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When to *Not* do Process of Elimination?

pizzaqueenpizzaqueen Free Trial Member
in General 79 karma
Hi Guys,

I'm a very committed POE-er, but I was wondering if anyone has found any benefit in not doing it for specific scenarios. For example, say you've prephrased the exact flaw in a flaw question or know what the sufficient assumption has to be in a SA question. If you find the exact prephrase in answer choice A, would you mark it down and move on, or still read over the remaining answer choices?

Do you guys always do POE or are there exceptions? Obviously skimming the remaining choices doesn't take much time, but my skimming is really half-hearted when I feel that I've already found the correct answer. So in my case, it does end up being a poor use of time, if even 5 seconds.
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  • nicole.hopkinsnicole.hopkins Inactive Sage Inactive ⭐
    7965 karma
    Easy answer.

    You should always, always POE 100% of the time on LR and RC. LG is the only exception.

    Jonathan Wang and JY both use POE. It's a great way to catch yourself making a silly mistake.

    This is not the worthwhile shortcut you're looking for to improve on timing.

    Put a little more heart into your POE unless you're going -0 on all of the Q's in question.
  • jyang72jyang72 Alum Member
    844 karma
    In RC, if answer choices are extremely subtle, then POE is a great way to find out nuance between different answer choices. The only situation I would not use POE is I really have to move on due to running out of time in RC.
  • allergicallergic Alum Member Inactive Sage
    246 karma
    When I was studying for the lsat I decided to try saving time by immediately answering and moving on without reading the other choices when an answer stuck out to me as definitely being correct. I did this for all sections of the test and quickly made a small mark in my test booklet next to each question that I answered this way. When I reviewed my practice tests, I noticed that I never got any of these questions wrong in the LR and RC sections. Occasionally I would miss one in the LG section. This strategy saved me a lot of time and I think it helped me get the score I got on the real thing. It was especially helpful for RC and LG where I had previously had trouble with timing.
  • Jonathan WangJonathan Wang Yearly Sage ⭐
    edited September 2015 6874 karma
    If your skimming of the other answer choices is half-hearted, then it is indeed a waste of time. You might as well not be doing it at all. That doesn't make POE less valuable, it just means that your implementation of it is poor.

    The theoretical best practice is to read everything and make your choice only after you've considered all of the possibilities. That means that every time you pick an answer without reading all of them, you are taking a shortcut - cutting a corner in order to save some time. Now, maybe that shortcut has a 98% probability of not hurting you, and maybe that's a risk that you're willing to take. But that doesn't make it any less of a shortcut. It's up to you to decide how many corners you're willing to cut in order to squeeze in a few more questions at the end. What you cannot do if you choose to cut those corners is complain in retrospect that you 'should have gotten that one', because you made the conscious decision not to read the other choices and you got burned for not having a safety net.

    My view on this is that if you're good enough to be 100% confident in an answer and snap-pick it on sight, then your understanding of the question must be also be deep enough to be able to snap-eliminate every other answer choice on sight. Otherwise, how does that work? How can you be simultaneously good enough to 100% **KNOW** that an answer is correct, but still be unsure whether (or why) the other answers are wrong? That's contradictory by definition.

    I also disagree that it's not useful in LG. In a LOT of cases, reading all the answer choices has saved my bacon by showing me multiple answer choices that I think work. I read every word of every question, every time.

    EDIT: I think it's also important to distinguish POE in the "I'm eliminating these four and therefore picking the last by default" sense from POE in the "I make sure to de-justify all the 'wrong' answers as well as justify my 'right' one" sense. They're not the same and shouldn't be treated the same, in my view.
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