- Fri Feb 23, 2024 1:20 pm
#105430
Hi Marissa,
First, scores can fluctuate a bit for any number of reasons. The exact content of any given section, the order of the sections, what you get for an experimental section, and (perhaps most importantly) how you are physically/mentally feeling while taking a practice test can affect your performance.
In other words, the fact that you occasionally miss a question or two more than usual in LR, while frustrating, is completely normal.
Unfortunately, because there's no particular pattern to the questions that you are missing (other than them being very difficult), this makes it harder to improve. If you were consistently missing a particular question type or type of reasoning, that would make it easier to focus your studying/review.
The goal is to try to determine as best you can exactly why you missed those additional questions. One helpful strategy is to do a "blind review" where you retry any question that you missed untimed (without knowing the correct answer, of course). If you get the question right the second time, then that tells that your original wrong answer was probably due to rushing, careless reading, fatigue, lack of focus, etc. rather than a lack of understanding the content. In other words, you could have gotten that question right with additional time or focus.
On the other hand, if you still miss the question on the second untimed attempt, then you can't really blame the missed question on those other test-related issues. In that case, you'll want to spend a fair amount of time really reviewing the question and why you missed it with the goal of never making that same error again. As you do more and more of these deep reviews, you hopefully will make fewer of these errors over time.
If you find that additional time would have helped you correctly solve some of these questions, then you may want to focus on your timing strategy. In my experience, most test takers scoring in the 170s are generally able to finish the LR section with several minutes of time remaining. This can be very helpful because they can then use that extra time to double-check any question that they "flagged" because they weren't 100% sure of their answer. It is generally preferable to review any problematic question after finishing the section because it takes a lot of the stress/time pressure off and can be easier to focus and "slow down" when necessary. Also, just going over a question a second time at the end of the section (with "fresh eyes") can be helpful as sometimes you'll spot something that you missed the first time.
Lastly, while you didn't mention the other two sections, depending on your performance on those sections, it may be easier to improve on those sections than to get those last one or two questions in LR. For example, if you are generally missing more than 1 or 2 questions in LG, that may be a better place to focus your studying.
