How to spend leftover time?

Pride Only Hurts

I'm slowly improving my speed with LR and now have more time to go back and check the questions I circled. However, I find that I'm overwhelmed by the possibility of picking a question that will suck up all my remaining time rather than the questions I simply needed to re-read.

Should you tackle the questions you narrowed down to 2 answer choices first, or should you tackle the ones that stumped you the first time around? What I do is circle the ones I was unsure about and I draw a square around the ones where the stimulus confused me. I typically go for the ones with squares first but I'm starting to wonder if that's a mistake.

NotMyName

Great question! I don't have a clean answer but I'll share with you my own personal experience.

1) Sometimes when a question goes wrong in the first round, I know it's a matter of a bad read and not because the question was actually difficult. It's hard to explain this feeling but it would usually happen at least once during a section. I knew I would be less likely to make the same reading error in the second round than if I just slogged away in the first round, so I'd prioritize these in the second round.

2) The flipside to this feeling was the knowledge that a question was actually really difficult and there was a strong chance I'd get it wrong. This is usually the case when I just can't parse out or understand the stimulus for the life of me. Depending on how many questions I circled, I would either blindly guess and choose to strategically miss these or deprioritize them in the second round.

3) There are other categories of skipped questions but I never found much value in identifying them during the timed section beyond the above two. Instead, I would just address them in order (still skipping category 2 until the end) and approach them the same way I did in the first round: if they give me trouble I skip before they become a time sink. I've returned to the same question 3 or 4 times before during a timed section.

Ohnoeshalpme

Try to avoid the ones that you found really challenging. The return on investment for the ones that you totally don't understand is lower than ones that you skipped because you couldn't decide between two AC's.

I recommend working with a tutor to help you with this, as it is one of the most crucial parts of perfecting LR. Even high scorers will have to go back at the end of the section and clear up some questions that they may have gotten wrong on the first pass or needed to skip.

A general principle that applies here is the "do the least amount of work possible" principle. If the test is throwing some question at you that you can tell is purposefully confusing, or if you don't grasp it on the first pass, just skip it and come back at the end. This also applies at the end of the section. If you have time, go to the questions that you felt you have the best chance of getting right. Work through those first, and if any question is making you work too hard just skip and move on to the next one.

Pride Only Hurts

@NotMyName said:

1) Sometimes when a question goes wrong in the first round, I know it's a matter of a bad read and not because the question was actually difficult. It's hard to explain this feeling but it would usually happen at least once during a section. I knew I would be less likely to make the same reading error in the second round than if I just slogged away in the first round, so I'd prioritize these in the second round.

2) The flipside to this feeling was the knowledge that a question was actually really difficult and there was a strong chance I'd get it wrong.

I know exactly what feeling you're talking about! I'll try to label those questions so I can find them quickly on the 2nd run.