The October LSAT is coming up in 19 days. It’s time to talk about speed: you should have covered more or less everything the LSAT might throw at you by now, so now it’s your job to figure out how to do it faster.
One of the first keys to picking up the pace is knowing what you’re doing. If you’re still hazy on identifying LSAT Logical Reasoning questions, or on how to approach some of them, now’s the time to work that out. Being unsure how to approach things wastes a lot of time. And being confident in what to do, step by step, makes things go by much faster.
Time yourself as you practice, and pick up the pace gradually. Try to work more efficiently, not just faster. You’re unlikely to suddenly be able to read and understand things faster than you ever have before. So don’t just hurry through the LSAT questions. Look for opportunities to cut time out.
If you find yourself re-reading the stimulus to an LSAT Logical Reasoning question over and over, figure out what you missed. Ask yourself how you might tweak your approach so that you get it the first time, next time.
If you’re going back and forth between answer choices, figure out what was truly different between them, and what was truly wrong about one of them. What can you look out for next time?
On an LSAT Logic Game, if you find yourself building tons and tons of hypotheticals as you work through the questions, review with an eye to next time. Did you miss a deduction? If so, how will you catch a similar deduction in the future? Was there something in the question that might have helped you anticipate an answer before just trying them all?
On the other hand, if you’re losing time staring at the page as you work on an LSAT Logic Game, maybe you should be more willing to try writing stuff out. Sometimes you just have to do whatever it takes to keep moving.
On an LSAT Reading Comprehension passage, you should assess how well your work on the passage helps you answer the questions. Ideally you’ll come out of the passage with a solid understanding of the big picture, and with tags that help you see the structure and find details. The idea is that you won’t have to reread the passage too much, and that when you do you’ll have some idea where to look.
Overall, it helps to make the easy stuff on the LSAT as easy as it can be. If you move quickly, efficiently, and confidently through the easy stuff, that leaves you much more time to do whatever you have to do on the hard stuff.
And remember: doing things faster isn’t worth much on the LSAT if you start getting lots of things wrong. Bring up the pace gradually. Don’t expect to work at your game day pace right away. If you start to lose accuracy, take the pressure off a little to regroup before you work on becoming faster still.