Timing issues... so frustrated

tekken1225

Hey guys,

How do you improve timing, especially with LR and LG? Is it something that just comes naturally with tons of practice? Do you just get faster at answering questions accurately with more and more experience?

I'm greatly frustrated because, for example, on a recent LR section on a preptest, I missed 9 freaking questions under the standard 35 minutes. Re-did the 9 questions afterwards on BR, and got 6 of them correct. Questions I could easily have gotten right but missed because of the pressure of that constantly ticking damn clock.

I feel if I had even an extra 5 minutes per section, or 40 minutes, I could really, really do much better. Obviously, we only get 35 minutes per.

How do you guys do it? So frustrated...

Sam Tyler

missing 9 is a lot. on LR, what i think you need to do is probably focus on really understanding what you read before you go into the answer choices, and predict what the right answer will be, or predict what the possible right answers could be or look like. As soon as you start reading an answer choice that shoots out of scope, just immediately cut it off. your looking for the right answer, and if you know exactly what it looks like you don't need to bother understanding exactly why each other answer is wrong. This is especially true for the first 12 questions where generally the correct answer will be very correct, with a huge gap between the correct ones and incorrect ones. It might feel counter productive to spend more time on the stem, but you can't skimp on understanding. the only way to correctly move thru the stem faster is to be better at reading and understanding quickly. Moving to the questions too soon will cost you a ton of time.

becides that, you should try and zero in on the types of questions you don't need to read critically. Complete the argument, main conclusion, point of agreemment, these questions just don't involve criticizing the argument at all, so don't bother. just figure out the direction or conclusion and just pick the answer choice and move on. skim the premises , they don't matter.

finally, if your simply not finishing sections, try getting to questions 13 or 15 or somewhere along there, and then just skipping to question 25 and moving backwards to twenty, and then once you do that go back to 13 and move forward again. theres some easy questions at the end usually. If you see a parallell questions skip it if its 12+. You can go back to doing these if you get faster, but you may just need to accept writing the LR section with some guesses each time which means skipping selectively.

Mostly keep practicing and keep yourself moving. be active in your reading and your predictions and you will get there.

Sam Tyler

As for LG same deal pretty much, just make sure you have a solid plan for each type of game, and then spend the time required to really figure out how the game works before you move to the questions. if you can, avoid drawing a new board and just do the questions in your head, especially the first game. make the inferences before you move to the questions so you can pop questions off in 2 seconds sometimes to get ahead.

Finally just remember you don't need to finish any section to get a 160. Be effective and efficient on the ones you go for and accept you might not be able to finish everything, so spend your time well. If you can really lock down 3/4 games on LG and guess on the last one, maybe also getting the acceptability question, you could easily get a 18 or 19/23 which is definitely a score in contention for good law schools.

NotMyName

@tekken1225 What is your goal score, current PT average (and section avg), and planned test date? How many PTs do you have access to and how many have you used?

While Sam Tyler certainly appears to have your best interests at heart, I think much of that advise may be misguided for you.

Sam Tyler

sorry if any of what I said is generally bad advice, this is just stuff that works me. I'm interested in what in particular I said seemed like bad advice, if your willing to please let me know, it could be an area I could improve.

tekken1225

Hi Sam Tyler, thank you for the advice. That was very helpful.

NotMyName, my goal score is 165. The most recent PT I took was preptest 37, and I scored a 158 (72 total correct/out of 101 questions). -4 on RC, -16 on LR, and -9 on LG. So I am off by 12 total questions to my targeted score (needed 84 questions total correct for a 165 on preptest 37).

I just started taking PTs, as I finished the curriculum about a week ago. I can always buy more preptests from LSAC or upgrade my 7Sage account as well. So number of PTs is not an issue. Taking the November test date. Also, not doing anything else other than LSAT studying from now until test date in November.

Could it be I don't have a full grasp of the curriculum yet? But when I BR with no time constraints, I get most of the questions correct all across the board. It's only when under time limits, everything goes to sh**.

Sam Tyler

158 three months out is great man! just put in the work and grind lots of tests with good review after and you will def improve. I was at 155 two months ago and moved to 163-168 now. It sounds like you just started preptests so put in some reps and see how you stand in a few weeks

tekken1225

@"Sam Tyler" said:
158 three months out is great man! just put in the work and grind lots of tests with good review after and you will def improve. I was at 155 two months ago and moved to 163-168 now. It sounds like you just started preptests so put in some reps and see how you stand in a few weeks

Oh cool, awesome. That gives me great hope. Thanks man!

NotMyName

@tekken1225 it's a good sign that most of your improvement is in LR/LG since those are typically easier to improve than RC, although earlier RCs are famously easier than the more recent ones so keep that in mind.

At this point, I'd suggest you commit most of your time to LG foolproofing and timed sections of LR following by BR and drilling. The go-to method for foolproofing around here tends to this https://7sage.com/discussion/#/discussion/2737/logic-games-attack-strategy.

Could it be I don't have a full grasp of the curriculum yet? But when I BR with no time constraints, I get most of the questions correct all across the board. It's only when under time limits, everything goes to sh**.

Yeah, with regards to LR BR score vs actual, it's helpful to think about it in terms of, say, swimming strokes. BR would be the equivalent of testing whether or not you are able to do a given stroke whereas timed LR would test how well (fast) you can perform that stroke. Being able to do freestyle is a whole lot different than being a competitive freestyle swimmer. Does that make sense?

Speed on the lsat is mostly a measure of ability. The greater your ability, the faster you go. Such speed allows for more time to commit to difficult questions and check your work, which leads to more questions right.

@"Sam Tyler" I think some of what you said can be really helpful to OP, some other things I disagree w wholesale, and some others, while helpful to some testers, should not be employed by OP at this stage in their prep. I'll go through it now and add my commentary. If you disagree w any of it or want some clarification, please let me know. I don't want to come off as a bully here; really just trying to share what I think is best and maybe we can each advance our understanding.

missing 9 is a lot. on LR, what i think you need to do is probably focus on really understanding what you read before you go into the answer choices

Totally agree. 9 is a lot and that number will have to come down for OP to reach 165. Good news is that that's totally doable. JY says all the time that AC are not helpful -- they're even downright distracting when it comes to finding the correct AC. If we enter the ACs w a bad understanding of the stimulus, then we're in for a world of hurt. It's absolutely vital that we actively read each stimulus to ID the argument parts and how they interact w each other every time. If you don't know where the conclusion is, you should be skipping that question without entering the AC.

It's great that you are missing less in BR. One thing this community is really adamant about is writing out your understanding of a stimulus and why each wrong answer is wrong and why the correct answer is right. I did this for every question in CC that gave me difficult and continued it all the way through my prep. Posting those analyses on 7sage is a great way to test your understanding because others will ask for clarification or challenge your analysis. Building analogous arguments, "fixing" wrong ACs to make them correct, and studying cookie-cutter LR questions are three great BR methods, too. I'd also recommend the BR calls. A lot of time we think we understand a question in BR, but as soon as we try to express that understanding to another person it all falls apart. You can improve these abilities by using them just like a muscle.

predict what the right answer will be, or predict what the possible right answers could be or look like.

Many will disagree w me on this, but training yourself to predict correct ACs tended to do more harm than good for me and I don't recommend actively training yourself to do. In many cases, a prediction will just jump out at you. In those cases, great! But I found myself passing over correct ACs because they didn't match my prediction and falling for traps because they were similar to my prediction. This is especially true on the more recent tests.

There are some QTs such as SA, PSA, MSS, and PAI where I do think it's helpful to think about what the correct answer could "look like" as you say but that is a little different from predicting the correct answer. It's more like thinking of a vague area that the correct AC will deal with.

As soon as you start reading an answer choice that shoots out of scope, just immediately cut it off. your looking for the right answer, and if you know exactly what it looks like you don't need to bother understanding exactly why each other answer is wrong. This is especially true for the first 12 questions where generally the correct answer will be very correct, with a huge gap between the correct ones and incorrect ones.

At this point in OPs prep, I strongly recommend against this strategy. When you're in the 150s or low 160s, I don't think your understanding of the test is strong enough to justify this aggressive approach. It is more likely to lead to false-negatives and reading errors IMO. However, I think it is necessary for most people to get into the 170s.

It might feel counter productive to spend more time on the stem, but you can't skimp on understanding. the only way to correctly move thru the stem faster is to be better at reading and understanding quickly. Moving to the questions too soon will cost you a ton of time.

Did you mean to say "stimulus" here? If so, I wholeheartedly agree! As per above, speed is a function of ability. If you don't understand the stimulus, you shouldn't waste your time on the AC -- move on and return in a second round or choose to miss altogether (more on this later).

becides that, you should try and zero in on the types of questions you don't need to read critically. Complete the argument, main conclusion, point of agreemment, these questions just don't involve criticizing the argument at all, so don't bother. just figure out the direction or conclusion and just pick the answer choice and move on. skim the premises , they don't matter.

Hm. On the one hand, you shouldn't try to weaken an argument if the stem says "find the conclusion". On the other hand, these questions are not gimmies and point of agreement or complete the argument questions do require you to do some more mental work than simply find the conclusion and skim the premises. And the premises absolutely matter for each of these questions. First of all, you can't locate a conclusion without locating it's premises. Second, you need to understand the structure of an argument if you want to complete it or identify what it's author would agree/disagree with.

finally, if your simply not finishing sections, try getting to questions 13 or 15 or somewhere along there, and then just skipping to question 25 and moving backwards to twenty, and then once you do that go back to 13 and move forward again. theres some easy questions at the end usually.

I don't think this is a good approach. It seems arbitrary. Why is question 14, 15, 16, or 17 less likely to be an easy question than last question in a section or the penultimate question? The better approach is to develop a skipping strategy such that you don't waste time on questions you're probably going to get wrong. There are lots of takes on skipping strategies but ultimately you need to develop self-discipline and know when to cut your losses. There is a great webinar on skipping here at 7Sage https://7sage.com/webinar/skip-it/

If you see a parallell questions skip it if its 12+. You can go back to doing these if you get faster, but you may just need to accept writing the LR section with some guesses each time which means skipping selectively.

This might be good advice if OP has trouble with parallel questions. I recommend folks scoring below the mid 160s choose at least 1 question to miss on LR sections. Ideally, these will be questions you read and think "WTF?" and you guess and move on in less than a minute. With OP missing 9 per section, I'd probably suggest choosing to miss 2-3 but not arbitrarily. This will give them time to convert some of those questions corrected in BR on the actual section.

As for LG same deal pretty much, just make sure you have a solid plan for each type of game, and then spend the time required to really figure out how the game works before you move to the questions. if you can, avoid drawing a new board and just do the questions in your head, especially the first game. make the inferences before you move to the questions so you can pop questions off in 2 seconds sometimes to get ahead.

Totally. Just make sure that you don't push yourself to do more in your head than you are capable of.

Finally just remember you don't need to finish any section to get a 160. Be effective and efficient on the ones you go for and accept you might not be able to finish everything, so spend your time well. If you can really lock down 3/4 games on LG and guess on the last one, maybe also getting the acceptability question, you could easily get a 18 or 19/23 which is definitely a score in contention for good law schools.

Yeah this is a worst case scenario but should be used if it must. Aiming for a 165, it's likely that the RC misses will increase at least slightly as OP moves on to more recent tests so LG improvement becomes more important

TLDR: Speed comes as ability improves. Ability comes through BR. I advise against arbitrary hacks and encourage you to develop a disciplined, well-thought out timing/skipping strategy.

tekken1225

@NotMyName, wow thank you very much for that detailed analysis. That was really great, and I feel I now have a better sense of where to go from here. Feel like your explanation should be stickied or something by admins.

Thanks again @Sam Tyler, as well for your help.