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Drill Bank

This is a collection of drills that can be slotted in, depending on what the student is weaker in. Some notes:

Frequency: Ideally, the student does at least a couple of drills on each non-PT day.

Drills are not uniform. Some might be as short as 15 minutes, while others may take over an hour. In many cases, the duration can also be toggled to meet the student’s schedule.

This guide is broken up by LG, LR, and RC. However, some drills can probably be applied for other sections. Be creative and don’t be afraid to go off the beaten path!

RC Drills:

Low-Res Drill: This is just about working on the student’s low-res summaries. Go through the passage and focus on getting the “best” low-res summary after one read-through. Quiz yourself afterwards and see how accurate your low-res summary is.

Memory Drill: This one is a derivative of the low-res drill. Read the passage once and have a good low-res summary. Then, try to do the entire question set without looking back at the passage! This is really hard. You’ll need to rely on your low-res summary and memory to do this.

Challenge RC Drill: Design an RC section just of 4-5 star passages. Try to complete it in 35 minutes - it will force the student to effectively utilize time-management skills.

Content-Specific Drill: Self-explanatory. The student will just pick a passage type you really struggle with and do a problem set from that question.

Passage selection: during BR, highlight evidence in the text for every single AC that you picked

Wrong Answer Journal Review: Self-explanatory. The student should go over questions they’ve missed previously.

Confidence Drill: Go through an RC section and treat each answer picked as the final answer - no wavering. Don’t be sloppy but go with the first intuition on the answer. Use this to assess confidence. Scale of 1-10 how confident? Bailey’s version: Go through an RC/LR section and treat each answer picked as the final answer - no wavering. Don’t be sloppy but go with the first intuition on the answer. Use this to assess confidence. PLUS ask yourself “how confident am I in my answer, on a scale of 1 to 10?” If you’re not at a 10/10, add an additional “confidence check” to get yourself there (i.e. re-eliminate all of the other ACs by highlighting a specific word or phrase “red flag,” highlight evidence for your answer in the stimulus/passage, rephrase what you’re looking for in the right AC in your own words, etc. Get creative with these!)

Stop/Start Drill: Do an RC section where they go question-by-question (or, in the case of RC, pausing after the passage) and clock yourself. The student should pause once they have the answer and check if it was right + note what could have made them faster.

Passage Fundamentals: The student should do just the passage and push themselves to squeeze everything they can out of it and write extensive summaries on paper.

LR Drills:

Pre-Phrasing Drill: Go through a question, without looking at the answer choices, put into your own words what you’re looking for in the right answer. I use this for Flaw, SA, NA, Strength, Weaken types... all of these your first “prephrase” is the gap/hole in the argument. ONLY let yourself look at the answer choices once you have a solid prephrase (I trained myself to do this by putting a physical sticky note on my screen to cover the ACs, I would only remove it once I could write down my prephrase (gap/hole) on the sticky note)

You can either do this for a particular question type or a mixed set of problems. You can also do derivations of this for particular question types (e.g., NA questions you try to find the gap, weaken/strengthen/flaw/PSAr questions you try to find the biggest problem with the argument, etc.)

Challenge LR Drill: Design an LR section just of 4-5 star questions. Try to complete it in 35 minutes - it will force the student to effectively utilize time-management skills.

Stop/Start Drill: Do an LR section where they go question-by-question (or, in the case of RC, pausing after the passage) and clock yourself. The student should pause once they have the answer and check if it was right + note what could have made them faster.

Confidence Drill: Go through an LR section and treat each answer picked as the final answer - no wavering. Don’t be sloppy but go with the first intuition on the answer. Use this to assess confidence. Bailey’s version: Go through an RC/LR section and treat each answer picked as the final answer - no wavering. Don’t be sloppy but go with the first intuition on the answer. Use this to assess confidence. PLUS ask yourself “how confident am I in my answer, on a scale of 1 to 10?” If you’re not at a 10/10, add an additional “confidence check” to get yourself there (i.e. re-eliminate all of the other ACs by highlighting a specific word or phrase “red flag,” highlight evidence for your answer in the stimulus/passage, rephrase what you’re looking for in the right AC in your own words, etc. Get creative with these!)

Content Drill: Self-explanatory. The student should pick a question type they really struggle with and do a problem set from that question.

Wrong Answer Journal Review: Self-explanatory. Go over questions they’ve missed previously.

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