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If I Wanted To Ace The LSAT Reading Comp Section, This is What I’d Do
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A lot of students struggle with LSAT reading comp. They say you can't learn it. The good news is they're wrong. Today I'm going to share with you how to ace the LSAT reading comp section and the secret is often doing less. For those who don't know me, my name is Steve Schwartz and I've been teaching the LSAT since 2005. I personally increased my LSAT score from a 152 to a 175 and the funny thing is I found that I often did better in LSAT reading comp when I did less work up front when I took fewer notes because the thing is it takes time to write things down. It takes time to read things and what you end up writing down often ends up not being that useful. Of course, the LSAT is now online on a computer. Back when I took it, it was on paper. When it was on paper, of course, you could highlight. You could underline. You could take notes directly on the passage. Now you're using these highlighting and underlining tools on LSAT's law hub on the prometric system and the unfortunate thing is that they are oftentimes quite glitchy and imprecise. They don't underline or highlight the exact words you wanted them to do it on. And when you're using some third party LSAT prep software, it oftentimes actually works better than what you'll experience on testing. So if you become reliant on things working properly during your practice tests, you're then in for a big surprise and unpleasant one when on test day, it doesn't work nearly as well as you thought it would. Now, when it comes to prep materials, a lot of people on sites like Reddit will recommend that you read scientific American or the economist to increase your reading comprehension ability. But the thing is, these magazines are written for people who are reading them for pleasure because they find it interesting, whereas LSAT reading count passages are purposely written to be boring. And there are approximately 400 real actual official LSAT reading count passages that you can study from. So my question is, why would you ever go outside of the actual official LSAT practice tests? If you're taking the LSAT in the next couple of months, for example, it's unlikely that you'll have time to both do all of those 400 actual official passages and also read these other magazines for LSAT prep purposes. So I recommend, unless you're taking the LSAT six months or beyond, stick with the actual official reading count passages, you can find the vast majority of them in LSAT's law hub, and you can get the other practice tests on Amazon for most of them at least. Now, when it comes to actually solving LSAT reading count passages, I find that students too oftentimes get bogged down in the details of the passage, in the evidence, in the supporting examples, a lot of your LSAT reading count problems will actually be solved if you understand the main idea of the passage, if you understand the author's opinion. So first and foremost, focus on the big picture global questions like, what is the main idea? What is the author's opinion? What is the best articulation of the tone of the passage? What would serve as the best title of the passage? Start there, note where the details are, but recognize, remember that you can always go back to the passage to find those details when you need to, to help you solve a particular question. This involves slowing down on the main idea and speeding up on the details. Now, if you want to get faster at reading difficult events text on the screen, there are a couple of tools I like for this. One is called spurreader.com, S-P-R-E-E-D-E-R. The other is phrasereader.com. These are both free online folder apps where you can copy paste in difficult dense text and display it to yourself at different speeds. And so you can gradually increase your speed, the number of words displayed to you per minute, to put yourself on an LSAT reading comp treadmill of sorts. Because the thing is that you may be more accustomed to reading difficult dense text on paper and then reading lighter stuff on the computer. But of course, the LSAT is difficult and it's on our computer may require a little bit of adjustment to your online reading habits. Now, I'll share some other techniques you can use for reading comp in just a minute. But before I do, I wanted to let you know that we cover LSAT reading comp using our Socratic review method in our weekly classes at LSAT Unplugged. If you're interested in finding out more on your journey into getting a top LSAT reading comp score, you can check out the links below to find out more and to book a call with me, my team. We'd be glad to help you out. Now, I mentioned earlier understanding the main idea first and foremost. And I mentioned there are roughly 400 real actual official released reading comp passages you can study from. And if you're taking the LSAT in the next couple of months, you likely won't be able to solve them all as full passages. So what you could do as an exercise is you reserve some of the older reading comp passages for drills. And you save the newer reading comp passages for your timed work doing individual sections and full length practice tests. So for these drills, what you do is you read the passage and you solve only the general global main idea type questions associated with that passage. What this does is it lets you get better at recognizing LSAT's articulation of the main idea, which oftentimes is the best of the worst. Meaning it's not how you or I would have described the main idea and it may not be immediately apparent, but it is the best of the worst. And by elimination, you have no choice, but to choose this one as the correct answer. You could also try rewriting the entire passage in simpler language like you were going to explain to a five year old. You could write this down. You could talk it over with a friend or a coach or a tutor or study about the idea being that you can explain what the passage says without just reading the passage text verbatim, which tells us nothing, of course. When I ask a student, what does this argument say? What does this passage say? And they just read it to me. I'm like, you don't really get it unless you can explain it in your own words. And of course, this is what we do with students in our classes and our one-on-one coaching programs. If you're interested in finding out more, feel free to reach out. And in the meantime, I wish you all the best and take care.