The LSAT reading comprehension test is one of the three major sections of the LSAT test, and it is the most overlooked. First of all, when you compare it with the tests in other sections, the Logic Games, and the Logical Reasoning sections, you should notice that the answers in this section are easier to come by, and that you’ve already taken dozens of reading comprehension tests before, from the ACT and SAT to everyday English tests given by all of your high school teachers.
That doesn’t mean that the Reading Comprehension test should be ignored, however. Actually, it means just the opposite; with a few LSAT reading comprehension tips in hand, you can actually improve your score more drastically in this section than in any other.
LSAT Reading Comprehension Tips – Practice
The first step is to try and find a good LSAT reading comprehension book, and practice. While there are many options the LSAT Reading Comprehension Bible is our favorite. If you cannot get your hands on that, try to find either a similar book, or even an ACT or GRE review book that contains similar small reading passages with a question and answer section afterwards. While they won’t be exactly the same, either in context or in difficulty level, the fact is that almost all of these tests use fairly similar passages, and the kinds of questions that they’ll ask will be almost the same. Doing plenty of LSAT reading comprehension practice questions will be necessary for success.
LSAT Reading Comprehension Tips – Main Ideas
The second step is to quickly forget details while reading and to focus in on the key main points. The details aren’t the primary information you’ll be asked about in the question section, which is where you score all of your points. Instead, you’ll be asked to pick out the main ideas in every section, and combine them all together to make sense out of the whole passage. If you have a history passage, the main ideas are usually not about dates, battles, or generals, but what the consequences of the war were to the people in power. For literature passages, it’s not about the relationships between characters that matters, but what they did, and how it affected everyone else in the passage.
LSAT Reading Comprehension Tips – Prediction
Third, read critically and carefully, identifying the key words in sentences and trying to use them to predict what the author will say next. Words like “because”, “therefore”, and “thus” are all interchangeable, and mean basically the same thing, that there is a cause-effect relationship between these two parts of the passages. If you can think carefully and quickly as you read, sometimes you can very easily guess or predict the next the part of the sentence before it comes, and if that is the case, you can skim the passage until you get to some new information, greatly increasing your reading speed. Using keywords that identify where information is, and underlining or circling them as you go can also help you by creating a map that can point you towards where to find specific information in the questions. If a question asks you for a reason, you could look back at all of the cause-effect words that you’ve circled and jump directly to where the information is kept.
LSAT Reading Comprehension Tips – Time Management
Fourth, budget time for all of the reading passages, and therefore, all of the questions. In each passage, there are easy questions, and hard ones, and spending too long on a single passage means that you’re missing out on some very easy points from the other reading passages. Keeping yourself under two minutes of reading time is by far the most important part of this; you don’t get points for reading, so use all of the speed reading techniques in your repertoire to help you overcome this difficult challenge.
If you can do these four simple things on the LSAT reading comprehension test, then you have a great chance of increasing your score. Using these LSAT reading comprehension tips, you should have no problems getting into the best of the best law schools.