The LSAT is a dreaded four-letter acronym that can make or break a law school application.
After ten years of tutoring law school applicants, I know that thorough preparation and a complete understanding of the test is the only way to ensure that an applicant maximizes his or her score. When I studied for the LSAT, I did every available practice exam three times in order to master the identification of the patterns in the different question types on the exams. I scored a 179 as a result.
[Learn how law schools evaluate LSAT scores.]
Over the next three weeks, in anticipation of the upcoming LSAT, I will discuss common pitfalls for each of the three types of scored sections on the LSAT. This week, I’ll address the reading comprehension section.
The section has four sets of questions and each set is comprised of reading material and five to eight questions. Here are three tips to help you ace the reading comprehension section of the LSAT.
1. Don’t get lost in the details: There is a temptation for test-takers to spend too much time on the details of a complicated passage. Spending time wrestling with a particularly tricky example is risky when you have only approximately nine minutes to read each passage and answer the questions about it.
Do not waste the time you could be using in other places on the exam. The example you’re stuck on might not even be relevant to the questions you’ll be asked.
[Here are seven test prep tips for LSAT success.]
2. Know your source: Misidentifying the source of an opinion can lead you to totally misunderstand a passage, so it is critical that you correctly determine the source of any opinion. Be sure to distinguish between the author’s opinion and the author’s presentation of someone else’s opinion, as authors of passages will often report the opinion of another without actually holding that opinion themselves.
In questions where you are asked to describe the author’s tone, opinion or attitude about something, make sure that the parts of the passage you are using to answer the question describe the author’s opinion.
3. Start things out right: Many people believe that they should start with the passage that has the most questions. However, the passage with the most questions is often a difficult one. You might then miss out on the easy points gained from less challenging questions hiding in a shorter passage.
[Follow these five tips for the five days before the LSAT.]
While there is no hard and fast connection between the number of questions a passage has and its difficulty, your best bet is to start with the type of passage you feel the most comfortable with.
This is especially true if you have noticed a trend in your studying where you do best on one type of passage above all others. For some, there is no discernible trend, and in that case you should just go in the order that they appear in the exam.
Avoiding these common mistakes will help improve your score on reading comprehension questions.
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Avoid 3 LSAT Reading Comprehension Pitfalls originally appeared on usnews.com
