Marina7 wrote:Hello!
This is my first post on the board, so apologies if this is the wrong spot.
I’m finding that I am really struggling with LR Questions. I seem to understand the theory behind each question type fine and what to look for but it seems that I continuously misunderstand or don’t understand what is actually being said in the stimulus to be able to answer a question about it. Once the answer is broken down for me I get where I went wrong but I can’t seem to make the right connections or interpretations when I’m answering to get the question correct. I’m not sure what to do or what resources I could potentially access.
I’d apprecaite any help you can provide!
Hi Marina,
Thanks for the message! This seems like a pretty clear case where what you should do is take some time to practice very specifically on understanding what the stimulus says, and paraphrasing the words of the test makers. This is actually a skill that can be learned, but it takes some time. The good news is that you know where you are running into problems, so you can attack this directly. I'm going to pull a section from an article I wrote where I covered how to go about this:
https://blog.powerscore.com/lsat/retaki ... your-score.
- Your understanding of the stimulus/passage
As you read each stimulus, you should be naturally summarizing what you've read and breaking it down. Inconsistency often relates to your analysis of the stimulus, so how confident you feel coming out of each passage plays a large role in your success.
Part of the process of breaking down a passage is identifying the argument components, so try the following exercise: read a stimulus at normal test speed then write down your summary on a separate piece of paper. Do that for 8-10 problems (stimulus, question stem, and each answer choice) in a row that you've never seen and then go back and closely compare your summary with what the stimulus/question stem/answers actually say. That will tell you if the issue is a detail issue, and help shed light on whether you are missing concepts in the stimulus. For example, if you summarize a stimulus that happens to be causal but don't notice until you review it that causality was present, that's an indicator of a problem. Or if you realize that your internal summaries are too broad or are missing key points, you can change how you read to begin picking up those points.
As you try these untimed questions, also stop after the stimulus and make an assessment of how strongly you feel about your understanding of it, and then compare that to how you perform when answering each question. If you see a connection between difficulties understanding the stimulus and answering questions, then you'll know that summarizing and reducing each stimulus into the simplest possible terms has to be part of your study focus. Another way to think of it is like this: everything you need to know to answer any LR question is in the stimulus, so if you don't understand something in the argument, it's going to be difficult to confidently answer the question.
Let's use that as a start and see how it goes. Thanks!
