Overcoming the difficulty of employing a skipping strategy

NotMyName

It's a tough thing to do. All of the voices in my head (and there are lots!) tell me "just stick with it a few more seconds" or "if you're going to answer all the questions anyway, just do it now". Not to mention the time lapse one can easily undergo during a given question: "Oh my. It's been 3 minutes? It felt like 30 seconds". Employing a skipping strategy requires LOTS of discipline and practice. My goal is to skip a question without any anxiety. In fact, I want to skip with the same confidence I experience when answering a MBT in 30s. After all, we should be proud of a decisive skip. If you're not sure why this is the case, check out this 7Sage blog post https://7sage.com/why-you-must-skip-questions-on-the-lsat/

Here is how I am overcoming this difficulty and establishing a 25 questions in 25m strategy.

I'm out of the CC and drilling the bundle. For LR, I am doing "timed" sections with a stopwatch to identify weaknesses which I'll eventually drill specifically. Because I'm using the bundle, I've seen almost all of these questions from the CC and performed detailed question analysis for any that gave me difficulty. So, I don't need to skip THAT many. Probably 3-5 per section. This allows me to dip my tow into the skipping strategy and build a foundation for it prior to PTing. It feels great to have 10 minutes to answer 5 questions (at the most) that I've read through and chose not to answer. That second read-through usually leads to the "click" which wasn't there during my first read and I finish questions in a minute or less. Then I even have time to review questions that I did answer but wasn't 100% on.

This approach is in its infancy, but I am feeling very comfortable with it. I am finding that I still have trouble skipping early questions because I feel like early questions shouldn't give me difficulty (fallacy) and I am not in a skipping rhythm. By halfway through the section, skipping is much more comfortable.

OK so those are my skipping training wheels. Maybe some of you are in a similar boat and find some use in this. Or maybe you've got your own style for skipping and would like to share. I'd love to hear about it.

AllezAllez21

I just reviewed my first video recorded LR section. My biggest takeaway, and this might not apply to other people, is that by spinning my wheels further on a question, I am really just solidifying my incorrect thought process and if anything am likely to choose a wrong answer or get nowhere.

For most questions on LR, you read and emphasize the right things, think about those right things in the right way, and you get the answer relatively quickly. I find that if I don't get an answer in under a minute, it probably means I've read something wrong, or emphasized the wrong part of the stimulus (1:20 for the harder questions). Therefore, spending more time on that question--at that moment--is not productive because I'm still using the incorrect interpretation to try to get to the right answer.

So, I am going to really try to just get the hell out of there after 1:20ish. I don't need to reinforce almost certainly incorrect thinking on the question. Move on before I am biased towards the wrong interpretation of a stimulus. Then give my brain a rest on that question for the next 10-20 minutes while I do other questions. That gives me plenty of time to come to the question with a fresh slate and re attempt reading the question, trying to deliberately think in a different way than I was before.

On this PT, I had only 3 questions that took over 1:30, but they each averaged just over 3:00! And I got one of them wrong anyway. So I spent over 9 minutes for 2 points. Total waste of time.

On the first pass of each of those questions, I spent about 2 minutes. That extra 30-40 seconds for each I think was really harmful in two ways. First, like noted above, it was 30-40 seconds of reinforcing incorrect thinking that further clouded my judgment once I went back to the question. Second, it pushed me behind schedule that little bit more. I think for every question that takes too long, you get a little bit more panicky (although I suppose having to skip a question can cause panic too).

My final thought is that I might start doing some single section practices where I try to more precisely gauge my confidence for each question. Maybe instead of circling, I write from 1-10 how confident I am in my answer. I say this because I really spent a ton of time on two questions on this section I have been discussing above, but I ended up getting two other questions wrong that I didn't even go back and review during the time because I was busy spinning wheels on the other questions. Maybe I would have been better off just picking between two narrowed down answer choices for each of those 3, saving myself 1-2 minutes overall, and double checking some of the other questions where my confidence was only like a 6-7.

Dunno. Just some thoughts. Thanks/sorry if you read all of that. Just working through thoughts as I type them.

NotMyName

Really cool thoughts on the subject @AllezAllez21 . Thanks for sharing. I never thought of it in terms of reinforcing incorrect interpretations but I totally agree.

It is remarkable to see how, with 10-20 minutes of space, we can see the question in a whole new light. I like your idea about marking questions with a degree of confidence -- that would make for an interesting twist on the confidence drilling @"Cant Get Right" endorses.

Stevie C

@AllezAllez21 said:
For most questions on LR, you read and emphasize the right things, think about those right things in the right way, and you get the answer relatively quickly. I find that if I don't get an answer in under a minute, it probably means I've read something wrong, or emphasized the wrong part of the stimulus (1:20 for the harder questions). Therefore, spending more time on that question--at that moment--is not productive because I'm still using the incorrect interpretation to try to get to the right answer.

>

This is exactly how I feel. If I can't answer it in under 1:20, then I probably can't answer it in 2:00 or 2:30 either.

It's very tough to skip because it feels like I'm giving up points voluntarily -- but I'm getting better at it. I tend to skip 2-3 questions per LR section now. I tend to still get them right during my second pass.