Alternative LSAT Strategy? Working back from last question to first

Takamine

Greetings fellow 7Sages

Since questions in each LR/RC section get harder, and since I start to feel mentally fatigued once I reach questions 18-onward, I was thinking of starting each LR/RC (and maybe even LG) section from the last question and working back to the first.

Has anyone tried this? Any input or advice would be much appreciated! (Sorry if this topic has already been covered).

BryantFu

sounds like an interesting experiment to try out on a prep test!

notguilty90

Hi

They don't necessarily get harder after 18. Usually the first 10 or 12 are easy, after that it gets harder but there's a fluctuation of how hard. From personal experience I can say that usually I feel like there's a curve and the hardest ones are clustered around 15-19 and the ones before and after are not so hard. If you're getting fatigued, you should work on your stamina rather than trying to look for shortcuts, try to write 4 sections back to back (start with less and work your way up). Also, you should become so good and confident in your skills that there wouldn't be any hard questions for you per se (there's obviously exceptions, but generally speaking); your approach to difficulty should be the questions that can be done fast versus those that require a longer time investment. What I can recommend to you like many others would here is to absolutely do the first 10-12 first, then you would be skipping, if you read a stimulus and can't quite get it, circle it and move on. Now I don't know how your speed is, but by doing this, you would skip harder questions instead of wasting time and possibly getting them wrong and being forced to skip the never-got-to-do easy questions. And if your speed is great and you do get to finish a section usually, then great, you would spend the extra time gained by skipping at the end to do them, and this time you have a peace of mind that you only have a couple of harder questions and won't be worrying about time. This approach is for LR.
For RC, unfortunately I can't get to all 4 so I would always do the first 2 passages first and for my 3rd I would pick the one with more questions out of the remaining 2. And for the 4th one, I would guess a single letter that had least appeared for the section.
Just passing on what has worked out for me! Best of Luck

Stevie C

Could be a recipe for bubbling errors !

Takamine

Thanks for your detailed response and helpful suggestions @notguilty90. Especially re. building stamina and circling the questions.

SherryS1

@Takamine Please post to tell us how it goes! I'd be curious to know.

I tried going backwards once for LR. It was back when I was still really struggling with time. I felt like I could power through the first ten more quickly and with greater accuracy during my final minutes than say the last ten which are objectively harder. That said, I ended up blowing more time on the last questions (that I did first) and ran out of time anyway Plus my accuracy with the last ten was worse so my overall score went down. I never tried it again but it could have just been where I was in my stage of prep that was the issue and not the tactic.

Right now, I jump around during LR some. If I hit a few back to back curve breakers between questions 15 and 20, sometimes instead of just skipping those particular questions, I'll jump to the end and work backwards. The final 5-6 questions are usually easier than the middle ones in my opinion. That said, I've never seen a section without a few 4 and 5 star questions in the final set so it's not like they're a walk in the park.

What I've found when I jump to the end in the middle of the test is that it can feel like a good reset, if I'm feeling like a section isn't going my way. It's a confidence boost to run through the last questions, since they feel more manageable. It also alleviates concerns around time as I tackle the hardest part of the test. Ie I don't feel like I have 7 questions hanging over my head as I deal with the curve breakers.

Cant Get Right

If you run out of time, do you want to run out of time on the questions you are most likely to have gotten wrong or on the ones you are most likely to have gotten correct?

jknauf

@Cant Get Right said:
If you run out of time, do you want to run out of time on the questions you are most likely to have gotten wrong or on the ones you are most likely to have gotten correct?

Agreed

Darth Jurist

I would strongly advise against this. You want to get the low hanging fruit first.

sophie74

Unlike most people have said, I really recommend this. I started going LR back to front and it really helped me. It makes the first 10 seem so much easier, and you are freshest for the hardest q's. It's worth trying on at least 3 PTs and seeing if it changes your accuracy. Then make an informed decision, rather than speculating.