High-Level Tips for LSAT Time Management
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If you’ve taken a practice LSAT, you’ve probably frantically bubbled in your favorite guess letter – mine’s D, for Daniel – as the last few seconds ticked off the clock. Maybe you keep getting stuck on a difficult game, or perhaps you struggle to get to that last Reading Comprehension passage with more than a few minutes left. Whatever your specific difficulties, here are some high-level strategies that you can apply to be more efficient with your time.
Have a Goal (and a Plan to Meet that Goal)
Step one in developing a personal LSAT time management strategy is setting a target score. You might be surprised to learn that you can miss twenty-four questions on the LSAT, on average, and still score in the 90th percentile! Knowing that takes a lot of the pressure off of nailing that daunting Equivalent Rule question, or that infamously time-consuming Match the Flaw question.
Determine how many questions you can afford to miss while still hitting your target score, and apportion those misses to each section based on your strengths and weaknesses. With that number in mind, you’ve laid the foundations for making intelligent decisions about where to spend your time.
For example, say your plan allows for six incorrect answers on RC; your accuracy is fairly high, but you consistently run out of time just after reading the final passage. Instead of scrambling to essentially guess on the last passage’s questions, spread those extra few minutes out among the first three passages. Even better, glance at the number of questions for each passage before you begin reading; if you spot one with only five questions, skip it. Statistically, you’ll nail one out of five guesses, anyway, still leaving you with some margin for error on the three passages you do attempt. With more time and less stress, that should be plenty.
Be Decisive
Now that you know how many questions you can miss per section, plan which questions you’re going to skip in advance. If Explain the Result questions are the bane of your existence and you can afford to skip a few questions on LR, guess and move on as soon as you see that stimulus.
Being decisive is critical throughout the test. Consider this situation, which happens all too often:
You’ve eliminated A, C, and D; you’re leaning towards B, but you can’t quite justify eliminating E. After thirty more seconds of debate, you choose B anyway. That’s half a minute that could have gone to answering another question.
Another common indecision point is deciding whether to frame a game. (If you’re not familiar with framing, read about it here.) Again, the key is to be decisive: if you’re torn, and framing is a strength of yours, go for it! At worst, you’ve built up some prior work you can use throughout the game. If you struggle with frames, move forward without them. The only truly bad choice is wasting a minute that could have gone to solving a question agonizing over your decision.
Slow Down to Speed Up
While you need to be decisive about how you will approach each question, avoid the temptation to rush through the questions themselves. If you take one piece of advice away from this post, let it be this: slow down to speed up. Ironically, time trouble on the LSAT often arises from moving too quickly. This cuts across all question types. Trying to rush through games? Watch out: when you notice halfway through that you missed an inference in your hasty setup, you’ll wish you’d slowed down. Deriving the same inference for three questions in a row is the epitome of wasted time.
Think you can cut corners on Reading Comprehension by skimming the passage? You’ll lose twice as much time as you saved when you have to re-skim the whole passage to find the answer to a simple Identification question.
Diving straight into a Sufficient Assumption question before spending the time to identify the argument’s core? You’ll spend precious seconds analyzing answers when you should have already known what you were looking for.
Whether it’s LG, RC, or LR, trust that the work you do on the front end will pay off on the back end. Cutting these corners will impair both your speed and your accuracy on the LSAT.
Familiarity is Key
Finally, know that familiarity with the LSAT and having a consistent process will shave off a couple minutes in and of themselves. If you’re just beginning your LSAT journey, don’t worry about time just yet. Once you’ve mastered the subject material, take another PrepTest and see if time is still a factor. Follow these high-level tips, and if you have a more specific question, leave it in a comment on this post and we might just address it next time! ?
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Daniel Fogel is a Manhattan Prep LSAT instructor based in Boston, Massachusetts. He has a degree in government and legal studies from Claremont McKenna College. Daniel scored a 179 on the LSAT and a 770 on the GMAT, which he also teaches. Fun fact: he’s a former top-ranked competitive Scrabble player. Intrigued? Check out Daniel’s upcoming LSAT courses here!