RC Wrong Answer Journal

[thomas33]

Hi Powerscore,

I'm a Powerscore students wondering if anyone has recommendations on how to format an effective RC wrong answer journal? I'm all out of ideas.

For LR I take a screenshot of the stimulus and ACs and put in a table on word. Then in the cells below I explain to myself why the right answer is right, why the wrong answer is wrong, and why I got it wrong and lessons learned. This allows me to scroll through a document and review everything in a central location This approach has worked well for me in studying LR.

However, for RC, I find this method difficult to apply because I can't capture a passage in a screenshot and the question stem/AC are usually heavily passage dependent. But I still try to do why the right answer is right, why the wrong answer is wrong, and lessons learned. I just feel I can never effectively review my RC work and as a result feel like my RC score is stagnant. Should I just re-do old drills instead of relying heavily on a wrong answer journal?

[Jeff Wren]

Hi thomas,

While you'll want a copy of the passage in front of you while writing out your explanations for the right and wrong answers, you should be able to summarize some of the key information in such a way that you can track your problem areas and mistakes just by looking at your journal entries without having to refer back to the passage itself.

For example, some of the important elements to track are the type of passage (science, law, comparative, etc.), the type of question (global or specific reference, main point, etc.), the difficulty of the question (which can be tracked in your score report analytics), and a general description of why you missed the question (such as failed to prephrase or prephased incorrectly, poor diagramming, misread/misunderstood something in the passage or in an answer choice, etc.) .

These general notes should help you to identify any patterns in your performance that you can focus on during your studying without having to go back to the specific question details in the passage. Of course, occasionally you can revisit the passage itself to review the question in greater detail, but this is not something that you necessarily should do too often. Instead, once you feel clear that you thoroughly understand the mistake, move on and perhaps hold off revisiting the passage for a few weeks and try doing the passage again. (You'd want to leave enough time so that you don't simply remember the exact correct answers.)

One point that is worth mentioning is that you should definitely read the explanations (posted on the forum) for any questions that you missed and compare our explanations to the explanations that you wrote in your journal. In other words, you should first try to describe your reasoning for why an answer is right or wrong, but double-check this to be sure that your reasoning is correct. If you're just going by your own understanding, then that could be a problem if your understanding is ever incorrect.

Also, redoing old drills can also be helpful, so feel free to occasionally return to those to mix things up in your studying.

Here's an article that you may find helpful.

https://blog.powerscore.com/lsat/the-be ... questions/