Decrease in score after Live Online Course

[mdeutsch]

Hi,

Sorry in advance for the long, slightly scattered message. I have recently completed the Live Online course. My blind diagnostic was a 153. I studied some on my own with the Bibles and increased to a 159 on Test 1 from the course Tests book the day before the course began. After finishing the course I am now averaging a 158 on prep tests. My highest score, halfway through the course was a 161. I have taken, not including my original diagnostic, 5 prep tests. I work a full time job but have completed just about every homework problem and am working my way through the supplemental problems as much as I can. I am taking the test in November. I am really concerned that my score is decreasing and do not know what to do. It appears the Must Be True and Flaw questions are my weakest LRs. I have some trouble with timing on LG but feel like I can probably work through that issue to increase my score ( my last PT I missed six but am confident that was due to timing issues). With RC, I am just hoping to increase to a minus four by test time. My dream score is a 169. My greatest concern is over LR right now. On my last prep test I missed 15 out of 30 questions in the 60-80% range and that was really concerning. After taking a course and going through the Bible and all of the homework, I really do not know what to do. Once I review the the problems that I miss I understand why I was wrong and why the answer is correct, but I don't know how to make those connections in the first place. Should I consider tutoring (which is a major financial burden) or should I do something else? With less than two months I am feeling the pressure but I do not want to give up on my goal score.

Thanks in advance for any advice. I really appreciate it.

[Adam Tyson]

A few questions here for you, mdeutsch, and we may be able to help diagnose your situation better.

First, are you prephrasing the answers to every single LR question? Every single time, you should be coming up with what the correct answer should say, or do, or contain, before you look at any answer choices. Never go to the answers without first having determined what it is that you need to find there. In my experience, a failure to consistently prephrase is the number one thing that holds students back from making real progress.

Second, are you sorting the answers quickly into losers and contenders, without pausing or analyzing or re-reading anything? Determining that an answer is a loser because you know that it is wrong and WHY it is wrong, and calling everything else a contender? Confusing answers, answers you don't immediately understand, should be called contenders without hesitation, and then you can deal with analysis after the sorting is done. I find that students who don't do this rapid culling of the answers are most likely to struggle with timing, because they waste time analyzing and re-reading when they don't need to.

Third, in RC are you consistently returning to the text of the passage to find evidence to support your answer choices, rather than relying on your memory of what you read? It's an open book test, and you should be treating it as one. On a typical RC section with 27 questions, I probably return to the text to find my evidence at least 22 times. I know the authors are going to try to play tricks with my memory, and this strategy prevents me from falling for those tricks. If you read so slowly and carefully that you feel like you can answer most or all of the questions from memory, then you probably read too slowly and too carefully and you are likely wasting time and setting yourself up to fall for those tricks.

Let us know whether you have developed these strategies and habits and apply them consistently, and we'll take it from there. The next step would be to look at the question-specific strategies you are employing, or not employing, as you move through the materials, like the Assumption Negation Technique, for example. First things first, though - prephrase, sort, use evidence.