Should you erase on LG Forum

[Psingh]

Besides the obvious advice to keep practicing, do you have any "mechanical" type of tips to improve speed on LG? For example, I do some erasing on LGs because I feel like sometimes it's less time consuming than writing another game board again. Is this a mistake? I've heard that you should never erase on LG.

Also a very very common thing we're taught to do is to rewrite the rules one by one in short form at the beginning of the game. Would it be a good idea not to do this to save time and just refer to the rules as they're given to you? (except for conditional rules)

Do you have any other time saving tips?

Thanks a lot

[Jeffort]

No and No. Don't ignore solid prep advice because it seems a little annoying and time consuming to do the steps. Great LSAT scores are built on getting good at following all sorts of annoying little procedures and steps of analysis to decrease guessing and increase accuracy with answers.

Selectively deciding which pieces of prep strategies/advice to ignore early in the process in a quest to save time will lead to poor LSAT habits and a poor score. Don't worry about and prioritize timing in the early stages of prep when you are supposed to be learning concepts and strategies and spending time practicing them even though the process is slow and annoying with lots of steps/tasks that seem tedious and in the way of getting right down to picking an answer. Timing comes from practice doing all the steps to get good at them and faster. You just have to develop things one step at a time. Concepts, knowledge and techniques first, slow motion practice with lots of repetition and review comes LOOOONG before you should even start thinking about or trying to go fast. If you focus primarily on speed right from the start of your prep efforts your score won't improve much and prep time will be filled with lots of frustration.

[Psingh]

No and No.

Selectively deciding which pieces of prep strategies/advice to ignore early in the process in a quest to save time will lead to poor LSAT habits and a poor score. Don't worry about and prioritize timing in the early stages of prep when you are supposed to be learning concepts and strategies and spending time practicing them even though the process is slow and annoying with lots of steps/tasks that seem tedious and in the way of getting right down to picking an answer. Timing comes from practice doing all the steps to get good at them and faster. You just have to develop things one step at a time. Concepts, knowledge and techniques first, slow motion practice with lots of repetition and review comes LOOOONG before you should even start thinking about or trying to go fast. If you focus primarily on speed right from the start of your prep efforts your score won't improve much and prep time will be filled with lots of frustration.

I'm not in the early stages of my prep. I'm actually pretty comfortable with the games now but I take an average of 1-2 minutes longer on each game than what I need to take to score perfectly. This is why I'm looking for some time saving tips.

[Jeffort]

Ok,then you need to carefully review the processes you are using to attack individual questions to figure out inefficient approaches you are using that can be improved. If you are brute forcing several questions per game by doing a fair amount of trial and error work with hypotheticals as a front line/common way of attacking questions, you need to focus on learning more efficient deduction oriented approaches to cut out the need for lots of trial and error work that causes you the need to erase a lot.

Brute forcing LGs is a very inefficient labor intensive approach that should only be used as a last resort when you can't get to the CR via deductions that don't need full hypos to figure out on the fly. Good timing/speed on LGs is a product of getting good at figuring out how to solve questions efficiently with as little brute force trial and error work as possible. Review is critical to figure out more efficient ways you could have solved each question than the way you just did it on games you do for practice.

The LG section is a goldmine of deduction driven time and labor saving shortcuts if you look for them.

[Clearly]

On the contrary, you should be focusing on getting MORE data on the board, not less. You'd be shocked at how often you can answer questions based on things you did to answer other questions. Reworking options takes time. Scanning the chart to see you've already put 4 of the answer choices into slot 2, and getting the answer takes about 3 seconds.

[Pneumonia]

Don't erase, do write the rules. One thing I found helpful was to circle valid hypos no matter where they occurred. So if you end up doing several hypos for #3 or something, circle the valid one. It's an easy way to see several solutions to the game at once, which can be immensely valuable in later questions. Also, don't write out the numbers for linear games on every hypo. Do it in your main setup, but when you do hypos do something like _ _ _ __ _ _ _ for a game with odd slots or _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ for a game with even slots. Those are some mechanistic things that helped me.

[WaltGrace83]

The only time you should erase is when you totally mess something up on the initial game board (aka misdiagram a rule). I don't like saying "never" in terms of LSAT prep

[Christine (MLSAT)]

For the love of all that is holy, don't re-read the full language rules in a game.

The reason you want to notate/diagram rules is that it actually gets them processed in a different part of your brain (and much faster) than if you are reading a full language sentence. Your brain has to process all that language, interpret it, and spit back out the visual concept - it would be so much faster to bypass all of that and have the rule represented graphically. This is also the reason it's so important to represent rules in the graphical way the elements would appear in the game as much as possible, so that you aren't forcing your brain to do unnecessary translation.

For instance, for a rule that says "M is placed on a slot numbered one lower than G is placed", a notation of "M --> G+1" is still forcing your brain to read and interpret what equates to a logical 'sentence', while [MG] is simply a graphical representation of what M and G are going to look like once they are seated in the game somewhere. That's a somewhat extreme example, but the idea applies widely. And the processing time for your brain on reading "M is placed on a slot numbered one lower than G is placed" is astronomical comparatively.

Erasing valid hypos is extraordinarily dangerous.

• 1) You will at some point accidentally erase something that was part of your original rules and not realize it.
  2) You will at some point erase a hypo that could have helped you answer a future question quickly.
  3) You will at some point not erase something completely and confuse yourself.
  4) The act of erasing itself takes time.

Just....don't.

[arhoogie]

Write out the rules using symbols, for the most part I use what was in the LGB but have adapted to the 7sage method I guess since I've watched so many of the LG explanation videos.
DO NOT ERASE! Frequently you can use previous game boards to allow you to eliminate answer choices for a different question, or sometimes they'll even get you the right answer choice.

[Lightworks]

I erase all the time when I'm short on space or just don't feel like rebuilding a diagram for every single question. Certain questions have set-ups that take up too much space to effectively diagram seperately for each Q (though not on the two-page newer games). Furthermore, once you've done enough games, it becomes very clear which deductions might come in handy, and which ones are obvious or irrelevant.

If you're new to/bad at LG, don't. But, if it works for you, do it.

[Pneumonia]

Space shouldn't be an issue on the newer tests though.

[BostonLSATtutor]

Besides the obvious advice to keep practicing, do you have any "mechanical" type of tips to improve speed on LG? For example, I do some erasing on LGs because I feel like sometimes it's less time consuming than writing another game board again. Is this a mistake? I've heard that you should never erase on LG.

Also a very very common thing we're taught to do is to rewrite the rules one by one in short form at the beginning of the game. Would it be a good idea not to do this to save time and just refer to the rules as they're given to you? (except for conditional rules)

Do you have any other time saving tips?

Thanks a lot

Below is the credited response.

For the love of all that is holy, don't re-read the full language rules in a game.

The reason you want to notate/diagram rules is that it actually gets them processed in a different part of your brain (and much faster) than if you are reading a full language sentence. Your brain has to process all that language, interpret it, and spit back out the visual concept - it would be so much faster to bypass all of that and have the rule represented graphically. This is also the reason it's so important to represent rules in the graphical way the elements would appear in the game as much as possible, so that you aren't forcing your brain to do unnecessary translation.

For instance, for a rule that says "M is placed on a slot numbered one lower than G is placed", a notation of "M --> G+1" is still forcing your brain to read and interpret what equates to a logical 'sentence', while [MG] is simply a graphical representation of what M and G are going to look like once they are seated in the game somewhere. That's a somewhat extreme example, but the idea applies widely. And the processing time for your brain on reading "M is placed on a slot numbered one lower than G is placed" is astronomical comparatively.

Erasing valid hypos is extraordinarily dangerous.

• 1) You will at some point accidentally erase something that was part of your original rules and not realize it.
  2) You will at some point erase a hypo that could have helped you answer a future question quickly.
  3) You will at some point not erase something completely and confuse yourself.
  4) The act of erasing itself takes time.

Just....don't.

Is there any particular game type that is slowing you down?