modifying my methods with what I learned in the seminar (which if you have studied RC for some time, you know this is a pretty big improvement), and that is just in the immediate aftermath. Some of the tips – reading The Economist, gaining background knowledge in various fields- are fairly boilerplate and are common knowledge at this point if you have researched RC. Where this seminar really is a home run is just seeing the strategy and getting an inside look into what to look for and how to ‘detect’ what will be on the questions following the passage. That intuition building is exactly the type of strategy that will take your RC to the next level. If you are looking to improve your RC score, I recommend implementing this into your study regimen.