Customer Reviews

Examkrackers LSAT Reading Comprehension

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I'm going to review this book from the perspective of someone who has already done some LSAT prep and has trouble with reading comprehension because I think that's the kind of person this book appeals to primarily.

There are many reasons why a person may be doing poorly in reading comprehension.

If you had no time limit, would you be able to answer the question? Did you misread the passage? Did you misread the question? Did you comprehend the passage? The answer to these questions will determine where you will be able to gain improvement.

If you are getting questions wrong because you don't really understand what the questions are asking you, then this book will help. This book lays out the question types and helps you understand how to answer them.

However, I find that usually, this isn't most people's problem. For the most part, the difficulty of RC is time management. After the fact, a question like "the passage mentions each of the following EXCEPT" is pretty easy. You have to scan through the passage to see what it mentions and what it doesn't. Pretty easy right?

Well, when you are trying to read the passage AND answer everything in under 9 minutes, it becomes a lot tougher. A lot of gains come from learning to be more efficient in the way you recall information and spend less time going back and forth from passage to questions.

This book isn't bad. But if your primary problem is time management, I think your results with this book will be limited because this isn't what the book focuses on.

I mention that because if you're someone who has been having problems with RC and see this book and think "Yes! This will solve all of my problems", I think you might be disappointed.

Again, that is not to say it's a bad book, but if you're getting 5-6 wrong and want to get it down to 2-3, I'm not convinced this book will get you there. If you are getting 10+ wrong, this book will probably help you.

As a science/engineering student I was having more trouble with this section than others. This book did a wonderful job of introducing the different types of passages as well as the different question types. Simply knowing this information makes it much easier (and a lot faster) to analyze a passage and its questions. I highly recommend this book.

As far as "marking up the passage," I found that I did use these tricks to train myself what to pay attention to, after a few passages though, I needed only to underline or circle a few things, which added no time to my reading of the passage. Also, this book contains tactics and information on the Comparative Reading which some of the other books did not.

I worked my way through the entire book (I borrowed it from my local library), and though it is often repetitive - it is an extremely realistic way to study for this section. I couldn't be happier with my improvement.

I've never been able to understand why there was no book out there that just focuses on LSAT reading comp. I mean, this section actually has more questions than the games. I've been studying for the LSAT for a few months now and always wished there was something that could help me in this section. So I was really happy when I discovered this book.

I like how they broke things down by logical structure instead of topic (why didn't anyone else think of this?) There is a good treatment of all the different passage types and question types, and a lot of examples, including dozens of real passages. The writing style is clear and doesn't dumb things down. I recommend getting the Examkrackers complete study package and some official tests, and that's all you need.