Self-study
Hello,
About 25 days into studying for the September + October LSAT. 60% through the foundations course, I genuinely feel like I am understanding most of the concepts (Lawgic the most challenging for me). I find I get a bunch of questions wrong in the drills because I don't read carefully enough and I am trying to move quickly. I don't know if it's my own impatience and limited time to study, but I want to make sure this doesn't continue on to when I am testing. Does anyone have tips for how to read more carefully while still answering the questions quick enough? It just scares me that going slow I will never be able to speed back up quickly enough to answer all the questions in a set in time.
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3 comments
I think you hone the skill through drilling. You should read the question stem first, and let that dictate your strategy on every question. Is this happening for you on LR or RC? There are different strategies for each, but on LR you'll learn a bit by question type. For example, "main conclusion" questions oftentimes don't even require you to substantively understand what the passage is saying, just to use keywords from sentences to figure out what the purpose of each sentence is and then pull out the MC. On parallel reasoning questions, you can reject some answers if you just see that the premise or conclusion of the argument doesn't match up to the stimulus (i.e. stimulus says "some X, some Y, therefore all A"; answer choice says "all X, all Y, therefore some A"). I guess it's more about honing the strategy of where you can read quickly or slowly.
Until you get to that point, it's best to drill without a timer and just get to the point of being able to answer the questions correctly and deeply understand a question type. Speed builds in naturally from there. Don't sweat it for the first few months, you've got plenty of time to prepare.
For RC, I found the LSAT Lab RC video curriculum to be particularly helpful. They have modules on how to read efficiently and annotate effectively so you both are comprehending the passages without spending too much cognitive load remembering/getting bogged down in tiny details.
@sagely Great advice and appreciate the link, thank you!
I'm in the same boat so dw. What I've found helps is to try and get the questions CORRECT first and then speed will come later. Remember, the LSAT is less knowledge focused and more skill focused. It's kind of like a jigsaw puzzle. If you do enough of them in a row, then eventually you develop tactics naturally that make you solve them faster and faster. I work mostly on untimed for right now and I will start adding in more timed stuff as I improve.
You could try what I call "slow mode" drills:
Pick an area you need to work on and do a set untimed. As you go through things, write down in a journal in pen or pencil why you think each answer is right/wrong. Not just "A is wrong cause it seems incorrect," but more like "A is wrong because it is talking about the fruitcakes flavor while the author is arguing about the baking methods to make said fruitcakes."