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Joshua Aldy
- Official Score
- 176
After finishing his own LSAT journey with an official score of 176, Josh attended Northwestern Pritzker School of Law where he graduated cum laude. Since before law school and ever since, he has been tutoring the LSAT and has seen his students go on to target schools all across the US, Canada, and Australia. He considers every question a student brings him a new opportunity for greater insight into the LSAT and has never stopped learning and refining as a teacher.
I always use the Blind Review score as my indicator. You can think of your Blind Review score as your Fundamentals score. It's the best you're capable of scoring on the strength of your fundamentals alone. As long as your Blind Review score is below your target score, even perfect time management won't be enough. At this stage, I recommend continuing to focus primarily on fundamentals and accuracy.
Once your BR is comfortably and consistently above your target score, though, congratulations! You have achieved the necessary fundamentals knowledge to achieve your score goal. Now, your focus needs to shift to time management strategy.
It's important to understand, though, that time management is NOT about speed. It is about efficiency. Time management strategy can be as simple or complex an area of study as you'd like to make it. You can keep it as simple as "skipping," or you can get as complex as game theory and empirical economic analysis.
A few universal basics though:
To reiterate, time management strategy is not about going fast. "Speed" is pretty far from the point. Skimming results in reading errors and bad outcomes. Of course it does. If you're not reading carefully, you should not expect to perform well on an exam testing precision understanding of linguistic, grammatical, and logical nuance. So start by reading carefully at a pace that is comfortable for you. Think about what you're reading; process what's going on. The work takes the time it takes.
The goal of time management strategy is not to compress a blind review into 35 minutes. This is one of the biggest misconceptions I see, and it was something I was hung up on for a long time in my own studies. You simply don't have time for such comprehensive solutions to every problem. You must set aside learning tools. For example, conditional mapping is an important and effective tool for learning conditional relationships and inferences. It is a really ineffective tool for testing under timed conditions. There simply isn't time. You must learn to increasingly rely on intuition, trusting your preparations to have prepared you to understand such things correctly without the need to prove it.
The goal of time management strategy is not to get every question right. You must learn to take some calculated risks. Answer Choice A look really strong? Then select it and move on without reading the remaining answers. Sometimes, you'll be wrong. But this is a fundamentals mistake, not a strategic one. We can't simplify our analysis to mere right/wrong answers. We've got to consider the cost. You must value your time as much as your points. If you spend 5 minutes taking a shot at the hardest question on the test and get it right, congratulations: You've just spent 1/7th of your time on 1/25th of your possible points. This is an unmitigated catastrophe. A wrong answer is always a fundamental mistake, but it is not always a strategic one. So make sure your strategic analysis is undertaken with the understanding that making the right strategic decision will sometimes cause you to miss a question. Sometimes making the wrong strategic decision will allow you to get the right answer.