Just need more practice or missing a huge technique?

[indebtmd]

So today marks the 3rd week of my TPR course (I'm scheduled for the 1st week of September so there's still 2 months until test day). A little background on where I'm at in my studies before I go on to my concern. I currently study verbal by doing 7 passages at a time out of the TPR book and timing myself for an hour as if it were an actual verbal section. When I initially started (during week 1), I was getting around 60% of the total questions right landing me in the 7ish score range. During week 2, my scores have been consistently sitting between 75%-82% of the total questions. It seems the questions that I consistently get wrong are:

Inference questions
Strengthen/weaken questions
Author most likely agrees/disagrees with type questions

Is there some type of technique to attack these questions or will it just take more practice? I'm a little concerned that I may be plateauing as well and if that's the case, would it be more beneficial to dedicate my time to other sections? Any tips to from people that do consistently well on these question types would really help!

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[NextStepTutor_2]

First, make sure you have a strong passage map with paragraph summaries. These questions always require a good understanding of the main idea of the passage and this is a reliable way to obtain that. Next, the following tips are helpful for these types of questions:

1) Rephrase what is being asked in your own words. Make sense of the question before doing anything else. The test makers like to use things like double negatives to make the question more confusing. Get rid of any of those in your rephrasing and come up with a simple, equivalent statement.

2) Come up with what you think the answer should look like before even looking at the choices. The test writers like to put down attractive wrong answers and by looking at those without first thinking about an appropriate answer, you may be influenced to think in the wrong way. This can be subconscious and the best way to avoid it is to simply formulate a good answer first.

In the end, a combination of good technique and practice is the most important so keep practicing. Ultimately, you gain the most points from post-test analysis so the more time you spend doing that, the better.