Silly mistakes

LSATschmellsat

Hey all,
I've been doing pretty well on my PTs, but I'm finding that on the logic games, I'm consistently making 1-2 silly mistakes on the section. I know that test taking anxiety and feeling rushed are causing me to misread questions or answers, and it's painful to see these mistakes when I correct the section. I'm wondering how frequently others are making these kinds of mistakes and what they are doing to fix it. I've been getting better - taking more time reading the questions and answers, but it's still a problem. I'm wondering what your experience has been.

pizzaqueen

What kind of mistakes are they? I know that I tend to go through the rules so quickly that I often skip over a rule accidentally, which obviously messes up the whole game. One way I've resolved this for myself is by quickly numbering each rule before I actually read them. I just spot out where each new sentence begins in the list of rules and number it. Then I make sure I have the same number of rules on my game board annotations when I've written it all out. This way, I don't miss any.

Another thing that I've seen suggested a lot is to read the rules once, don't notate anything, and then do a second read-through and start notating then. That way you have an idea of how the rules work together and have a bit more familiarity with how the game works, which should minimize mistakes too.

Pacifico

Both suggestions from @pizzaqueen are good ones. But even with those strategies, the types of mistakes you're talking about are still bound to happen to even the best test takers given a large enough number of games. Your brain usually does a good job of processing things correctly, but sometimes it will simply tell you it says "before" and not "after" for a sequencing game, or "if" instead of "only if". At some point, you have to be confident enough in your attention to detail to still be able to move quickly. That way, if you do screw up, you'll have time to fix it.

That begets the question: how do I know if I screwed up? And I think the answer to that question is the best way to deal with these issues. Assuming you can never rid yourself of stupid mistakes 100% of the time on a long enough timeline, then you need to know how to recognize that you made a mistake, and fix it. Double checking relational ordering/grouping rules is one way to do this. But I think the most important thing is to be able to recognize that things aren't going as smoothly as they should during the questions. That's because the stupid mistakes are not always just in the rules, they can be in your inferences. So if you make a bad inference and get to a MBT question, for example, and you think all the answers MBF, then you know you screwed up somewhere along the line.

Now the biggest problem when this happens is that people panic and get that deer in the headlights OH SHIT! look on their face and don't know what to do. They freeze up and can't decide to go forwards or backwards. The most important thing is to remember not to panic, go back to the stimulus and rules you were given, make sure everything is correct in your transcription and initial setup, then walk through your inferences quickly. Normally the mistake(s) should jump right out at you. This sounds like a huge time suck, and it is, but for a good cause. Imagine if there were 6 questions for the first game and for whatever reason, the mistake you made in the rules or inferences didn't come into play during the first 5 questions. Well then when you get to that 6th question and it makes no sense, you might be tempted to think you just don't get it or the question is stupid rather than that you made a mistake. The faster you recognize you screwed up, the faster you can go back, correct the initial mistake, and recheck all your answers. Most of the time, having done the previous questions, even if you did them with false information, should make them go more quickly. So if this happens on a 5 minute sequencing game, you should be able to get through it twice while correcting yourself in under 10 minutes. That sounds like a huge sacrifice in time and it is, but you saved those 6 points as long as you did everything correctly the second time around. It will likely leave you strained on 1 or more of the last 3 games, but then your instincts to skip and come back will just need to kick in to push on through to the finish line.