Problem sets: Timed vs blind review

dwillzkay

I'm about to start the advanced PSA and SA portion of the CC, and with the PSets I've been realizing a recurring theme:
I have 6:40 to finish the 5 questions so I try to balance out the time to about 45 seconds to 1:15 per question and a little extra time on those that are longer/more convoluted. 80% of the time, I end up speeding through parts of the PSets because I'm running out of time, but once I hit blind review, I can take my time and review everything and end up getting everything correct or perhaps miss one.

My question is if that's just because I haven't done enough practice problems yet. I'm able to do the questions and understand the concepts, but application takes longer than I want. How can I speed this up? Can I even speed it up? Or is it just about how much time I put into analyzing it so my brain can start developing shortcuts?

Planning on taking the August 29th LSAT btw.

Chris Nguyen

It just takes practice. The phrase “you have to walk before you run” is relevant to studying the LSAT. Before you take questions timed, you should take them untimed to fully grasp the concepts you’re learning first. Once you’ve mastered the concepts, you can move to taking the questions timed in full sections.

caffeine powered human

I echo @Christopherr that it's important for you to be able to get all the questions correct untimed before you move onto timing yourself. I know the temptation is there, and I also tried to rush my problem sets since they often seem dauntingly long. But trust me, you gain a lot more out of the CC if you take time with each LR questions. Speed comes as you become more comfortable with each question type and see the patterns. Since you don't have that much time left, what you could do is take the first few problem set untimed (or even the last problem set since those are usually the hardest). If and only if you get everything right during the untimed section, move onto timing your subsequent ones and try to improve your speed. For me, I got faster with LR as I was doing a mixture of timed and untimed sections after the CC.

dwillzkay

thanks! I appreciate the feedback. I'll switch up how I'm doing it.