Tips for improving speed?

mackenzie_fitzgerald

I'm not doing too bad on the PTs, not quite where I would love to be but I am definitely seeing improvement in my blind review scores. The problem is I consistently have about 5 problems leftover each section as the time runs out. I am becoming more accurate but not any faster. I was wondering if anyone had any tips or ideas on how to be quicker? Thanks!

Nathanial

I have the same issue. Just keep doing some drills from the older PTs and try to get to the answers in a faster way. You know one way to get to the right answer, trick is to find the fastest way to the right answer. Drills will help cause it will show you the pattern for majority of the question types.

jdawg113

as above, keep drilling, the better you get at answering the problems, the faster you will be able to answer them

[Deleted User]

Honestly I wouldn't listen the posts above and especially those who say keep taking practice tests. There is really no magic way to get faster that's what many of my law school friends have told me from their lsat exprience (some high scorers). Practice tests and drills will only help with accuracy and at times accuracy can cause faster speed but not always. I have a huge problem with timing too. I always end up Answering up to question 15 and run out of time for rest. It sucks and I hate when people advice more drilling or practice test because that doesn't do anything other than increase accuracy. I also haven't found blind review that helpful.

ddakjiking

@royaimani
Nathanial/Jdawg never suggested taking full practice tests. They recommended drilling questions from older PT's. A valuable resource online is the Cambridge Drilling packets that break down LR question types/LG game types/RC subject passages from PT 1-38. For example, in the Flaw packet, there are 284 flaw questions from PT 1-38.

OP: I definitely recommend purchasing the Cambridge Packets for LR/LG/RC. The idea of drilling a single question type is similar to the homework at the end of each 7Sage lesson where you would go through say 15 strengthen questions in 10 mins.

Wombat15

@ royaimani

I agree in that there is no magic way to get faster, but the purpose of drilling is two-fold in that it'll raise your accuracy, but that it can help increase speed as well. The key to LSAT problem solving I think is that the better your intuition and internal deduction-making skills are, then the better you'll be at tackling problems quickly and efficiently. Mike Kim says in the LSAT Trainer that mental muscle memory plays a large role in problem solving. When approaching a problem, you may not be able to "get it" the first time, or the second time or even the tenth time around. But every time you try and solve it AKA drilling, you're exercising your mind's ability to apply logical thinking, and that's what really hones your intuition. Your intuition will help you find quicker and better ways to connect premises or make deductions, and it's these mental shortcuts that your mind develops during drills that ultimately contribute to faster times. Repetition might seem dull and mind-numbing, and even pointless at times because you're not understanding the problem, or because it takes forever to reach the correct answer. But every time you drill a difficult problem, you'll find yourself trying new methods, and eventually something will click and you'll find that you were able to solve said problem faster than the first time around.


The concept behind BR is in the same vein as drilling where you force yourself to really pick apart a problem and figure out what the problem is asking, how to approach it, why the correct answer choice is the correct one and why the other ones are incorrect. BR will develop your familiarity in handling problems, so once you get to the point where you're comfortable in figuring out what you methods you need to employ and the reasoning behind them, then you will most certainly see gains in the areas where you're having trouble.

joegotbored-1

The other advantage to watching your accuracy increase with drilling: confidence. When your confidence hovers around 95% and your accuracy is in the same realm, then you will notice you stop second guessing yourself.

On of the reasons I was so slow when I started out was because I wasn't confident when I found the right answer. As I got better with my accuracy, I started going "Nope, that's a stupid answer. Nope, that sucks too. Not that that one either. Yup, A, just as I suspected." This as opposed to an inner dialog that was more along the lines of "well I guess this could be it. Maybe this one too? Huh, this looks good if you think about it, but I thought the other one was better. Uhhh? Crap, I've been reading these answer for 3 minutes now. Time to guess and move on."

Don't underestimate the power of confidence derived from drilling a single question type repeatedly.

[Deleted User]

@jason ^ advice is the best one. My instructor suggested that and it's helpful because you know exactly what you need more help with.

Nilesh S

But getting better is the only way to get faster (at least with results) and here's the mechanism behind it... say you're a newbie... and start with a main point question. You read the stimulus, and then you read the question stem and then you look at the stimulus again and try to figure out which portion is the main point or conclusion. Now, if you're a practiced hand, before reading the stimulus, you read the stem, then you look at the stimulus, see which sentence is supported by the others, go to the answers, look for one that matches your choice. Say it is answer C, you mark it immediately and move on to the next question, giving only a cursory glance instead of a detailed reading to answers D and E. All this time, your mind has worked at a much faster rate than it did in the beginning because you are comfortable with the mechanics and techniques of answering MP questions and it has become second nature to you. The 10 - 20 seconds that you shave off each question add up in the end giving you buffer time for the more difficult questions. Your mind has also gotten more tuned to the LSAT style of writing so you are more comfortable navigating the question paper. That is how, in my opinion you get faster... by getting better. I've seen this happen with me.

jdawg113

think of everything else out there... say you want to knit a scarf, in order to do it faster you can speed up but its gunna look like crap, tho if you take ur time, learn how to knit, get good at it, eventually u will knit a scarf in a quarter of the time of when you started and you won't even realize you're going faster... (why did I pick knit rather than a more average thing? no clue lol) same with pianists/drummist/guitarist... they don't start off going crazy fast and sound amazing, they gotta learn and be used to everything and then speeding up seems like nothing

Nathanial

Just another analogy to throw at you. When you first started typing on the keyboard, everyone one was slow and made errors. With practice and SLOWLY learning the pattern of the keyboard, many are able to type on a std keyboard without looking and without making any errors + they type ridiculously fast.

Hope that helps.

devin.balut

Writing the LSAT is kind of like making an analogy. In all likelihood your first few analogies will suck. You will spend a long time just to make poor comparisons that fail to illustrate anything interesting or insightful. Over time you will learn to recognize the patterns of differences and similarities that make analogies work and eventually you'll be able to make decent ones, and quickly. You'll even be able to make them between things that don't make any sense at all, or to illustrate exceedingly simple concepts like "practice improves accuracy/speed" in increasingly strange and convoluted ways!