Saving time-searching for conclusion first

tulacarini

Hi, just joined 7Sage and had a quick question that I thought I would try to clear up before the LSAT on Saturday! (:/ pretty nervous).

I've been studying on my own for a while and have made pretty good progress in terms of where I am now and where I started. Everything that I've read, whether here, a Kaplan source, or other test prep materials suggest that you find the conclusion first for the LR questions. Now I've digested this and if you hand me a question I can point out the conclusion and premise(s) without any problem usually. What I'm curious about is, for those that are scoring really well on the LR sections (like let's say no more that -3/4 per section) or finish them with a lot of spare time, or both if you're an LR beast, do you actually go into the question, having read the question stem, and just first look for the conclusion and circle, underline, mental note whatever, and THEN read the rest?

What I've been doing, and I've improved but I still cut it really close to time in the LR sections (and I think this is partly because of getting stuck on long time sucking questions or when I have those epic mind civil wars over two remaining answer choices), is I just read the whole stimulus and just make a note of what is background/premise and what is conclusion. I don't actively SEARCH for a conclusion indicating word, read the conclusion and then read the rest. Just read it all the way through once, and maybe sometimes I have to go back and reread a line or two once I've identified the conclusion/premise.

I know it's probably not the wisest thing to try to switch this up before Saturday. But I've been wondering if the hard practicing suggested in the beginning of learning how to tackle LR questions with drills on Conclusion and Premise identification is just for you to understand the difference in the beginning or if actually helps with speed/accuracy if you just kind of chop up the stimulus like that.

Anyways, any thoughts/advice would be great. It would be nice to reduce my missed questions in LR for Saturday, even missing 3-4 less than I am right now could realistically put me in the low 170s which would be lovely. In addition to practicing for the last days of keeping mindful of timing, not getting stuck and, for the most part, going with intuition for those answer choices you bounce back and forth between, anything to help me anchor down these sections a bit more would be amazing.

Cheers to everyone taking the test on Saturday!

godawgs24

I've been doing pretty well on LR so far, missing an average of three or so. My thought process is I usually read the question stem to know what I'm looking for (whether the passage is an argument or not). If yes, then I make a small mark of where the conclusion is and the supporting premises, that is the authors argument, so the stuff that you need to pay most attention to. The rest of the sentences may or may not help with helping you understand the argument better. And then I ask myself, how can this argument be wrong or what is the author assuming? I find that forcing myself to evaluate the argument before looking at the answer choices makes it easier to eliminate wrong answers. If you spend more time making sure you have a solid grasp of the argument in the stimulus, it's a lot easier to get through the answer choices faster. I know it's natural to want to go directly to the answer choices after reading, but try taking a few seconds to fully understathe nd what the argument is saying, because it will save you time instead of having to always go back and re-read stimulus. Good luck Saturday!