Reading Comprehension Resource Collection

Hi, I am Indian preparing for GMAT. I have seen Gmat ninja mention LSAT as a good source of practicing for CR and RC and LSAT prep books offer some of the difficult material with lots questions for practice. But LSAT books are not easily available in India and take over a month to ship. Is there any other alternative?

#GMATNinja #LSATforGMAT #charlesbibilos

I like the hashtags!

You can get several free official LSAT tests on the LSAC LawHub website, and at the same place you can purchase 70 LSAT tests for $99.

One note: Skip the "Analytical Reasoning" sections, which are not GMAT-related at all. On the Reading Comprehension and Logical Reasoning (aka Critical Reasoning) sections, don't worry about the 35-minute time limit! That's blazing fast, and MUCH faster than you'll need to be for GMAT verbal.

I hope that helps!

Hahaha, thanks for hashtags 🙂. This definitely helps and will give them a shot. Thanks for the guidance!

Posted from my mobile device

They're all official RC passages of some kind. The vast majority are from the OG and verbal guide, but there might be an occasional LSAT passage in there, and maybe a few from the official mba.com practice tests. But they're all high-quality passages from official sources.

Enjoy!

I Got inspired by this story, posted by GMATNinja.

https://gmatninja.wordpress.com/2012/10 ... questions/

I am a non-native speaker and I have been going at LSAT from the beginning of the preparation.
I have finished a total of 1087 LSAT Questions (have a subscription of LawHub online for this).
I also finished close to 500+ LSAT LR questions.

Across all practice average accuracy is around 75% for LSAT, now a days for untimed I am at 90% accuracy as I can read the pattern easily and know the trap choices.

But now I am struggling with timing, it almost takes an hour and 30 minutes for me to finish 27 LSAT questions ... how do I bring this down to 1 hour or less? I need some serious advice ...

I have put close to 1000 hours already (have everything logged in my timesheet, pure study time, no phones, no web browsing etc.) since September 2020 and still pushing hard as I am closing the gap now, so need some direction from you guys, please help!

Thanks.

Whoa, that's some serious dedication, IN2MBB2PE! I'm not surprised -- you're obviously a familiar, hard-working member of the community here. But it's still one heck of a thing when you hit the 1000-hour mark. It's truly impressive.

Depending on your score goal, your accuracy is already approaching the right range. As a VERY broad rule of thumb, if you're able to get at least 80% of LSAT CR and RC questions correct, you're on track for a 40V (or better, if your accuracy is higher than 80% on the LSAT sets).

The bad news is that I also like to see you get through those LSAT sets (roughly 25 questions each) in under 60 minutes. But I think you knew that already.

The really hard thing is that there are a ton of different reasons why your times might be so high, and I can't even begin to guess which of these is the issue for you. A few thoughts, in case they spark something for you:

• Failing to do each set with test-like intensity. (Seems unlikely for you, but it's a common problem.)
• Obsessing over every little word of the passages, when you don't really need to. You'll see plenty of proselytizing on this in our RC videos.
• Other inefficiencies in your process for tackling passages/questions -- which could mean all sorts of things. We try like crazy to teach efficient processes in all of our verbal videos, but it's impossible for us to know which things are or aren't working right for you.
• Fundamentally slow reading... and that would be a bad thing that can't really be fixed easily in the short run.
• Fatigue, burnout, low blood sugar, or some other "external" cause. (Rarely the entire problem, but often part of it. You're a slower reader when you haven't slept well, right?)

I wish I could tell you which of these things is happening, but I can't possibly know that, unfortunately. Odds are pretty good that it's a combination of several of these factors, though I'm skeptical of the first factor in your case, just because you seem to be so thoughtful about practicing systematically. But I could be wrong about that.

Most test-takers with verbal speed problems automatically assume that the problem is that that they're slow readers, and that isn't necessarily the case. It's often part of the problem, but it's rarely the whole story.

In your case, here's my (admittedly somewhat wild) guess: you're a pretty accurate reader, but since you're a non-native speaker, I wonder if you're focusing a bit TOO hard on the details. As a native speaker, if I struggle with a word or a sentence or a paragraph (and that happens to me WAY more often than you might expect!), I'll generally try to work around the part that's difficult for me. Can I still understand what's going on? On RC, do I still understand WHY that paragraph is there, and how it fits into the author's argument? Cool -- then I'll probably move on. But non-native speakers are often conditioned to hyper-focus in those situations, and that's not always productive or efficient.

Again, I might be way off here. And it's very possible that your reading speed isn't great, too. But I would recommend taking a good, hard look at your process, both when you read passages and when you start eliminating answer choices: are you trying to squeeze every little detail out of the passage, at the expense of the big picture? Are you obsessing over answer choices when you might be better served by just picking something and moving on? Those are likely to be the easiest things to fix -- but still not easy.

But again: I'm still guessing. Think of it as food for thought -- unless you're working with a tutor, you'll ultimately need to do a whole lot of self-reflection to find process inefficiencies or issues with your energy levels. And that's admittedly a very challenging undertaking.

I hope that helps a bit, and keep us posted on your progress!

Thanks GMATNinja, thanks for taking the time from your busy schedule to reply me, I truly appreciate that. I think you hit couple things that might be the issue for me for Verbal and I realized that today when I took my first GMAC Official PT1 and got crushed with 610 (Q43, V31, IR 3.0). I focus too much into the details of every single word and ponder to understand before moving on ..... that's the main culprit of my timing problem. Other problem for me is I have practiced way too much untimed and it put my brain at Ease, so I recommend based on my experience, Practice first timed, then practice untimed the same question that you got wrong but always practice timed first time. I think practicing untimed from the get go is not a good advice to also deal with test anxieties that comes with timed tests.

As I said, my main purpose of taking the PT1 was to understand where I am lacking and to draw some actions prior to taking PT2 (Which I do not want to waste unless I can get to where I need to, which is at least a 720-760 ... yes ... I know it's a dream for now ... but I want to shoot for Mars to end up at the ISS.

Attached is a detailed analytics that I put together based on my PT1 performance (Despite my basic chart knowledge, I still got IR 3.0 :p), I can gauge the following -

1. I made a mistake not using Ear plugs (I am going to use that for every test going forward), in the middle of the verbal test my neighbor started his lawn more while I was trying to focus on CR but no excuse as I did most of my practice on LSAT RC during my 1 hour one-way train ride to work

2. Crammed/reviewed formulas from 7AM-11AM and then going for the PT1 (I should have started at first thing in the morning after light warm up, my brain was foggy by the middle part of the Verbal

3. As can be seen from the Verbal performance, I did fairly decent until the last quarter of the test, this is when the time pressure got me SIX questions wrong in a ROW, causing a total of 8/9 last questions wrong and I believe this brought down my overall score down because I did get lot of really hard SC right in the middle part of the test, these difficulties are based on GMAT Club difficulties and percent correct by the users.

4. For Quant, I got caught up with 4-5 problems where I spent 4+ minutes each and ended up getting all of them wrong. For many quant I had no clue how to approach the problem. I did TTP 3X all examples (Easy/Medium/Hard), have a 80%+ on all Medium questions across the board. I think the problem was I did not solve enough OG or Hard TTP problems. So every time, I saw a hard question, I had to kill more time or bounce and ultimately paid the price.

5. Focus was a huge issue during the second half of the Verbal, I felt I was lost, I was reading stuff but I was not understanding what I was reading (maybe a second language speaker problem, I do not know), I was literally being a news presenter reciting what I see without having any clue of what is going on, this is when I got the 9/10 questions wrong. I did meditate a week leading into the PT. I even went out for a run before the exam, cold shower, had the right food and the meditate just before I started the test but then could not keep my composure during game time.

Enough of debugging, here's what I am thinking in terms of actions for next 3-4 weeks before I try PT2:

Quant (Q43 -> Q49-Q50):

1. Being an Engineering grad, I think I can improve here. I cannot aim anything below Q49, there's just no way. I will finish all TTP Hard problems timed. The ones I got wrong I will do untimed and them again on a separate review note book. Then I will start doing GMAT Club Quant CATs on Medium and Hard levels (3-4 sets at least prior to taking PT2 and after finishing all TTP Hard problems) MartyTargetTestPrep JeffTargetTestPrep ScottTargetTestPrep - I am thinking this should put an end to the Quant stuff for me, I did not have a whole lot of problem managing time with Quant but the accuracy was just not there for me. Also I found there was way too many questions from Function, which is an area not much covered in TTP lessons, might need to beef up the theories in that area. But as shown in the analysis - Function & Sequences, Geometry, Statistics, Inequalities are the sections I got most number of errors, so I will go all out with those and the rest, that is basically the plan with Quant.

Verbal (V31 -> V40): GMATNinja boss please suggest if I need to modify anything further AndrewN old friend please jump in as necessary, you are an angel ....

Reading Comp (64% Accuracy)

1. I need to get back to reading - Everyday read 1 article from Economist and 1 from National Geography, read for PURPOSE. Once the GMAT started and the clock hit, I forgot to read for purpose. I was just plain reading ... that hurt my accuracy ... I got 5 RC Questions WRONG!
2. I am going to one LSAT RC Passage each day at least and solve one full set under 1 hour mark during the weekend
3. Read for PURPOSE, I do not know what happened. As per my process, I always read 1 paragraph and reread it to myself and did it after each paragraph and once I finish reading the whole thing. Once the test started this was out the door, so I need to get back to my process and force myself to READ FOR PURPOSE during practice.

Critical Reasoning - (50% Accuracy)

1. I had 75-80% across ALL OG and LSAT for LR but I did not practice this much leading up to the test as I initially prepared a lot on CR as this was my weakest area back in 2020 when I started preparing and then solved a total of 1000 questions, 600+ of those are LSAT as I ran out of OG CR questions and made error log for every single one of them! So I will get back on swing practicing sets of 10 under 20 minutes from LSAT every other day (No point solving the whole set given GMAT only tests 10 per verbal section, it will save me some time as well) - This is my plan for CR

2. My average time with CR was 1:50. I think this was not enough. Although I need to practice to be under 2 min per CR. I need to calm myself down for accuracy on CR. So I need to somehow spent an extra 10-20 secs per CR Question.

Sentence Correction - (62% Accuracy - 1:45/QN)

1. I think I spent way too much time per Question of SC, I need to bring this to 1:30 and practice at 1:20 under timed condition.
2. I read both the Nirvana SC Book by EducationAisle and TTP theories - TWICE and I practiced all Main OG Questions (200+), plus watched GMATNinja videos (all of them, currently doing the 24-hour marathon). I also made notes while doing the videos and basically went into gmatclub for each of the questions that Charles explained, I had a 67% accuracy on all of the 75 problems solved by Charles on the 13 videos so far. So now I think I plan to redo all the OG 200 Main guide questions, especially the one I got wrong, try to do them under 1 minute. Once that's done I will focus on starting with the Verbal guide, maybe ten questions at a time and thoroughly reviewing them. I think I am not always understanding the meaning based approach, tried a lot of different things and kind of confused how to approach. My approach was to go for those definite errors of 7 categories (Pronoun, Modifier, S-V, Parallelism, Comparison, Tense etc.) > then read horizontally first and then look for splits and at the end go with meaning. It yielded good results at the first 3/4 of the tests, but screwed me up with timing. The process was right but I could not execute properly under timed condition. I am left with OG Verbal questions and advanced questions, should I use these 150 now or just redo the ones I got wrong and disect everything out of them first before I approach the remaining 150 questions, what should I do on SC? This is my biggest worry right now ...

Some more actionable items -
1. Continue meditation (maybe go from 10 minutes to 20 minutes at a time to improve deep focus)
2. Long walks to calm myself down
3. Tutor for Verbal > I might just need some extra help from professionals to push the verbal barrier. It's just like going to a doctor, you can wait and suffer or seek professional help. I have already sacrificed 1000 hours that I could have spent with my loved ones, A damn MBA takes 2 years to finish and here I am spending over 2 years doing GMAT ....

For tutoring options, I am considering GMATNinja & GmatTutorKnight, depending on who is available at short notice!

Also big shout out to Target Test Guys for responding to me on the chat, I appreciate you guys very much, let's get to work!

Thank you GMAT Ninja.

Does anyone know where to find the LSAT RC / CR content.

Also, I think we said that do the LSAT material in under an hour? I think the format of the LSAT has evolved as well?


Thank you.

You can access LSAT materials online at LawHub, or you can buy books here (or on Amazon or other book retailers). This book would be a good choice.

The LSAT has changed a bit, but the timing per section should remain the same. The older tests (pretests #1-50, roughly) are marginally better for GMAT prep, but the new ones are okay as well. They still challenge your reading and reasoning skills in the same way as the older LSAT tests.

Enjoy!

Hello thank you, I got the book with 10 tests, 29 -38 so that should give me a start.

I will check out LawHub now thanks for your response, I appreciate you a lot.

Thanks,
K