Timing Issues - What Would You Do? Forum

[rubydandun]

Hi All,

First-time posted, I find this site incredibly helpful and am looking forward to getting to know some of you better in the coming months. I'm taking the Feb LSAT and...

I've gone through the LRB and Voyager RC strategy in depth and apply the techniques pretty well to problems but unfortunately I seem to have reached the following trend in LR and RC:

LR: consistently have about 2 LR problems left with time up (always skip the parallel question) and get about -3 or -4 on the problems I have done, so my accuracy is okay...but I am always RUSHING on the last 3-4 problems as time winds down. I don't know what to do and I end up with a total of about -12 on LR, with 10/12 problems being wrong due to me being rushed/having to guess.

I almost always get 1-15 100% correct, and get 3-4 wrong from 16-23, sometimes 3-4 in a row! This is in part because I'm rushed but also because obviously some of the hardest problems are here.


RC: By the time I get to the last passage I have literally 3 minutes left every time, with about 3-4 wrong already in the ones I've done. This ends up giving me about 5-8 wrong in total. I've experimented not writing any notes at all, just underlining and trying to get to the questions as fast as possible while sacrificing comprehension (what's the point of understanding the passage if I'm going to be referring back to it anyway...) Maybe I shouldn't write on the passage at all?

I feel rushed throughout the whole test. I think it's because I go at a happy-go-lucky pace at first and panic towards the end. Maybe the solution is to push the pace as hard as possible the first 15 LR problems and throughout all of RC...

Or maybe not doing the shortest RC passage?

I'm sorry, I know this is incoherent but any thoughts would help. What the hell does a guy with decent accuracy have to do to speed things up?

Thanks everyone.

[EarlCat]

Hi All,

First-time posted, I find this site incredibly helpful and am looking forward to getting to know some of you better in the coming months. I'm taking the Feb LSAT and...

I've gone through the LRB and Voyager RC strategy in depth and apply the techniques pretty well to problems but unfortunately I seem to have reached the following trend in LR and RC:

LR: consistently have about 2 LR problems left with time up (always skip the parallel question) and get about -3 or -4 on the problems I have done, so my accuracy is okay...but I am always RUSHING on the last 3-4 problems as time winds down. I don't know what to do and I end up with a total of about -12 on LR, with 10/12 problems being wrong due to me being rushed/having to guess.

I almost always get 1-15 100% correct, and get 3-4 wrong from 16-23, sometimes 3-4 in a row! This is in part because I'm rushed but also because obviously some of the hardest problems are here.


RC: By the time I get to the last passage I have literally 3 minutes left every time, with about 3-4 wrong already in the ones I've done. This ends up giving me about 5-8 wrong in total. I've experimented not writing any notes at all, just underlining and trying to get to the questions as fast as possible while sacrificing comprehension (what's the point of understanding the passage if I'm going to be referring back to it anyway...) Maybe I shouldn't write on the passage at all?

I feel rushed throughout the whole test. I think it's because I go at a happy-go-lucky pace at first and panic towards the end. Maybe the solution is to push the pace as hard as possible the first 15 LR problems and throughout all of RC...

Or maybe not doing the shortest RC passage?

I'm sorry, I know this is incoherent but any thoughts would help. What the hell does a guy with decent accuracy have to do to speed things up?

Thanks everyone.

Sounds like you need to turn on the intensity on the front end just a bit. While you have 100% accuracy on Qs 1-15, it may be largely because you're taking your time, which is forcing you to rush on the harder ones. Allow yourself to be a little sloppier on the early LR questions, and save your thorough double-checking time for the later questions. Regarding RC, whether you write on the passage or not shouldn't affect your time too much. Most of your time is probably spent looking back for the answers. I don't like the idea of doing passages out of order because the time it takes to find the shortest passage is time you could have spent reading. Since you're planning to hit all 4 passages, you're going to read all of it anyway regardless of the order.

For me, speed improvement came from growing more and more familiar with the test itself. The patterns and tricks and quirky things LSAC does over and over when they write the test became a lot more clear, and for the most part questions appeared as if I'd seen them several times before. That's when time really ceased to be an issue. This familiarity came from slow, deliberate, analytical practice, not from churning and burning preptests.