LSAT flex: skipping questions

lsatlover-2

I am practicing for an online version of the LSAT and one difficulty I am having is knowing which questions to skip, specifically when unable to easily see the next few questions. For example, on RC or LG it might make sense to skip a game / passage and come back to it later but such a gametime decision is difficult when it takes time to go ahead and look at future questions. Comparatively, in Live Commentary videos, it looks so easy since each side of paper has 4-5 questions.

Any advice?

elias.christensen

Hi there! So the questions you should be skipping (if you're having timing trouble) are ones that will take you a longer time to answer than a normal question would—with LG/RC specifically this tends to be a few specific types of questions that are often more difficult to think through quickly, such as rule substitution questions in LG or analogy questions in RC. If you see the question type, you should save it for the end of the question set, or guess and come back to it after finishing the rest of the section!

But your question seems to be leaning towards not knowing what the group of questions as a whole will look like, in which case you may get more value out of deciding to skip the game/passage when you first see it and return to it after completing the others. If you're going to skip that way, I think it should actually be done before you ever look at the questions! What's going to hog up most of your time is not games/passages with a certain quantity or type of questions, but ones where the stimulus is difficult for you to understand and work with, and that's something you should be able to tell fairly early into starting a board or summary.

If you're not sure what kinds of questions or games or passages are taking up more time for you, keep practice testing and pay attention to where something trips you up. If you'd like help looking over your analytics and figuring out what sorts of material you struggle with or take a long time on, you can always schedule a free consultation with one of our expert tutors here!