Speed + Panic: A Love Story

Cant Get Right

I've just had an apostrophe, and it's about time too. I think it's something a lot of people probably deal with, so I thought I'd share in the hopes that maybe someone else can benefit from my many months of error.

Time is a huge shadow hanging over the LSAT. No matter how much we know, none of it matters much if we can't apply it with speed. So over the course of my studies, I have been in an epic struggle against time, fighting it with every tool at my disposal. As is good and right. However, I've realized that I was in a race down the stairs, and I was jumping off the landing when I should have just been quickly and calmly descending the stairs.

I discovered this by taking an LR section with a stopwatch instead of a timer. I wanted to find what I'm calling my "natural speed"- not a BR, but not time restricted either. How far away from my goal of a comfortable 30 minute LR section am I? So, I moved quickly and calmly, finished the section, and stopped the clock at 32:30. I couldn't believe it. That's my average speed under timed conditions. Inconceivable.

This result obviously called for some reflection. What does it all mean?

And what it means is this: I had no idea what speed meant. I thought I was "going fast" but all I was doing was "panicking." Speed is not attained by moving ever faster and faster. It's earned by mastering the fundamentals. If I'm having time issues, it doesn't mean I need to go faster, it means I've got to go back to core. If I'm spending six minutes on a complex parallel question, it doesn't mean I need to "go faster," it means I need to go back to the lessons so I can translate the question and answers into lawgic more fluidly. That's the nature of speed on the LSAT.

I hope this resonates with/helps out some others. Mostly because if it's just me then I look like kinda an idiot. But also because if you're like me and feel that underlying sense of haste and panic, maybe this will help you put your finger on the problem and to ultimately overcome it.

stepharizona

@"Can’t Get Right" said:
It's earned by mastering the fundamentals. If I'm having time issues, it doesn't mean I need to go faster, it means I've got to go back to core.

Yep! Perfectly worded! I think this is why many of us decide to "start over" time and time again. Its funny how you can "think you know something" only to discover there was more to learn. I know in office hours with another group they talk about how they are still learning more about the LSAT and Grame Blake has shared that as well.

The more we admit how little we know and be open to new ideas, and even revisiting old once the more proficient we will become on the test. It ironically, it just takes time...

Darth Jurist

@"Can’t Get Right" said:
I've just had an apostrophe

You had an 'apostrophe'?

I'm guessing you meant epiphany... Any-who, thank you for the post @"Can't Get Right" Time feels like my biggest issue at the moment. Would you recommend simply timing oneself, without paying attention to the time, to get a baseline?

Cant Get Right

@"Darth Jurist"
Yeah, so my excercise was to find my "natural speed." So instead of taking it under timed conditions and manipulating my pace to the time, I tried to reverse engineer it and think about how much time my pace took. So, I went at what I felt like was the best pace I could manage without losing too much accuracy- quick yet calm. Not a BR, I didn't allow myself to linger too long when I got hung up on a parallel flaw question, I did the best I could and moved on. In BR I realized I'd missed that one, actually. Think of it as a pace diagnostic. If you try it out, let us know how it goes.

Cant Get Right

I guess I should also mention that this is probably not appropriate for PTs 35+. It's an exercise, so best to keep it to the bundle.

Darth Jurist

I tried this out on a pair of RC passages, not a whole section because I am still not all the way done with CC. It took me 20:34, getting 3 wrong, with 5 Q's in the first and 6 in the second.

...I suck.

stepharizona

Be kinds to yourself @"Darth Jurist" you will feel a lot different in a few weeks!

Darth Jurist

@stepharizona I have been prepping for almost 4 months now and have seen practically no improvement... I have reason to be unkind.

Cant Get Right

Reading is tough to improve on. LR and Games have skills you can really work to acquire, but reading skills are a much slower process of accumulation. My undergrad is in English lit, so that section comes very naturally for me, and it's probably the only section I'm qualified to offer advice on, not that that stops me on the others, haha. Are you identifying your mistakes during BR? What is your annotation strategy? How much time are you spending reading the passage versus answering the questions? There are so many things that can go wrong in reading, you've got to start by identifying what's happening. When you tried this exercise, did you feel calm and collected? Do you have an undiagnosed vision problem/dyslexia, I mean there's just so many things it could be. How is your LR coming along? RC is essentially just LR with really long stimuli, so if you're strong on LR, maybe you need to try some retention excercises and approach it from more of an extended LR passage.

Darth Jurist

I basically annotate like J.Y. does: circling important people, events and ideas and underline the larger predicates describing the main aspects of said major person/place/things. If the passage is super easy I spend about 3 and half min on it, if it is hard I will spend up to 5 and half min. After that, I spend about a min per question, on average. So on 5 Q passages I generally take 8-9 min (on a couple of easy passages I finished everything in 5 min.) and on 8 Q passages I usually finish is 11-14 min.

When I attempted the exercise I did feel calm and pretty well collected I think. Although, I did take an ECON exam earlier this morning. I recently went to the optometrist, needed a new prescription but nothing drastically changed, just mild myopia.

As far as dyslexia, I guess I could get that checked out. My UG GPA is 3.86 so I never really felt like I had a learning disability. I'm actually in the top 10% of my class at a tier 1 university, honors society, student government, internship at the state capitol, all of which went well I would say and never led me to think I had some type of mental health issue. I guess it could have flown under the radar, though. Is being dyslexic where the words jump around on the page? Could it be anxiety related? I do have a tendency to panic and freak-out when stressed.

I have only been doing 7Sage for 2 weeks and am 1/4 the way through the CC, so I am just barely scratching the surface with the memory method. I have taken 5 PT's prior to enrolling, all in the 140s. Perhaps my prep beforehand was really crappy as I was only using the PS bible trilogy. I have consistently spent 30+ hours per week studying solely for the LSAT.

My LR is sporadic. Some days, I do extremely well. Others, I feel like grasp what is going on... I am generally bad at weaken and flaw questions, along with the lawgic heavy SA types.

I cannot say or identify a specific issue I am having, but, I can't help but feel like I should be doing a lot better than when I first started.

Cant Get Right

I'm guessing your reading issue is a problem of processing and retention. That's a really broad, macro diagnostic, but I think it's just what people struggle with on RC. It's just a lot of information and to succeed on RC you've got to be able to process that information as you read and then recall everything. With the time restraint it really is an enormous task. It's hard to improve upon, but it's totally doable. Start by just reading something you're really interested in. Anything at all. Go back and read a book you liked as a kid. Whether it's Harry Potter or whatever, read something you can get lost in. Then try and think about how your brain worked and try to reconstruct it during RC. Get interested. Lose yourself in the pages. Active reading is really just the ability to get lost while remaining aware. But you've got to get lost first. I know that's maybe a really abstract suggestion, but RC is a different beast from the rest of this test. A little abstraction may help. I am a really strong reader, but when I get disinterested I just can't even. Remind yourself what interested reading feels like. Then try and get back there when you hit a boring RC passage about who even cares. That's only a first step, but I think it's a strong one. It may not yield concrete results, but reading comprehension isn't a concrete skill. I spent four years learning how to do it and at the end of the day, the only way to improve is to read.

twssmith

@"Darth Jurist" said:
but, I can't help but feel like I should be doing a lot better than when I first started.

Big mistake in my opinion of setting expectations especially in the beginning stages of the 7Sage curriculum even after the PS bibles.

Please take the time to really understand the concepts and not focus on performance. The adage of "One step forward, two steps back" during core curriculum study is one of the hardest of realities to recognize especially for people with high expectations.

@"Darth Jurist" said:
My LR is sporadic. Some days, I do extremely well. Others, I feel like grasp what is going on... I am generally bad at weaken and flaw questions, along with the lawgic heavy SA types.

Me too:)
So many people say that the LSAT is a skills test and the more time that I have devoted to those types of weaknesses: re-doing the lessons, drilling, etc, the more comfortable I am and finally seeing the reward and agree with their assessment. We all have different strengths and weaknesses where we have to devote (at least for me) an extraordinary amount of time to conquer different aspects of the test.
When building your fundamentals, I would not recommend being concerned with timing strategy/PT test taking strategy.

Relax, do not panic which is exactly what @Can't Get Right's post is all about. Learning how to instinctively trust your knowledge will allow you to alleviate an incredible amount of test anxiety.

@"Can’t Get Right" said:
by taking an LR section with a stopwatch instead of a timer

Great advice for strategy that many of us have embraced:)

Darth Jurist

@"Can't Get Right" @twssmith Thank you to the both of you, I feel a bit more encouraged. I guess, I am used to picking up on certain things relatively easy, and the LSAT is just, not that at all.

I have started to read the economist on a regular basis. I actually enjoy it, I am an ECON major and generally find most non-fiction interesting. I do think the CC is helping, too. The MSS/MBT/MBF lessons have been really helpful, and I generally don't miss any practice questions from the sets on those Q-types. I guess I should recognize the small progress made and try to gradually keep grinding through. It's just frustrating, I tried to devote so much time to this thing and I might need to postpone until October if I really want to be ready.

I guess I need to get over my millennial, I want it now mentality. No easy way to get through this, just got to grind. Again, thanks for the motivation.

Darth Jurist

@"Can’t Get Right" Another thing: now that I think about it, sometimes I really am not that engaged, but when I read for pleasure I am engaged. I can see what you mean by bridging the gap between using the same kind of focus when I read for pleasure as when I read RC passages. Maybe I am focusing too much on diagramming?

runiggyrun

I think sometimes focusing on underlining/diagramming in RC takes away from focusing on reading for structure. Heavy marking works for some people (maybe they are better at remembering the structure than at locating details), but doesn't for others and becomes an obsession with trees that cause you to lose sight of the forest.
Trial and error will help you find what works for you.
I started with a lot of underlining of key things (people, places, dates, etc) and it always caused me to run out of time or rush.
Then I tried a few passages with no underlining at all - just read, stop at the end of the paragraph and summarize in my head (OK, there's going to be something about the objectivists Vs subjectivists; Here's what objectivists think) and so on. That sped things up a lot, but I missed a couple of questions more than usual.
I especially had trouble with questions that ask about opinion in some way, or require you to know how strongly the author feels about something, what does the experimental data support and what it doesn't and so on.
Now I do a hybrid. I do mark down a couple of key players and dates, but I focus most on two things: first things are "opinion/example indicators" like but, although, also, besides, first, second, additionally, others, etc. If there are multiple examples/components/theories, I write on the side 1, 2, 3.
The other things I mark are indicators of certainty or opinion like: key, crucial, unfortunately, suggests, demonstrates, hypothesis(es), likely, unlikely, will, could, should, if etc.
I find these very helpful to answer most of the questions.
If the author says "the scientists demonstrated" is very different from "the scientists hypothesized"
If he says "Implementation of this technique will lead to improvements" is very different from "if this technique is implemented, it could lead to improvements".

There are a lot of ways to skin the mark-up cat, you just have to give a few of them a shot and see what helps YOU most.

Besides that, yeah, engaging with the passage and making yourself believe you're reading something super interesting that you care about.

Cant Get Right

What @runiggyrun said.

Annotating can definitely cause you to lose sight of the forest. Play around with different strategies on that. Also, go back and look at the sections you've taken. If you're getting all the tree questions and missing all the forest questions, then there you go. I know my annotation strategy is wildly different than JY's or any prep book. I've developed my own system and it works great for me. I also really like the suggestion of briefly pausing at the end of each paragraph and giving it a quick mental run down. I'm going to add that in to my strategy.

twssmith

For RC, my progress evolved exactly as @runiggyrun's!! I am working on a hybrid situation based on my similar experiences - underlining the trees and missing the forest and then not marking at all and missing the details. I also tend to pause in between major shifts of opinion/concepts and not just after each paragraph depending on the complexity of the passage.

@runiggyrun said:
Besides that, yeah, engaging with the passage and making yourself believe you're reading something super interesting that you care about.

Ohhh, to find a silver bullet to give a darn about some of the passages... Yes, staying engaged is of utmost importance:)

runiggyrun

How about you imagine that your kid is asking you with big round eyes to take a look at this passage because she's having trouble with answering some homework questions, and she's going to fail the class if she misses them. She believes that you should be able to figure it out because you're a grownup and don't grownups just know these things? Do you want to let her down and admit you don't understand ocean floor spread either? Or do you want to show her it's never too late to learn something new?

Cant Get Right

@twssmith
Ohhh, to find a silver bullet to give a darn about some of the passages

So on the real thing, they site their RC sources at the back of the test. You can see the citations when you initially open your test packet to your scantron sheet to start filling out your info. While this doesn't seem entirely kosher to me, they instruct you (assuming my proctor was following protocol) to open right to it. Being able to read the essay titles and take a moment to wonder what they might be all about at the beginning of the test can definitely prime one's curiosity. When you hit the reading section, you'll be arriving at essays on topics you've just recently spent a moment considering. Maybe not a silver bullet, but an effective start.

So a follow up on this comment. Just listened to the Pre-Test Proctor Instructions and my proctor DEFINITELY glossed through a few things. So this may not be a real thing you can do after all.

twssmith

@Can't Get Right
That is a silver bullet of knowledge!
Thank you so much for giving me the heads up - I have never heard of that possible opportunity to at least get a moment to consider the topics. I have been planning to practice filling out the ID part of the scantron prior to starting a PT to more mimic testing conditions and now I can do it with a purpose:)

Fish0701

@runiggyrun (or anyone)
Do you mind elaborating on this:
If the author says "the scientists demonstrated" is very different from "the scientists hypothesized"
If he says "Implementation of this technique will lead to improvements" is very different from "if this technique is implemented, it could lead to improvements".
What exactly is the difference in meaning between these examples? I do "feel" like there's a shift in meaning between the two when reading them side by side, but I can't seem to put my finger on it. Really appreciate the comments by the way.

Cant Get Right

@Fish0701
In the first pair, hypothesizing and demonstrating are way different. A hypothesis is essentially just an educated guess. So, I hypothesize that kittens are fluffy. I don't know, but I think that is the case. So how do I find out for sure? Well, let's have a demonstration. So to demonstrate the hypothesis that kittens are fluffy, here's a box of kittens. Feel how fluffy they are. Are they fluffy? Yes. Okay, so we just demonstrated that kittens are, as hypothesized, fluffy. In the second pair, the first sentence is an absolute. If this is implemented, it WILL lead to improvements. The second differs because it only COULD lead to improvements. The first statement absolutely will, but in the second, it may or may not.

runiggyrun

@"Can’t Get Right" did get it right, as usual!
I actually picked those two because they were key for answering 2 questions in the last few PT's I did.
I missed the first. The paragraph said exactly that "so and so hypothesized that immune cells do something. It's been shown numerous times that lots of types of cells do it". The questions asked which of the following could be inferred from the paragraph, and the correct answer was "so and so didn't actually observe the immune cells doing whatever". I got fooled by remembering that cells had been shown to do it, and missed the part where the scientist in question was just "hypothesizing" about immune cells in particular. I picked another answer that was slightly "off" but I was so certain I had read about those damn cells doing tricks that I fell right in the trap.

Incidentally, the choice of demonstrates/shows vs suggests vs hypothesizes/speculates/claims can give a clue about the authors opinion about the evidence being presented. He probably agrees with the first group, thinks the second group is plausible and thinks the third group has some proofing to do.

For the second, the question went one step further than what @"Can’t Get Right" explained above.
One wrong answer choice went for "implementation will"
Another trickier one went for something like "Because the technology will be implemented, improvements could be expected".
The correct choice was something like "If the technology is implemented improvements can be expected".
Both the "if" and the "could" were key to finding the correct answer.

Quite a few paragraphs end with "if the theory above is correct, then we can expect X". The if WILL show up in a question, and you'll have to somehow differentiate between two answers, one wrong one in which the author appears to fully believe the theory, and one that correctly points out what happens "if" the theory is correct.

My main point was not necessarily about these two particular cases - they might not show up in the next 5 LSATs as such. The point was that LSAT writers never use words randomly, and they are incredibly good at finding words that do exactly what they are supposed to do. They use them like a subtle treasure map to show you the way to the correct answer, and the more you are able to recognize their clues as such, the easier it will be to dismiss wrong answers for not matching the clue. The blind review process is the main tool to achieve that recognition, because the clues are easy to miss under time pressure, especially in the beginning when you're not sure what to look for.