Question about speed and memorization

Hi Sebastian! Let me just welcome you to 7sage and LSAT learning! I hope you're ready to get your brain boggled in ways you can't imagine! But I promise every day there is a small victory!

Regarding point one, if you started about a month ago, there really is no rush! I usually leave about 5-6 months to study for the LSAT (I'm taking my third in June), and usually one or two months is enough for the Core Curriculum. So I'd suggest first to really goin through the core curriculum as just a guideline for how to think and approach questions.

You also mentioned that 2-4 minutes per question was your average time. I'd recommend that you cut that down to almost a minute a question.

When I approach an LR question, the first thing I do is read the question stem, just so that I know what the question type is or what logic is needed.

Then, I go to the stimulus and look ONLY for the conclusion. Most times, the answer choices will be reacting to the conclusion in the stimulus, so while the question type is still fresh in my head, I like to relate it ASAP to the conclusion in the stimulus.

After the conclusion, I look for the premises. Almost like my inner dialogue is saying "This is what the author is saying, but why does he say that?"

Next, I try to identify the argument structure. Really, I try not to draw diagrams or write it down, since that eats up time. If I find myself that I need to draw it out I usually flag it and move on. Link assumption questions in my opinion take a while and are pretty time consuming, so if I don't understand the structure of the argument easily I usually skip it and revisit later. A second strategy that I do is negation test, but I usually only do that for necessary assumption questions (eg. Which one of the following, if assumed, is required by the argument).

With this approach, I usually finish LR sections with an average of 1 minute per question, with at least 5 minutes of extra time to spare.

For your second point, I'd recommend memorizing the 4 Groups of indicator words for link assumption. Those words like All, Only, Unless, and None. Honestly, just memorizing and understanding that section alone saves me so much time in Link Assumption questions (for more details, you can look at my other comments, there was one where I went into the 4 groups more in-depth regarding a question)

I'd additionally recommend having contrapositives and De Morgan's law memorized like the back of your hand. It's underrated IMO, and honestly I think it's key since a lot of 4-5 star difficulty questions revolves around using contrapositives or tricky traps.

Finally, I'd recommend that you come up with your own concepts and quick tips! One of mine is that if I see a sentence that goes "No X, unless Y", I just read that as X -> Y. Having that rule reduces all that time I would have needed to say "Okay No X, means group 4, unless Y means group 3... so that's /Y -> /X... and then the contrapositive is X->Y."

And third and maybe unrelated? Don't be afraid to flag questions and skip them to return to them later. It saves so much time and brain juice.

TLDR: Welcome to the LSAT! I hope you stay for as long as you need to lol, we're all in this together! If you have any questions, you can just respond here, or even shoot me a DM! (Just figured that out a couple days ago). I'd be glad to maybe go over some LR questions with you to kind of give some live talk through about my message!

2 comments

Marcus Tsang
2 days ago

Hi Sebastian! Let me just welcome you to 7sage and LSAT learning! I hope you're ready to get your brain boggled in ways you can't imagine! But I promise every day there is a small victory!
Regarding point one, if you started about a month ago, there really is no rush! I usually leave about 5-6 months to study for the LSAT (I'm taking my third in June), and usually one or two months is enough for the Core Curriculum. So I'd suggest first to really goin through the core curriculum as just a guideline for how to think and approach questions.
You also mentioned that 2-4 minutes per question was your average time. I'd recommend that you cut that down to almost a minute a question.
When I approach an LR question, the first thing I do is read the question stem, just so that I know what the question type is or what logic is needed.
Then, I go to the stimulus and look ONLY for the conclusion. Most times, the answer choices will be reacting to the conclusion in the stimulus, so while the question type is still fresh in my head, I like to relate it ASAP to the conclusion in the stimulus.
After the conclusion, I look for the premises. Almost like my inner dialogue is saying "This is what the author is saying, but why does he say that?"
Next, I try to identify the argument structure. Really, I try not to draw diagrams or write it down, since that eats up time. If I find myself that I need to draw it out I usually flag it and move on. Link assumption questions in my opinion take a while and are pretty time consuming, so if I don't understand the structure of the argument easily I usually skip it and revisit later. A second strategy that I do is negation test, but I usually only do that for necessary assumption questions (eg. Which one of the following, if assumed, is required by the argument).
With this approach, I usually finish LR sections with an average of 1 minute per question, with at least 5 minutes of extra time to spare.
For your second point, I'd recommend memorizing the 4 Groups of indicator words for link assumption. Those words like All, Only, Unless, and None. Honestly, just memorizing and understanding that section alone saves me so much time in Link Assumption questions (for more details, you can look at my other comments, there was one where I went into the 4 groups more in-depth regarding a question)
I'd additionally recommend having contrapositives and De Morgan's law memorized like the back of your hand. It's underrated IMO, and honestly I think it's key since a lot of 4-5 star difficulty questions revolves around using contrapositives or tricky traps.
Finally, I'd recommend that you come up with your own concepts and quick tips! One of mine is that if I see a sentence that goes "No X, unless Y", I just read that as X -> Y. Having that rule reduces all that time I would have needed to say "Okay No X, means group 4, unless Y means group 3... so that's /Y -> /X... and then the contrapositive is X->Y."
And third and maybe unrelated? Don't be afraid to flag questions and skip them to return to them later. It saves so much time and brain juice.
TLDR: Welcome to the LSAT! I hope you stay for as long as you need to lol, we're all in this together! If you have any questions, you can just respond here, or even shoot me a DM! (Just figured that out a couple days ago). I'd be glad to maybe go over some LR questions with you to kind of give some live talk through about my message!

3
DannySmall
3 days ago

What was your diagnostic? Lower diagnostics tend to get more help memorizing methods. There’s a lot to learn, and some people already intuitively know what they’re doing

1

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