Overconfidence and Under Confidence

CSieck3507

Hello Sagers,

I took an LR section today and I came to a realization that I often see in my studies and thought that many of you could use this as well. When doing my LR section I always try to base my analysis on whether to skip or stay based on my confidence. If I know I get a question correct (Ex. SA question and going on hunt mode) I know that is a point in my bag. But sometimes I am confident in an answer choice and then see another answer that I am confident in. This is where I lose points. Often times we see an answer choice that is in fact correct but then we see that other AC and think, "Oh no..." and then what do we do? Some of us sink time or some of us skip but still think about that question. Today there were 3 questions where I had under-confidence and it cost me 3 points. Instead of going -3, I went -6 just because of this simple error.

Takeaway: Understand where your confidence is and use that to skip or stay. Create a process of being able to knock that one answer choice that you just cant let go of. Be confident in your answer choices and move on. That is what top scorer's do. They don't dwell on an AC for 1 min. They pick an answer and move on. If they have time to come back they will flag. This test is about confidence and whether you are overconfident or under-confident it can impact your score dramatically.
Stick to your processes for each question type and don't freak out if you don't know the answer. It is just one point. We don't need to be perfect to get a top score.

Hope that helps some of you and happy studies!

HopefullyHLS

As someone who has been practicing for over 6 months and still needs to overcome this problem from time to time, I fully agree!

I think the reason why many of us freak out is our ego: the feeling of being outsmarted by an LSAT question really sucks (although, if we think about it rationally, easy, medium and hard questions all have the same value: they count for 1 point - this is not GMAT!).

Sometimes I wish I had the genes of a psychopath (exaggerating here, but hopefully you get the point), or at least I could somehow turn them on during the LSAT in order to be reminded of the above.

On a note, maybe another mindset could help as well:

Most of us (including me) unreasonably take the worst-case-scenario for granted, and this affects performance negatively! For example, in at least 90% of LR/RC questions I struggle, I am down to 2 answer choices of which 1 is the correct one. If, let's say, I have 4 such questions in a section, after doing it my brain automatically thinks "shit, that was at best a -4!", which from a statistical point of view does not really make sense: if I guessed randomly, on average I would get 2 right and 2 wrong ; typically though it is not a random guess, but intuition also plays a role in these situations (and most of the time it does not betray me), and I would say chances are rather 3 right and 1 wrong.