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I've tried both, haven't really seen a dramatic improvement using one or the other. I'm basically trying to decide which to officially stick with from here on out. What's everyone's thoughts on this?

Use pencil. highlighters just waste your time.

Pencil. You want to write notes in the margins to call your attention to specific details. Also, people have a tendency to go cray cray with the highlighting and then you're stuck with huge blocks of highlighted text that do nothing to help you find key information.

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Either or.

I never marked up the RC section, BUT, I would recommend at least bringing a highlighter for the logic games. You can set up your paradigms in highlighter and fill in the sections with pencil. That way, you only draw the paradigm once and you can erase your pencil work for each new question.

Pencil for notes and markings.

cortnf wrote:Pencil. You want to write notes in the margins to call your attention to specific details. Also, people have a tendency to go cray cray with the highlighting and then you're stuck with huge blocks of highlighted text that do nothing to help you find key information.

I couldn't explain it better myself.

The LSAT is printed on the cheapest paper I've seen outside of a coloring book. I would suspect that highlighters might bleed through the page.

NZA wrote:Either or.

I never marked up the RC section, BUT, I would recommend at least bringing a highlighter for the logic games. You can set up your paradigms in highlighter and fill in the sections with pencil. That way, you only draw the paradigm once and you can erase your pencil work for each new question.

I wouldn't recommend doing this for LG, I found my past work on each question was often useful for other questions. Never ever erase anything you do in LG.

To answer OP's question, I used a highlighter for RC and it worked very well for me. But again, it's a matter of what you're more comfortable with.

kazu wrote:

NZA wrote:Either or.

I never marked up the RC section, BUT, I would recommend at least bringing a highlighter for the logic games. You can set up your paradigms in highlighter and fill in the sections with pencil. That way, you only draw the paradigm once and you can erase your pencil work for each new question.

I wouldn't recommend doing this for LG, I found my past work on each question was often useful for other questions. Never ever erase anything you do in LG.

Yeah, good point. Probably doesn't work for everyone. It was helpful for me, in any case.

100% pencil. highlighting, at least for me, is what I used to do in high school to fool my english teachers into thinking I did the homework assignments. It doesn't help with memory retention nearly as well as writing out a brief statement or two regarding the paragraph/passage. Challenging yourself to put into your own words, what was going on will help you a ton. Also, check out "Voyager's Reading Comprehension Guide." You can search the forum for it or just type it into google and it is the #1 hit. It really helps to follow a set of criteria for RC similar to that. Not that he is THE guru or anything, but the thread summarizes, in a nutshell, what 93.5% of people will tell you to do on RC.

masochist wrote:The LSAT is printed on the cheapest paper I've seen outside of a coloring book. I would suspect that highlighters might bleed through the page.

I remember worrying about exactly this, back in the day, but it wasn't as bad as I had thought it would be. I'll admit that it was definitely a little bit annoying though. Also, for RC, I don't really highlight too much on the questions (unless they're really hard or something), and so I have very little bleed-over into the next passage, which was my biggest concern. I found bleeding over to be more of an issue for LR, actually.

As for the time issue, I avoided making it a problem by using a highlighter throughout the passage, then grabbing my pencil at the same time as when I would reach for the bubble sheet at the end of each passage for bubbling. This helped me avoid a bunch of switching back and forth, which I would definitely agree, be a huge possible downside of using a highlighter.

I don't think it's so bad, if you practice with it and can make sure it isn't a huge time suck. Personally I'm a visual person so highlighting stuff in different colors was just more preferable to me than squaring/circling/boxing stuff in pencil. Double sided highlighters for the win!

In terms of the margin noting, I do that anyways when I use a highlighter. I just highlight the whole passage, switch to pencil to margin, and switch back. Sounds tedious but it doesn't eat that much time at all (I hold pencil in one hand and highlighter in other when reading so switching is easy) But I see the overwhelming consensus here... surprised, I expected at least one person to say that highlighting helps them refer back better or something.