Tips on not rushing through timed sessions

AnnieCilla

Hi guys, can anyone help me with not rushing through the RC and LR sessions? I find myself subconsciously skipping reading answer choices which cost me like -7 questions.

taschasp

Skimming is the worst thing you can do on the LSAT. Pause for a second after everything you read and ask yourself if you properly understood it. If not, why? Try to dissect what happened. But don't move on until you've properly absorbed whatever you've read. I'd do a section in each RC and LR without timing and just really drill this: focus on your focus itself. See if you walk away with any take aways.

But at the end of the day its about building strong habits. So you'll want to practice the right way, making sure not to skim and to read carefully, and then turn that into a habit for every time you practice. If you catch yourself skimming, stop yourself, and do it again without skimming.

Think of it like if you're playing a piece of music and you catch yourself speeding up the tempo (and therefore messing up). Stop, go back to where you sped up, and do it again a few times until you stay at the right tempo. Then move on and try to stay on tempo, and if you speed up again, you go back and re-do. You can apply that same idea to practicing the LSAT.

AnnieCilla

@taschasp said:
Skimming is the worst thing you can do on the LSAT. Pause for a second after everything you read and ask yourself if you properly understood it. If not, why? Try to dissect what happened. But don't move on until you've properly absorbed whatever you've read. I'd do a section in each RC and LR without timing and just really drill this: focus on your focus itself. See if you walk away with any take aways.

But at the end of the day its about building strong habits. So you'll want to practice the right way, making sure not to skim and to read carefully, and then turn that into a habit for every time you practice. If you catch yourself skimming, stop yourself, and do it again without skimming.

Think of it like if you're playing a piece of music and you catch yourself speeding up the tempo (and therefore messing up). Stop, go back to where you sped up, and do it again a few times until you stay at the right tempo. Then move on and try to stay on tempo, and if you speed up again, you go back and re-do. You can apply that same idea to practicing the LSAT.

Thank you!!!!

Cant Get Right

If you want to run a three hour marathon, you don’t train by running for three hours and seeing how far you got. You run the full distance and then see how long it took. From there, you analyze what you did and look for opportunities to bring your next time down.

Focus on good procedural decision making, not the clock. Afterwards, analyze your time management efficiency to look for questions where you got too little value for too much time. It’s often helpful to do this before grading. You have to make your decisions under time without the benefit of hindsight, so it’s good to consider your actions without the insights of right/wrong answers.

For example, if you spend 3:30 on one question, you’ve made a huge mistake regardless of the outcome. Getting the right answer does little to validate or justify the decision to spend so much time, and so your analysis should recognize that as an error either way.

Other questions are more difficult to analyze. A question that takes 1:15 could be great or terrible depending on the circumstances. If it’s an easy question for you and you had the answer after 0:30 and decided to spend the rest of the time confirming to make sure, then that’s not good.

If you made quick gains but then got bogged down between two contender ACs then we love the quick gains but have to look closely at our 50/50 strategy. Were you working deliberately during this time? Then good. Were you panicking and just reading them over and over again without doing anything different from read to read? Then awful.

If it was a really hard one for you and you made good steady progress, then that’s pretty good.

So same timings can mean different things. You just have to reflect on each question and figure out what’s what. Once you do that, you then have to decide what you should have done instead of what you did. Then force yourself to make those improved, more considered decisions going forward.

danielbrowning208

There's also a big distinction between rushing and working quickly. I used to try to fly through stimuli, paraphrasing and not reading well. That is rushing. It's hard to describe during timed conditions other than an internal feeling that you're going at warp speed. On the other hand, you can work very quickly and not feel rushed at all. I think this is the goal. I had to work very hard on effectively reading the stimulus, making accurate and succinct translations. Speed came as a natural result of this improvement. Just remember that you cannot force speed on the LSAT. Speed only comes through effective reading, followed by effective analysis based on significant practice. On this test, you really have to slow down to speed up. After you are executing the fundamentals correctly, you can focus on confidently flying through wrong ACs. Good luck!

pstroud97

For LR, I tried to complete the first 15 questions in less than 20 minutes (Aimed for 15 minutes). It was a good way to assure myself I didn’t need to rush more and helped to keep me from panicking over time and skimming as a result.