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 Administrator
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#30094
Please post below with any questions!
 Nicholas Noyes
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  • Joined: Feb 07, 2020
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#75342
Hi,

This is not a specific question but was this passage considered a difficult one? This was by far one of the worst results I have ever had on an RC practice section and I am just wondering if students struggled with this passage on test day back in 2016. I just felt like this passage was by far the most difficult one on the test, I don't know exactly why.

-Nicholas
 Jeremy Press
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#75375
Hi Nicholas!

We don't have the precise data on test-day performance on this passage, but I know from working with many students on it that it often poses difficulty (and is certainly more difficult than the average passage). This is borne out by the data we have from those who've taken the test in our system. There are several above-average difficulty-level questions on the passage. My personal impression (and you have to be careful with these, because they're subjective, particularly on the reading comprehension section) is that it's a difficult passage but not quite on the level of the hardest passages I've ever seen.

The best question to ask would be: why did you feel the difficulty here more than on other passages?

Was the content of the passage particularly difficult to track? If so, ask how you could've more easily kept track of the key ideas, and also ask whether it was the type of passage you should've left to the end of the section after you knocked out all the others (often I get a paragraph into a passage and see it's dense and difficult, and then decide to leave it to the end of my section).

Did you understand the passage, but find the questions particularly difficult to answer? If so, what could you have done better? Used the question stem to find the source of the answer more quickly? Distinguished between subtle but crucial differences in wording in the answer choices?

Ultimately, these are the most important questions to ask when you yourself find some element of the test especially difficult (something that will vary from student to student!).

I hope this helps!

Jeremy

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