Posting on Behalf of a 7Sage User: Need tips for tackling questions & timing in the current progress

Mary - Student Service

I was wondering if there were any tips for how I should be tackling questions and timing in my current progress. I am working through the core curriculum right now and I am noticing that I am quite slow when it comes to answering questions during drills. Should I focus more on process of elimination (takes me longer) or should I focus more on "hunting" for the answer? I do notice that sometimes I am confident with the answer choice I have chosen, but at this stage I am always second guessing myself and it really slows me down.

Sharing this on behalf of a fellow 7Sage user. Any help and answers would be incredibly appreciated! Thanks a bunch!

addison101220

I think this is where BR comes in, which you should be doing even during drills.

I believe the common way to answer questions when timed is to use process of elimination. Trust yourself here, and then use BR to review and really mull the questions you're not sure of over. When you're just starting out, you might get more questions wrong than you'd like, but don't be discouraged. The more you blind review each day, the more accurate you'll become and the quicker you'll answer more questions correctly.

And you don't have to do a lot, especially at first. Maybe try doing 5 at a time, then work your way up to 10, then full sections regularly. You got this!

troysch1

Eventually, it's good to use timed drills/PTs to focus on your timing and stamina, and then BR or separate sectional, untimed drills to focus on comprehension.

In the beginning though, I'd emphasize accuracy over timing--you're not going to build your comprehension skills if you're not taking time to understand the questions.

As for how to tackle answer choices, this depends a bit on which section we're talking about--

1. In LR, for argument questions, you certainly want to come in knowing what you are looking for. If you're doing that, weeding out wrong answers should not take you much time (most of the time), and will familiarize you with common wrong answer types to be on the look out for.

2. In logic games, however, I think it's more worthwhile to build an understanding of what question types are better handled what way, and when to fully test an answer choice vs not.

'could be true' questions are often faster, and more accurate, to solve by PoE--it's much more straightforward, and less error prone, to show whey an answer breaks a rule, than to fully do out a whole model to show something 'could' work, and you're more likely to forget a rule/mess up its implementation when you try and sketch a full model

'must be true' otoh are often solved fastest by scanning the answer choices, ignoring obviously wrong answers, holding on ones that look difficult to test, and first going for answers that are easy to test/put the most pressure on the rules--these answers are usually rignt, and if they're not, they're the fastest to model and rule out, so you don't lose much time. (note i'm being a bit brief here--global vs local will make a big dif here, as most local qs can be solved through initial deductions that provide the answer)

Hope that helps!