Self-study
I recently reviewed several practice tests and noticed a pattern.
Most of my mistakes weren't coming from difficult questions. They were coming from rushing through the final few questions because I was running out of time.
It made me wonder whether the timing strategy is sometimes more important than question difficulty.
What's been more effective for you: improving speed or improving accuracy?
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4 comments
+1 to what the others said, but also low key I do LR sections backward for exactly this reason -- when I'm running low on time I'm much better at shooting from the hip on easier questions. Sorta high risk, high reward, and certainly not for everyone, but that's what I do ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ .
For starters I'd like to resist the false dichotomy of focusing on improving speed OR accuracy. If your LSAT knowledge increase, and hence your accuracy, you will be able to identify and predict correct/wrong answers in less time. Generally people are recommended to focus on understanding first, and once accuracy is achieved, then speed can be prioritized. You can't really work on speed if you can't find the right answer even going slow.
Secondly, I'd like to inquire into your method of doing your practice tests. If you are rushing to get through the last few questions in a section because of timing, you are probably missing some points at the end that you could have gotten. What I mean by this is that you probably spent time on questions that were way beyond your reach of getting right, and that cost you the chance to work on a question later that you could've solved. For example, if a question has a difficulty where 170 scorers only have a 50% chance to get it correct, and you are scoring 155, then its probably best to just move past this question right from the second you see it. This allows you the time to attempt ALL of the questions, then once you have answered all the questions you think are reasonable, you can go back and work on the hard/possibly out of reach questions with the remaining time. This will help to not leave any points on the table. It is hard sometimes to identify what questions are these hard ones, but generally it is the passages that make you go "uhhh what are you even talking about". Just skip 'em and come back when you have time. This saves you potentially wasting time attempting questions that you didn't have good odds of answering in the first place.
For me personally, there's usually 1-2 questions that I flag as time wasters, and I deal with those at the end with the remaining time, knowing my odds of correctly answering is not great. Hope that helps!
@GreyHugli Yes this is great advice! I would also add onto this with what I do. If I'm ever on a question and I reach around the 2 minute mark for that Question, I'll give it my best guess from the AC's I've narrowed it down to, flag it, and move on to the rest of the test. Doing so allows you to then revisit these questions at the end of the section with any leftover time, and often going back to these questions with a fresh mind/take will help you see things you didn't see before. If you don't have leftover time, now you can be grateful you didn't waste your time on that question and take time from the Qs later in the test that you WERE able to answer. That being said, it is a very nice place to be when you can consistently do this strategy, ending each section with around 4-6 minutes of extra time, as that is more than enough to revisit a few harder flagged questions and give them a fresh chance.
Hey! In tutoring, we always use this saying: slow is smooth, smooth is fast. You work on the content stuff first. Once you have a good handle on that, you introduce the timing/strategy elements. In other words: improving accuracy will improve speed. If you confidently know a question, it's going to take you a lot less time than if you're waffling or second guessing. That being said, timing and strategizing are big factors on this test! Once confident about content, you can be free to start playing around with different strategies.
Sorry for the unsolicited advice! Sometimes we can't help ourselves