Quick Tip: Give yourself study breaks when you need them!
It’s great to have a schedule to stick to, either daily or hourly. But sometimes you can find yourself burning out when you didn’t plan for it. Whether it’s for 20 minutes, a day, or even a month, listen to what you need! Trying to push through can negatively impact your mental health and be bad for your studying—you can end up just spinning your wheels but not absorbing anything.
The Value of Easy Questions
Many students are eager to jump right to studying the questions they find most challenging. However, easy questions have important uses, no matter how far along you are in your studying.
If you are just starting off or are still far from your goal score, you should be spending most of your time on easy questions, games, or passages (rated 1-2 stars in difficulty). There’s a reason we break down the statement “If you’re a jedi, then you use the force” into J→F. It’s simpler, and understanding the logic makes it easier to understand the English (here's that lesson). In the same way, mastering easy questions makes it easier to understand harder questions. It ingrains the fundamentals in your mind and lets you recognize the patterns that recur frequently on the test.
If you are making progress but are not at your goal score yet, your study of easy questions should be focused on gaining speed. By saving time on easy questions, you can give yourself extra time on the hardest questions. Practice working through easy Reading Comprehension passages in 7 minutes or less so that you can have 9 or 10 minutes for the more complicated ones. As much as you may want to move on to harder, more engaging questions at this point in your studying, the best way to get faster with easy questions is to drill them and make them instinctual.
If you are at or near your goal score, you don’t need to spend much time on easy questions, but that doesn’t mean you should abandon them completely. One or two easy Logic Games is an excellent way to warm up—it gets you thinking in “LSAT mode” but doesn’t tire you out early in your study session.