Blind Review Habits

DMoneyyy

I attended a webinar tonight on diagnosing issues with the 7Sage analytics tool / score report. In the session's Q&A piece, there was a note made on blind review by a moderator - and specifically, blind reviewing with a timing component (an example was made for when you are blind reviewing RC - not taking as much time as you want reading the passage, looking up words, and so on, as that doesn't help you perform better once you're back into another PT with the clock ticking).

This got me to thinking about how I should be blind reviewing. Should my goal of blind review to not do a complete deep dive into passage/question intricacies, by factoring in some sort of a time component? Should I simply blind review less in order to see more cumulative LSAT material that I otherwise wouldn't?

It may sound excessive (I am not sure if it is), but fully reviewing a PT can take me in excess of 7-9 hours... Wonder if I should be allocating that time to new material instead.

Or, more generally, can anyone point me to some effective blind review habits that I can factor into my studies?

Thanks very much!

Chris Nguyen

Hey there!

In the world where you have unlimited resources and unlimited time to study, you should be doing both - taking a deep dive into the questions/passages while also factoring in the time component. But there comes a time where taking a deep dive will be diminishing returns if you're spending too much time on it.

When you're first starting out, I do think 7-9 hours of blind reviewing is okay to take those deep dives to get to know the LSAT. But the more you take PTs, the more you want to start blind reviewing to ask yourself "What should I have done under time to maximize my score here?".

For example, like what I said in the webinar, a common thing students will do is look up words to very hard vocabulary that they will probably never ever see again. Words that have to deal with science, like "peptide bond" or "earthquake faults", or "Choledocholithiasis".

Under time conditions, you can stare at Choledocholithiasis for hours and still have no idea what it means, and unfortunately, you don't get a dictionary on test day.

So under blind review, instead of looking up the definition to that word, I would ask myself "Is there any way I could understand this word using the other words surrounding it?" The answer is almost always yes. And if the answer does come out to be no, odds are that it wasn't important to answer any of the questions. The test takers don't expect you to know what Choledocholithiasis means. If this word does come up as a line reference question, a common reaction is to freak out because you don't know what the word means, but 90% of the time the questions isn't even asking you what the word means, but what role the word is playing in the passage, which is a much more attainable question to answer. (for example, is he bringing up Choledocholithiasis to support his main point? To give an example of his main point? To refute an opponent's argument? etc etc). So what is more important is not to understand what Choledocholithiasis means, but to understand why the author is bringing up this term in the first place.

Disclaimer - this doesn't apply to every word that you don't know. The LSAT does expect you to know some vocabulary, but the vocabulary the LSAT wants you to know is more on the lines of SAT vocab - not scientific vocab or art vocab. So spending time looking up words like 'abysmal' is more useful than spending time to look at a word like Choledocholithiasis.

Other examples of questions you can ask yourself:
Could I have eliminated more answer choices here?
Should I have diagrammed this under time?
Could I have visualized this game board better?
Should I have split the board here? How would I have been able to know?
What steps can I take to get a similar question correct under time in the future?

DMoneyyy

Thanks Christopher for your response! Much appreciated.