Hey all,

I've been gradually improving on RC over the last 10 PTs (-6 to -8) to (-3 to -5) by spending more time upfront understanding the passage content/structure/emphasis and less time wastefully deliberating over answer choices. Generally, I feel pretty efficient about how much time I spend on each question based on the question type and its respective difficulty.

However, I notice that for harder meaning/synonym and author's attitude questions, I find myself spending a longer period of time debating answer choices (~1 min+) than I should be (~30 sec). For author's attitude questions, I circle key words that reflect the author's opinion as I read the passage and write an A next to the longer parts of the author's opinion. For meaning/synonym questions, my strategy is to replace the word in the stimulus at its respective location with the answer choices and see if it fits.

Usually, 2-3 of the answer choices can be easily eliminated, but when the remaining two answer choices have the correct type of tone (i.e. both positive/negative) and only differ in degree, I end up spending way too much time debating between the two by looking at the passage for textual evidence and eventually end up going with my gut. I know JY's advice for difficult RC questions is to cut your losses, go with you gut, and rack up points on easier questions, but I feel like there's a better way to approach these questions more confidently to minimize time spent and improve accuracy.

How do you guys approach these question types?

Hello,

First, I should note that I currently alternate between bubbling after each page and bubbling after circling all of my answers in the test booklet, depending on how confident I feel about the previous 5-10 questions I answered. During timed PTs, I've noticed that I occasionally lose track of which question I'm supposed to be bubbling and make an error that I then have to spend additional time fixing as I finish double checking everything.

Throughout high school and college, whenever I took timed multiple choice tests, I developed a strategy of writing down my answer in a larger size on the left side of each question's answer choices. When it was time to start bubbling answers on the scantron, this allowed me to instantly see the answer for each question and easily memorize the next sequence of answers for the 3-5 questions on every page. I found it to be much more efficient and accurate than tracking the circled answer for each question and going back and forth between the test and scantron.

I never had a professor suspect me of helping someone else cheat (most likely because the multiple versions of an exam were strategically distributed, so copying my answers would be pointless) nor question me about the purpose of annotating my answers like this. Because I am very comfortable with the aforementioned bubbling strategy, I think it would help me keep better track of the question I'm bubbling and significantly reduce the time I spend bubbling answers. Obviously, I want to be sure that I am allowed to do this on test day. After looking at the "Misconduct and Irregularities" page on the LSAC's website, it specifies that "copying or sharing information, or any other form of cheating, on the LSAT" is considered a misconduct/irregularity. I have been unable to find a clear-cut answer about whether a test administrator would assume my bubbling strategy to be some type of cheating. Could such a strategy be considered to be a form of "copying" or "sharing information" by a test administrator or be flagged for some other reason by the LSAC? . If anyone could help clarify this for me, I would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks!

Matt