Quick Tip

You Don’t Have to Highlight

There’s nothing “wrong” with highlighting per se. Some students find that it can help them pay attention or draw their focus to particular information. 

However, many students highlight out of habit, either doing it excessively or doing it subconsciously without a good reason for doing so. I’d encourage you to ask yourself whether highlighting actually enhances your understanding of the material: if so, highlight only the information you truly want to retain. Otherwise, cut it out. Clicking—and unclicking—the highlight feature takes time, and every second spent on the LSAT should be intentional.

Discussion

Flagging and Returning to Questions 

On 7Sage and on the real LSAT, you have a useful feature: the ability to flag questions. Upon viewing a question, the test-taker has the ability to click a flag in the upper-right corner of the question. Doing so will generate a “flag” on that page and on the question navigation pane in the bottom of the screen; glancing at this navigation pane will tell you which questions are flagged or unflagged.

Many students either don’t use this at all or use it to mark questions that they’d like to return to in Blind Review (BR). This is a mistake! In doing this, you miss an opportunity to come back to questions during the timed section itself. The flag feature gives a test-taker the unique ability to assess which questions require a second attempt. By flagging a question, you are telling yourself that you need to return to a question and give it another shot.

Why is this helpful? The harsh reality of the LSAT is that you will not be confident in every question and, indeed, your confidence may differ markedly between questions. Some questions may have near-100% confidence, while others may amount to a guess between two choices. While you may not be certain, you may not want to spend endless time up front assuring yourself that your answer is right. As a result, it’s strategic to move on and only return to these when you’ve answered the easier ones. 

Keeping all of the above in mind, you should use the flag in the following way: if you decide there was a question that you  wanted to take a second look at during the 35-minute time constraint, then you should flag it. You should not flag every question you’re remotely unsure about. If you flag a question and don’t have time to return to it, the entire purpose of flagging for a second round is defeated. You should have a sense of how much time you typically end with and how many questions that permits you to review. Finishing 5 minutes early, for example, may permit someone to review 3 questions; reviewing 10 in that time would obviously be unrealistic. 

There’s a reason that the LSAT gives you the ability to flag questions: it offers a valuable way to track questions that you’d like to return to for a second swing. You should take this opportunity! Hopefully, the use of the flag function incentivizes you to adopt a timing strategy where you move on from questions that are too hard up front, with the possibility of returning to them later with time remaining.