LR Speed

Ohnoeshalpme

On average, how long does a strong LR student spend reading the stimulus and question stem before looking at the answer choices? In general I spend more than a minute on a question before I get to the AC's... (i'm new to timed LR)

kflor028

When I first start a section, the first 9-12 questions I generally take about 1-1:30 min for each question. I haven't timed the stimulus specifically, but I guess I can estimate it to 0:30-1 min. I have found that personalizing it has really helped me a lot.

So like if they are talking about dinosaurs, in my head I come up with a name or I imagine the guy from Back to the Future talking to Marty about the problem. If it's about heart disease or health related problems. I imagine a really stupid doctor trying to explain to me my own health condition but with flawed logic, then I imagine that I would want to correct him and try to decide how I would correct him. I was also in debate team, so in debate team, we are trained to find the inconsistencies in arguments. So assume every argument is wrong until proven valid and try to nitpick it and prove it wrong in your head.

Sometimes if it's an obscure fact like there was this one question about cow mattresses, I imagine a rude and pretentious student raising his hand and saying "Actually..." before explaining some weird fact no one cares about and then I would try to prove him wrong in my head.

Personalizing the questions in my head made me focus more instead of being disassociated with the questions and rereading because it was so boring I didn't focus. It also motivated me to undermine the argument. Even in assumption or strengthen questions, I would find the fault of the argument and try to fix it by using one of the answers in the question.

Generally, I do a lot of the questions and skip the parallel and parallel flaw questions (because they take the longest) and I come back to them when I'm finished with the rest of the section. Saves me time and increases my accuracy.

FixedDice

I don't know about reading the stimulus, but reading - or rather, skimming - the question stem normally shouldn't take more than 3 seconds. The only exceptions I can think of are those funky stimuli from older PTs that place additional conditions (e.g. PT16, S3, Q23).

JustDoIt

As others have said, it depends. For the first 10-15 questions, I would spend about 45 seconds before the answer choices. However, if it is a parallel flaw or parallel reasoning, I would skip. This is when you know what to expect and what you are looking for. But I would recommend that you focus on recognizing patterns. This would help greatly with speed.

eRetaker

I have different speeds depending on question types. Main Conclusion questions I spend about 10-15 seconds on the stimulus. Basic Flaw questions I spend 20-30 seconds whereas Necessary Assumptions take me longer. Parallel reasoning I spend 45 secs - 1 min on stimulus. I read question stem first so I already know right away how long I need to read the stimulus to answer the question. For example, when I see a Paradox question I spend 20-25 seconds on the stimulus and actually most of the time on answer choices since the answer is unexpected enough that I wouldn't be able to pre-phrase it while reading the stimulus anyway. Also agree with @JustDoIt , the speed will come with pattern recognition.

Ohnoeshalpme

@JustDoIt said:
As others have said, it depends. For the first 10-15 questions, I would spend about 45 seconds before the answer choices. However, if it is a parallel flaw or parallel reasoning, I would skip. This is when you know what to expect and what you are looking for. But I would recommend that you focus on recognizing patterns. This would help greatly with speed.

How do you develop "pattern recognition" is it merely through exposure?

eRetaker

@Ohnoeshalpme I think a good example is the Flaw question type. By drilling tens to hundreds of flaw questions, you'll be able to see when a Correlation and Causation flaw is the answer as soon as the stimulus mentions some event A causing event B. Also, when in doubt, it's probably a sufficient-necessary condition flaw when you see any formal logic on the flaw questions. So yes, exposure and also practice pre-phrasing while going through the questions.

paulmv.benthem

Depends on whether I choose to do a visual diagram for the question. If there's no diagram, I usually read the stimulus in about 25 seconds before moving onto the answer choices. I probably write some form of visual aid for about 4-5 questions per section, adding about a minute to the stimulus portion of the question.

JustDoIt

@Ohnoeshalpme said:
How do you develop "pattern recognition" is it merely through exposure?

@eRetaker said:
So yes, exposure and also practice pre-phrasing while going through the questions.

Nailed it!!

AshleighK

Following this.. I can do LR near my target score for this section untimed and in BR but in timed conditions the anxiety is real. I did a confidence drill and I was shocked at how well I could do just by trusting my gut. I'm also working on a skipping strategy. I read somewhere that for LR, "reading slow is going fast". It's better to take time to go through each question and ensuring you got all 15 or 18 questions correct than completing all 25 or 26 and only getting 10 correct. It really resonated with me because blanks don't count for points anyways and if you guess, it won't hurt either. This is easier said than done of course but something to think about since you seem to have the same issue like me.