not trusting myself

mkdiocee

I'm hoping someone can come and drop some much needed advice! I have a very bad problem of not trusting myself, and second guessing my answers. When I look back at the questions that I've missed, for quite a few of them, I had the right answer first, then I talked myself out of it. I know I could be scoring closer to where I want to be scoring; I just need to get over this last hurdle. Does anyone have any advice on how to stop doing this?

tahurrrrr

If you're doing this during timed practice, I think it's really important to remember that lingering on questions costs you precious time, so mark it and come back to it, but be sure to give every question a chance.

If it's during untimed stuff/blind review, then you need to set a strict criteria for changing your answer. Do not change your answer unless you can write out a full explanation of why the answer you're changing is wrong AND why what you're changing your answer to is right.

mkdiocee

That’s really good advice! I do tend to do change my answer when i’m going back over the questions either during the timed sections, or during blind review. I always finish all the questions though, so timing isn’t particularly an issue for me! But I will definitely try to keep this in mind for next time I take a PT and see how that helps!

Kris4444

I agree with everything @tahurrrrr said. I also struggled with not trusting myself and something that really helped me was a "confidence calibration" exercise. Take a full LR section at normal time, but answer every question according to your intuition. Flag any questions where your intuition didn't help you but DON'T linger or go back to any questions where you relied on intuition. This exercise did two things for me: 1) I now had a reliable, quantifiable indicator of how reliable I was instead of a vague and overwhelming feeling of doubt, and 2) for the questions I did flag, since I knew it was because my intuition wasn't up to it, it was obvious that I had to approach the question mechanically. Flagged an NA? Time to start negating ACs. SA or para? Time to start diagramming.

The first time I did this exercise, I flagged about 4 questions and missed one of them and my intuition was wrong for just 1 5-star question, so -2 on the whole section. Knowing that my intuition was almost always trustworthy did wonders for my LR skills. I used to go about -5 because I did what you did and would change my answer at the last minute, even though I couldn't articulate my reasoning because it was just coming from doubt and nerves. Now that I can take a more objective approach to my doubt I've been averaging -1 on LR.

Even if you do this exercise and confirm that your intuition isn't as trustworthy as you want, it's still helpful because now you can look at yourself objectively and learn where your mechanics haven't become part of your intuition and focus on that.

Good luck!

mkdiocee

That's really helpful, thank you so much! I'll try and take a more objective approach like you suggested, I hope that it helps!!