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The Outrageously EASY Way to Ace LSAT Reading Comp
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A lot of students struggle with LSAT reading comp and even a lot of prep companies say you can't learn reading comp and they're wrong. Today I'm going to share with you how you can ace LSAT reading comp and the key is often doing less. For those who don't know me, my name is Steve Schwartz. I increased my LSAT score from a 152 to a 175 and I've been teaching the LSAT for almost 20 years now. And what I found is that I did better on reading comprehension when I did less work up front when I took fewer notes because it takes time to write things down and it takes time to read them. And it often turns out the notes you take end up not helping you when you're solving the questions. If you get invested in highlighting and underlining, you may be in for a rude awakening when you find out that on LSAT test day, the highlighting and underlining tools in Prometric and on LSAT's law hub actually don't work well. They're actually a bit glitchy and imprecise. And so if you're using some private prep companies platform where the highlighting and underlining tools work well, you'll end up running into trouble when on test day you discover that LSAT tools don't work nearly as well. Now a lot of people on the forums out there such as Reddit will tell you to read Scientific American or The Economist to help you get better at LSAT reading comprehension. But the thing is you have approximately 400 actual official LSAT reading passages that you can study from. So my question is why would you go outside of that? Why would you read The Economist or Scientific American which is going to be a lot easier after all people are reading those for leisure a lot of the time than LSAT reading passages which nobody out there is reading for fun. But of course LSAT is writing the passages specifically to be boring, to be difficult, to be dense, to be hard to get through. And so if you're reading The Economist to study it doesn't count as real studying because LSAT reading comp will be a whole lot more difficult. So what I recommend is if you are taking the LSAT in the next two to three months or so and you're expecting that you're not going to be able to do every single LSAT passage ever released that you print out a bunch of those passages if you can. Read some of them on the beach or in the bathroom or during your commute, whatever it's going to be. And then maybe you use the older passages for leisure reading on the side and then you use the newer passages for your actual LSAT studying either in timed sections or as part of full-length timed practice test the idea being that whenever you're reading it you're still as an exercise trying to extract what is the main idea, what is the primary purpose, and what is the author's opinion. Now of course you may have heard this before you are reading for structure not for details. Meaning you don't want to get bogged down in the details as you are reading the passage. You want to focus on what is the main idea, what are the global major takeaways from this passage because you know that LSAT is going to ask you about those global big picture questions. They're always going to ask what's the main idea. They'll typically ask what is the primary purpose or what is the author's opinion or what is the tone or the title of the passage. Those are all big picture questions that after reading a passage you should be able to answer. If you don't know the main idea you don't know anything. Now the thing is LSAT's articulation of the main idea may not be how you or I would have written. They're going to make it a lot more difficult to get through a lot more difficult to recognize and so you want to have your own idea in mind so that at the very least you can eliminate what definitely isn't the main idea and then whatever is left even if you don't love the wording will likely be the correct answer. The right answer on LSAT reading comp is oftentimes the best of the worst. It may even be a quote unquote bad answer meaning that well it may be technically correct. It's not as precise or as clear as you or I might have done it but that's the thing about multiple choice. The answer is right in front of you and it is oftentimes the best of the worst. So if you can eliminate the other four whatever remains even if you don't love it even if you don't understand it has to be by elimination the correct answer. Now if you're one of those people like me who prefers to read things on paper rather than on a screen it may be difficult to adjust to reading difficult dense text on a screen. There are a couple of tools I really like for this. One is called Sperider S-P-R-E-E-D-E-R. The other is phrase reader. These are both free apps where you can copy paste in any text you want and then display it to yourself at different speeds. So you can put yourself on an LSAT reading comp treadmill of sorts where you increase the speed over time and make sure that you are still of course comprehending what you are reading. Now if you hate dual passages of course dual passages only showed up in June 2007 meaning that after LSAT prepped test 51 under the old system every LSAT since then roughly 40 exams worth had dual passages but the exams prior to that time did not. If you hate reading comp dual passages I totally hear you. You may want to do those either first or last in your set of four on LSAT testing. You may want to practice this while you're doing timed sections as well. A little pro tip for you is that there may sometimes be LSAT questions referring to only one of the two passages. So you may want to look at the questions quickly as a quick skim and see are there any questions relating to only passage A or passage B. If so you read passage A solve the passage A specific question then read passage B and solve the others that way you're not cluttering your mind with passage B information when you don't need any of that to help you solve passage A. Of course you are going to want to do all four passages so as you're skimming through the section looking for the dual passage to do either first or last I would not at the same time be deciding which of the long passages will I do first, second, third. Because the thing is if you're aiming for a 160 or above you're going to want to do all four passages anyway so why waste time deciding the order in which to do things. Of course dual passages are pretty easy to recognize and so I make an exception for that but when it comes to evaluating difficulty of the text or the topic or the number of questions associated if you're going to do it anyway just knock it out when you come across it. Now I'll share a few more techniques you can use for reading comprehension in just a moment but first I wanted to let you know that if you're looking for more and else it unplugged we cover this as part of the Socratic Review Method in our courses and our one-on-one coaching programs. If you're interested in finding out more you can check out the links below this video to book a call with me and my team. We'd be glad to help you out. So I wanted to end off here by sharing a couple of strategies you can use to help you get better at LSAT reading comprehension especially if you struggle with getting out what is that main idea what are the global big-picture questions. You may want to take a reading passage and rewrite the entire thing in your own words to simplify the complex language and the arguments. You want to make sure that you are identifying patterns not just in the question types that give you trouble but also the reading comprehension structures. So for example there are some structures that involve old thing updated by new thing or viewpoint number one, viewpoint number two and a reconciliation of those two viewpoints. These are just two common frameworks you'll see in LSAT reading comprehension and I often find that students don't even realize they're struggling with a certain reading comprehension structure a lot more than say the topic because they don't like natural science or whatever it is. You may also want to try simply reading the passage and solving only the global main idea questions associated with the passage as an exercise to get better at recognizing LSAT articulation of the main idea. Of course in reading comprehension as I said earlier you want to make sure that you are extracting the main idea and focusing less on the details because of course you'll be able to come back to them in the passage when you need to to help you solve a specific question. So when you're solving questions in a time setting your main idea global questions first then secondly your detail-oriented questions and finally the more inferential questions that require a bit more reading between the lines. Anyway folks that's all for now. In the meantime I will shoot you all the best and take care.