LSAT Blog Interview: LSAT Time Management

LSAT Blog reader Jacob interviewed me at length about the strategies of top-scoring LSAT takers.

Here's an excerpt from the interview:

Some students get to a place where they [reach a plateau] and they’re still scoring 15 or 20 out of 25 questions on the logical reasoning and 15 or 20 out of 23 on the logic games. How do they break that barrier and get a few more points?

My answer to that would have to vary from section to section. Someone who’s already scoring 20 on games, close to perfect but not quite perfect - those extra points are simply going to come from more repetition and better time management. One example of something that test takers should do on logic games, in my opinion, is: don’t go through all five answer choices on any given question. Once you’ve already found the proof and you’ve proven that something is the answer, whether it could be true or it must be true or any variation on one of those, you need to take the answer and move on.

You have to trust your diagram and your inferences. That’s something that could help you save time on games when you already have the fundamentals down. You get better at it by learning the method and then applying and reapplying them to be more and more automatic every time.

With logical reasoning, someone who’s already scoring around 20, again, they already have the fundamentals down, most likely. So, I would suggest that if they can’t find any particular weak areas in terms of a particular question type that gives them trouble, then it could be down to time management issues. Think about getting through the 10 questions more quickly so you have a time bank built up to give yourself ample time for those more difficult questions. So, if you get through the first 10 questions in 10-12 minutes, you’ll then have more than the average amount of time per question to attack the more difficult ones later in the section when you need it.

You know, double checking and triple checking question number 3 on LR isn’t going to make that answer any more correct. You’ve already got that question right, most likely. You need to save that time and devote it to something that would actually benefit you.

With the reading comprehension, not getting too bogged down in the passage and not spending more than three minutes on the passage is something that will allow you adequate time to solve the associated questions. And that’s my big time management tip for reading comprehension.

Don’t try to learn or memorize all the details in the passage. Chances are you’re not going to, especially if it’s a topic with which you’re unfamiliar. So, you’re going to want to go back to those details later, when you have the detail-oriented questions. Just focus more on getting down the main idea, the primary purpose, and anything else that you believe it’s likely they will ask about in the question.

So, in your tutoring, do you encounter students like that who get stuck on a certain score?

I do have students like this, and my biggest recommendation is to really focus on the logic games. You know, going from 20 to 23 on games… those three questions there are a lot easier to achieve than going from 20 to 23 on LR, as LR is a far more complicated section (in my opinion) because you have a variety of question types and you have a million different methods of reasoning, whereas games are more regular and standard. There are fewer types of games and I find that, for more students, they’re far more able to perfect their scores there.

In reading comprehension, there’s only one section of reading in the LSAT, and it’s fairly difficult to improve upon that level. I find that, of course, if you’re getting 20 correct on reading comprehension, that’s still seven or eight questions on games. So, there’s still a significant amount of work to do there as well.

So, a lot of it comes down to also doing the math or, better yet, being a strategic test taker. If you’re missing 10 questions on each section on logical reasoning, that’s 20 questions altogether, but if you’re missing 10 questions on logic games, that’s only 10 questions.

Right. I think games are perfectible. So, it’s worth a lot of time there, but if you had 10 wrong on reading comprehension versus 10 wrong on either of the other two LRs, I’d say focus on LRs. Any change you make in LR, in terms of your standing, will likely be doubled.


Further reading: Other interviews on the "LSAT mindset"

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