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Logical Reasoning Breaking 20Q
as5324therapy
Member
Help!! Can't do more than 16 LR Q with 80% accuracy. Tips?? I want to touch 20
Comments
I set small incremental goals each test. So next test try to reach 18/19. Once you reach that try to reach 20/21.
I calculated how much time that allowed me per question and knew that if I was going over I needed to move on. So, for 18 questions it'd be about 1 min 55 seconds. Then I used a loop timer to plug in that amount of time and periodically look up at my computer to see what loop I should be on and how that measured up to what question number I was at. Therefore, I knew I was spending too much time or if my speed was improving. Allowing myself to visually see where I should be really helped develop a sense of timing. Because prior I was allowing myself spend way to long on easier questions, but wouldn't realize it. This forced me to focus on increasing my speed.
Obviously, you won't have that benefit during the real test, so once you get to where you want to be or close to it I would stop using the loop timer.
And to echo what everyone else said, you need to learn how to devote less time easy question and to not spin your wheels on hard questions. When a question is easy don't question it and second guess yourself (real thought process: "that was way too easy, I need to redo that to confirm thats right"). Instead take it and run- move on to the next question. When you can't figure out what a stimulus is telling or can't figure out the answer circle it answer move on. Don't sit there and compare answer choices to each other.
Increasing speed is also about hounding in fundamentals, so they come more as second nature.
http://www.online-stopwatch.com/loop-countdown/ <--- loop timer
http://7sage.com/lesson/why-you-must-skip-questions-on-the-lsat/
I have a theory for people who can't go quickly on LR. I think that people give too much respect to the answer choices.
Just for perspective on my technique, on the October test I got 3 LR sections. I finished the three sections with 5, 10, and 15 minutes remaining (not counting the time I used to go back and recheck what I had circled). I had -1/-2 on the two real sections. Can't match the time to number wrong, but that's pretty typical for my preptests.
Anyway, I think that people who don't move that fast give too much respect to the answer choices. I suspect that as you go through the answer choices, you may be trying to make them work instead of realizing that they are almost certainly (80% chance) totally wrong.
Here's how I approach it. First I read the argument as many times as I need to until I feel it click in my head. This may be 2, 3, or even 4 times. If I get to that many times, I will probably take a break and meditate for 10 seconds. Typically it's 2 times and roughly 20 seconds here.
Then I approach the answer choices, and I totally rip through them. I will read as little as I need to to eliminate it mercilessly. I semi-frequently eliminate all 5 choices (maybe 5 times/test) but will eliminate it for any reason. Typically first pass is 5-10 seconds/answer and second pass, if necessary (typically not) is 20 seconds/answer, as I have to compare them.
For example:
Argument: A controlled experiment found blah blah blah stone is good for trees blah blah
Question: Most Strongly supported
Answers:
a) Many experiments say blah blah blah
b) bushes like nice dirt
I eliminate answer (a) on the first pass the instant that I read "many experiments" because the passage said "_a_ experiment." Doesn't matter what the rest of the answer choice says so I don't bother reading it. I eliminate answer choice (b) as soon as I read the word "bushes" simply because a bush may not be a tree. If nothing else works for me I can come back, but otherwise it's imperfect.
Then I circle whatever is remaining as long as it works in my head.
So I think you may need to give less respect to the answer choices and, mostly importantly of all, ensure that you 100% understand the argument prior to touching the answers. Otherwise you could easily be spending 30 seconds/answer comparing it to an argument that may not be fully embedded in your head.
For the record, this is completely different from how I approach RC (typically only have 2-3 minutes left) and LG (typically have 1 minutes left).
Love to share, and I may disappoint, haha, because I don't really know. In a class I instruct someone asked me this question the other day and I've been having trouble creating a coherent answer.
More I have a list of tips:
1) I really really make sure I get the passage. In the same way that I can tell if I didn't get a LR passage, and need to reread it, I can feel that in RC. If I don't get a paragraph I reread. I can always zoom through the questions and probably have a decent idea of the answer choice anyway, so I don't mind wasting 5+ minutes per passage.
2) Once the passage is locked into my mind, I attack the questions similarly to how I attack LR. I eliminate the wrong stuff mercilessly, but also realize that RC is subtler. It doesn't repeat as much and on almost every question there are at least 2 that are somewhat plausible, which is very different from LR, where on most questions only 1 is even plausible at all. I tend to not refer back to the passage because of my upfront work, although I will. If I do, I read roughly 3 lines ahead/behind. Typically the answer matters more on the _context_ of where you referred than what it actually said.
Example:
On a question that asks what "decent idea" meant in my tip 1 above (most strongly supported) a correct answer is far more likely to be about rereading than about what "decent idea" means. The LSAT tries to be subtle, in that way, but it's easy to see through
3) Realize that a lot of the test can be about intuition. At least 2 points of my improvement were entirely due to pattern recognition. In the same way that sometimes LR answers "feel" weird, sometimes RC answers aren't the type of answer that LSAC has given in the past. Stuck between 2 answer choices, I will almost always choose that one that feels more LSAT-y to me.
(This certainly works on LR, and even on LG!!! On the Oct test I missed a full rule in the third game! I still got all of the questions right because I could feel that the game relied mostly on two letters and I had a halfway decent idea of the dynamics between those letters without the rule I needed, and I had an idea of the type of answers that LSAC goes for, so I guessed correctly five times. I remember thinking on one question "it just doesn't feel right that this game board would be tested on this question, but the rules allow it, right?" Of course, I also dreaded my score for a full month once I realized I had ^$^#*@# MISSED A RULE)
4) For studying: read more stuff. I read dense stuff for several months to get my mind into the correct frame. This was stuff like The Economist, The Origin of Species, various scientific papers, philosophy etc. I just put it on my phone and read at the bus stop, and tried to analyze it.
Honestly, other than that, I've got no real advice. RC is hard. Took me a very long time to improve.