Quick Tip

Skipping Questions

Many students are unsure about when to skip a question, sometimes feeling as though time up front on a question means they ought to try to finish it. To some extent, this reflects “sunk cost fallacy,” the tendency to want to spend additional time on something because time was spent at the outset. 

Instead, think of time on a question as characterized by diminishing marginal returns—every additional second you spend on a “hard question” is increasingly likely to prove ineffective if the question is particularly challenging. Instead, you should work on setting a “stop-loss” for when to move on. After spending a particular amount of time (say, one minute) staring at a question, force yourself to move on.

Discussion

Optimizing Blind Review

Blind Review (BR) is 7Sage’s way of separating fundamentals from technique, or untimed from timed performance. In other words, you use the BR process to see if your problem is knowing the material or simply not knowing it fast enough. 

This is valuable because the insights gleaned from it can help you allocate your study time. If your BR score is significantly higher than your untimed score, that suggests you ought to do more timed sections and drills to build speed. If, on the other hand, your BR score isn’t that much higher than your untimed score, your fundamentals are what need work; this might counsel in favor of reviewing the Core Curriculum.

Many students understand the value of BR but fail to utilize it optimally, however. Here’s how I would BR, if I were studying today.

  1. Take the section/test under timed conditions. No “cheating” with extra time or breaks or anything like that. Flag every question that you’re at all unsure about.
  2. Take a break! Give your mind a chance to rest before BR. This also gives you a fresh perspective on the questions you’ve just done.
  3. Start with questions you guessed on and didn’t answer, but then flip through the entire section. For unflagged questions, quickly confirm your answer and check that you didn’t misread something. For flagged questions, go through them meticulously. Redo the questions and work through them until you can start to make sense of them, taking the time that you need; however, try to limit yourself to no more than 20 minutes or so for a given question. BR should not involve spending an hour or more on a given question. If you’re stuck, go to another question and then return to the tricky one after. But stick with it.
  4. Score the section and add missed (or flagged) questions into a Wrong Answer Journal.

The biggest issue I’ve noticed with students is rushing through BR. Generally speaking, this should take you about as long as it took you to do the test, but will vary depending on your score, which dictates how many questions you’d be unsure about. At the extremes, though, I would be surprised if a proper BR is ever less than one hour or longer than six hours (twice as long as a four-section test would take someone). You shouldn’t need more than two times the normal section time to BR it, except perhaps for someone who is just beginning the test.

In sum, BR can be an important part of any improvement plan—the alternative is taking a large quantity of material but not improving much due to a lack of introspection. Optimizing your BR routine can help you squeeze as much as possible out of any given test.