I'm Getting Destroyed by the Time Aspect Forum

[Jumpors]

I've been studying for a few months now, and I can say I have a pretty good understanding of most of the question types and how to solve them. What is killing me is the time limit. I've always been a slow reader, so when placed with the time constraints I find my self just trying to read fast and semi-guessing on the answers. I have taken 3 timed LSAT's over the past few months and my scores on the timed tests have not fluctuated at all. Whereas untimed I'm scoring in the 170s. What can I do to speed up my reading without losing out of comprehension? Thanks in advance.

[Halp]

Practice. Lots and lots of practice. Some light notation (ex:put a star by the main point) may also help. But mostly, practice. Also, it sounds to me like you’re trying to read too fast - slow down some. IME, your pace should be a little uncomfortable, but you shouldn’t be skimming at all.

[HopefulSplitter0000]

Practice. Lots and lots of practice

This is key. However, I will add two pieces of advice that helped me personally:

1. If you are slow on logical reasoning, practice isolating conclusions. The faster you can isolate conclusions, the better off you will be. Even if the actual reading takes longer, you will get your time back because choosing the correct answer will be easier.

2. For reading comprehension, if you are reading slowly, you may have to sacrifice some questions and guess at the end. Better to answer 23 or 24/27 questions to the best of your ability than to answer all 27 without confidence because you are rushing.

The two points above come with practice anyway. Keep doing practice questions and you will improve, provided you understand the question types, which, according to your post, you do.

[Halp]

The above is good advice. I particularly agree that legal reasoning skills go hand in hand with reading comprehension speed. Can’t answer RC questions if you cannot quickly spot the valid and invalid forms of logical reasoning contained in the passages.

[Publius Scipio]

https://lsathacks.com/guide/faq/how-to- ... reasoning/

Try G.B.'s advice.

I found them very useful at least for logical reasoning.


Worry not, what you are facing was a common issue.

[zeglo]

Don't practice untimed. Getting a high score without time is stupid; anyone can do that.

Always do timed sections. Practice.

[lsatmadness]

Time is largely about practice as others said. However, there are some strategies that you can maintain like aiming to get the first 10 questions in 10 minutes. Or always moving on from the first 5 after 5 minutes. Stuff like that helps build you up to where you want to be. I recommend you focus more on concepts before worrying about time. It will come naturally. We'll be putting up some more strategies related to that on our website in the future too, but again, not the biggest thing to worry about if you keep learning the concepts. Good luck!

LSAT Madness
lsatmadness.com

[EnjoyIllinois]

Re-use your diagrams. If the first question asks, "Which of these could be a complete and accurate list of elements?," that answer is valuable. When later questions ask, "which one of these elements cannot be in position 2," use your previous answer as evidence.