Through our anecdotal and entirely unscientific survey of LSAT students over the years, we’ve noticed an interesting pattern. The Logical Reasoning section—with all its flaws—is not quite as fearsome as Reading Comprehension. In fact, three types of passages almost always give their readers the most trouble in their pursuit of a high LSAT score: passages about science, the law, and the arts.
In our three-part series, we discuss what makes these passages so difficult and what we can do to make them a little less formidable. We began by focusing on passages about science. Then we discussed passages about the law. Here, we’re concluding the series by looking at passages about the arts, and offering some final advice about difficult LSAT Reading Comprehension passages in general.
Why Are LSAT Reading Comprehension Art Passages So Difficult?
We’ve discussed the reasons why science- and law-themed Reading Comp passages can be tough—most pre-law types don’t have a great understanding of how those things work. But why are passages about the arts supposedly difficult? I mean, most of us have at least a passing interest in some art, even if our aesthetic tastes don’t get much more refined than Netflix’s original content and the top songs on the music streaming platform of our choice. Plus, the arts are supposed to be enjoyed. And yet, art-themed passages are among the most reviled on this test.
Basically, it comes down to using big words to convey relatively simple ideas. This, of course, is a favorite trick of those who write the Logical Reasoning questions as well. So, how can we deal with these over-written passages?
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Don’t Get Lost in the Details
Try your best not to get lost in the big words. Don’t be scared off by them. Use context clues. Generally speaking, just knowing whether the author’s general opinion of the subject matter is positive or negative is all you need. However, you should be dutifully looking up every word you don’t know when you’re reviewing these passages. Expanding your vocabulary can only help you on the LSAT, in law school, and in your career.
Find the Main Point
Still, if the morass of verbose, abstruse, recondite, or otherwise grandiloquent language still presents an issue for you, fret not. The art passages tend to reiterate the same themes. Historically, we’d get a ton of passages about some unconventional artist or group of artists doing something wacky with their painting, literature, music, sculpture…You name it. Nearly every time, the author would—as the online might say— stan the unconventional artists and the innovative thing they were doing.
In such passages, there were usually two crucial points you had to catch to answer most questions:
- What were the key characteristics of the art? And, on a related note, what made it unique or otherwise noteworthy?
- What were the author’s opinions of that art?
So, to answer the questions on such passages, just make sure you have a very solid understanding of what the artists were doing, how their art was different from the conventional approach of their time, and what the author thinks about that art. It can actually help to imagine what the art looks like.
Sometimes these passages focus on the nature of the art. Some passages have discussed different artistic media. Others have discussed certain artistic genres or, in a meta twist, what defines genres themselves. These passages are less about individual works of art or artists, and more about the formal characteristics or rules that define these genres, what artists operating within these genres must consider, or how to evaluate art produced within these genres.
These passages are less predictable than the older passages about unorthodox artists, but tracking the author’s attitude is still important. We recommend keeping track of the author’s attitude by underlining the words that convey the author’s opinion as you read. The rest of the questions might ask about how the passage is structured. You can keep track of that by making brief notes about the role played by each paragraph in your provided scratch paper.
A Foolproof Strategy
So these posts provided are our recommendations on how to endure the brutal passages about science, the law, and the arts. However, I must end with a caveat: I can’t guarantee that the science, legal, or art passage on your exam will all conform to the recent trends mentioned in these posts. Nor can I guarantee that the specific pointers included in these posts will apply to those passages on your exam.
But there is a strategy that I promise will help you on any passage, even the most brutally difficulty passages on science, the law, the arts, or whatever else. This strategy has a 100% success rate, and I can guarantee that it will be applicable on your exam.
That strategy? Slow the hell down as you read the passage.
Now, I know advising you to slow down on a timed test may seem counterintuitive. It may even make me sound like I’m engaging in educational malpractice, and that I’m disqualified from offering any further advice on this test. But before dismissing this advice, let’s do some math related to the time you actually have on a Reading Comprehension section.
Most Reading Comprehension sections have about 4500 words in total, including the passages, the questions, and all the answer choices. If your reading speed is about 300 words per minute, and there are about 4500 words in this section, it should take you about fifteen minutes to read the entire Reading Comp section, cover to cover. You have thirty-five minutes to complete this section. Ergo, you have about twenty extra minutes you can use to—say it with me —slow down.
The reason people experience timing issues on Reading Comp is not because they don’t have enough time to read or process the information. It’s because they don’t know the answers to the questions. They go back to the passage and re-read large swaths of it trying to locate the answer. That’s the real time suck.
When people try to speed up on Reading Comp, the most common strategy is to read the passage more quickly. This is a misguided strategy. For one, it’s an attempt to fix a non-existent problem. Reading faster can hamper your accuracy, which means you’ll likely lose points in the end.
The answers to the questions are invariably in the passage itself. So, you should read that passage slowly and carefully. Try to use some of the tips in these posts on the inevitable science, law, and arts passages; odds are that at least some of them will help you. But most importantly, take your time to make sure you understand the passage. It’ll pay off in the end.
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