LSAT time pressures are the stuff of nightmares. Depending on the section, you’ll have 25 to 27 questions to answer in 35 minutes. That’s only 1:20 per question!
In this article, we’ll talk about how to survive the timing pressures of the LSAT while still walking out with your best score.
LSAT Time Management
Accuracy Comes First
But first, a disclaimer: if you haven’t already mastered the LSAT question types and repeatedly drilled them for accuracy, any timing practice is premature at this stage. As the old expression goes, we need to learn to walk before we try to run. There’s no sense in doing something quickly if it cannot be done well.
LSAT Timing Best Practices in Logical Reasoning
A Logical Reasoning Section provides us with a series of progressively difficult questions, each with its own mini-universe of facts, arguments, and conclusions to tangle with (otherwise known as the “Stimulus”).
As mentioned above, our timing breakdown works out to approximately 1:20 per question if our goal is to finish the section. This might sound downright impossible to you. In fact, you can probably think back to a few questions that took more than a minute to read, let alone answer!
Understand that success in this area does not mean doing every question in under 1:20. Questions on the LSAT come in all shapes and sizes. You’ll definitely have some questions, like high-level Parallel Flaw, that are lengthy and could take north of two minutes to solve. But you’ll also have some other questions, like low-difficulty Main Point, where you can read, anticipate, and find the right answer in under 30 seconds. (Yes, 30 seconds!)
It is crucial to be able to “bank” time on the easier questions so that you can have that extra time to spare when the hard questions show up.
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“First 10” Drills
A good way to practice time banking is by doing a “First 10” drill, where you focus on doing the opening 10 questions of a logical reasoning section in 10-11 minutes with high accuracy. If you can’t accomplish this goal while keeping accuracy, start at 15 minutes and work your way down. For this purpose, you can use old practice tests from LawHub if you don’t want to burn through your personal stores. Blueprint LSAT students don’t need to stress—just fire up your AI-powered Qbank and get started!
Slow Down To Speed Up
My fellow Blueprint instructor Dylan likes to talk about a common misconception with LSAT instructors. People think that we must be able to read, think, and problem-solve at supercomputer speeds.
Not the case. In fact, I will often have a tutoring student ask “Is it B?” while I am still reading the stimulus!
The reality is that we don’t work any faster. We just make better decisions. We read the argument, once, at a comfortable speed. Then we break it down into premises and conclusion, after which we immediately start applying a hard-coded strategy. When we find our anticipation in the answer choices, we select it without hesitation.
There’s a saying in the Navy SEALs: “Slow is smooth; smooth is fast.” The idea is that by properly orienting ourselves and solving a problem methodically, we can progress more efficiently than someone working at a harried, scatterbrained pace. On the LSAT, this means learning how to execute the right strategies in the right way, one step at a time, before worrying about skipping steps or cutting corners.
Skipping Steps and Cutting Corners
Oh, but we can and should find shortcuts!
My number one rule here is “Remember Your Job.” Logical reasoning questions ask us to perform a variety of tasks. If we adhere to the task a question is asking us to perform, this means we can usually ignore anything extraneous to that task.
For instance, the task of a Main Point question is to locate the conclusion of the argument. Let’s say the conclusion is, pretty clearly, the first sentence. After which the argument rambles on for a dozen or so more lines.
Am I reading that entire argument? Not really. To be sure, I would read a few lines past the first sentence, just to confirm I have identified the main point. Then I’d quickly skim the rest and jump to the answer choices.
Almost every question type has these kinds of shortcuts.
Assumptions? Look for a new term or concept in the conclusion.
Parallel? Eliminate answer choices that differentiate themselves by strength of language, type of conclusion, or validity.
Flaws? Look for “flaw flags” in the premises or conclusion that indicate where (and how) the argument takes a wrong turn.
Anticipation
Perhaps the biggest shortcut and time saver is to work on your anticipation skills. In essence, we want to think about what the right answer is going to look like before we read the answer choices. If we don’t front-load some of the problem-solving process and instead enter the answer choices blind, we risk disorienting ourselves and losing precious LSAT time and accuracy.
I would say that anticipation is the number one skill in high-scoring test takers, and a top-three skill for working faster. If you want to learn more, I’ve written a previous post about it here.
LSAT Timing Best Practices in Reading Comprehension
If the time crunch in Logical Reasoning wasn’t bad enough, Reading Comprehension might be worse. Here, we have roughly the same number of questions (plus one or two), but we also have to read four passages of about 60 lines each. Subtracting reading time, that means we’ve got about 40 seconds per question if we want to finish. Oh, mama.
Blueprint LSAT Reading Method
The Blueprint Reading Method that I teach in my live courses is designed to help navigate these timing obstacles. That’s more than I can obviously cover in one blog post, but let me give you a few highlights.
Read for Structure, Not Detail
Pre-law students tend to be information sponges. We’re interested in understanding the intricacies of how things work so that we can debate, discuss, and argue them intelligently. While this is a good quality for the future lawyer, it can work against us with Reading Comprehension on the LSAT.
LSAT reading comp passages are information-dense. They often contain technical jargon that is (purposefully) way over our heads. Your instinct might be to read and re-read to capture every last detail. However, this is the exact opposite of what you want to do. Instead, you’ll want to shrug off the details and focus on structure.
This essentially encompasses three things:
- What’s the subject of the passage, and are there any viewpoint(s) about it?
- Is there a viewpoint? What kind of support is offered, and what form does it take? Is it an analogy or example? A list of things?
- What is the author’s overall tone? Are they informative? Argumentative? Do they adopt one of the viewpoint(s) in the passage?
Focusing on structure saves us time in two crucial ways.
First, it encourages us to see the “big picture” and avoid getting bogged down in mundane details. If we get sucked in by the jargon and try too hard to understand it, we end up wasting a lot of time and mental energy.
Second, most questions in RC come from the above three structural areas. So, naturally, if we focus on these elements, we will be better able to anticipate the questions and answer them more confidently and efficiently.
Tag Paragraphs for the Details
What about detail-oriented questions?
Yeah, they definitely exist. But here’s the thing. When a detail question shows up, either you’ll remember that detail or you won’t. And I’m betting you won’t. That means you’re going to have to go back and re-read, which costs you precious time.
The goal, therefore, is to minimize this time as much as possible. Tagging (i.e., annotating each paragraph with a short, helpful description) helps us accomplish this.
Let me illustrate the time-saving nature of tags with an example.
Say we have a science passage about a famous chemist who had some kind of breakthrough experiment. Paragraph two might cover, in painful detail, the intricate, science-y steps of this experiment, most of which are over our poor pre-law heads.
In this case, rather than allowing myself to get slowed down by these details, I would probably just throw up my hands and tag the entire paragraph:
“BG: chem. exp. steps”
Here, ‘BG’ stands for ‘background.”
I know I’m not going to remember all these experimental steps. I’m not even sure if I understand them. But if I can mark their place in the passage, like an index or table of contents, I know where to go back and look.
Then, when a specific reference question asks: “What was the fourth step in the experiment?” I simply look back at my tags, remember that the experiment was detailed in paragraph two, and read the relevant lines of text for the answer.
Using tags in this fashion helps us avoid losing time to the “needle in the haystack” problem that often comes with combing an entire passage for lost details. It also helps us avoid wasting time in the first place trying to understand the details, because there’s a fair chance the questions won’t even ask us about them. But in case they do, we slap a label on them and move on. It’s a prime example of “work smarter, not harder.”
Speed Drills
Like Logical Reasoning, we can improve our timing prospects in Reading Comprehension by trying to “bank” time in the earlier passages. Statistically speaking, the first two passages tend to be easier than the latter. I like to prescribe a “first two” drill much like our “first ten” drill in LR.
Here, the goal is to read, tag, and answer all the questions in the first two passages, with good accuracy, in 15-16 minutes. If your accuracy is suffering, start with 20 minutes and work your way down. Again, old practice tests in LawHub are a good resource if you’re wary of burning through too many exams.
By the way, you might be wondering what’s a good goal time to read and tag a passage. The range I like to give for most passages is 3:30-4:30.
This is more time than you might think. The logic behind it is similar to our “slow down to speed up” discussion above. If you read a passage in two minutes flat, you might think you’re buying yourself more time for the questions, but you’ll lose more time on the back end re-reading because you retained less in the first place.
Wrap-up
I hope you give some of these timing strategies a try. Just keep in mind that none of them is a magic bullet for your timing woes. Like anything else on the LSAT, timing is a skill you need to learn and practice repeatedly.
Be patient with yourself and focus on progress, not perfection. The timing pressure will never go away entirely, but with enough practice, it will no longer be the LSAT nightmare you’ve built it up to be.
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