I keep second guessing myself when my first pick was the right answer! How to stop this?

davidorellana883

So yeah, for LR, the vast majority of questions that I am missing I picked the right answer first, only to then start doubting myself, usually thinking "this answer is too easy/obvious, it HAS to be a another one" and end up picking a wrong one. Ugh, why does this keep happening? Is there a way to stop second-guessing myself???

LawgicIsHard

This happens to me too! Here is what I tell myself. To get an answer truly correct I must articulate why the answer is right and why all the other answers are wrong, so in a way, I have two methods of getting it right. First is to find the right answer. Second is to eliminate all the wrong answers. If I fail either one, I deserved to get the question wrong. So, if I got it right through "not second guessing myself", I still deserved to get it wrong except I got lucky, which proves nothing.

As you know the LSAT often have attractive wrong answers. It often is our job to succeed in explaining why an answer is wrong. For example, just recently, I got PT86, section 1, question 22 wrong when I was debating between two answers. I saw that both C and D are pointing to the same issue I had in my mind, but I failed to notice that the wording "cannot be restored" was too strong. My provability detector was off, and this question showed me that it needed calibration. Had I stuck with D, what would it have proven? Should I pat myself on the back for being lucky? All I would be doing is to trick myself into thinking I am smarter than I actually am. I still wouldn't have known "cannot be restored" was definitely wrong for being unprovable in a MSS (aka most provable) question.

This topic demonstrates the positive, negative, false positive, false negative concept (which I don't remember the name of). If you are in a situation where you are not good enough to know why a wrong answer is wrong, then you should be glad that the test gave you a positive result by flagging the question to your attention. Think of how many false negatives you got where you equally didn't master the proper foundation, yet you got it right through luck. In my opinion the second situation is much worst considering you're not even aware you got it wrong.
 
Sorry for the wall of text. TLDR: If you are second guessing yourself, then as Kenshiro from Fist of the North Star meme would say "Omae Wa Mou Shindeiru" which translate to something like "you already got the LSAT question wrong and need to work on the associated basics".