Mastering the Science of LSAT Timing
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Of all the standardized tests out there, the LSAT is perhaps the most intensely time-pressured. We all know the feeling of our hand shaking a little as we stare down at an entire unattempted Logic Game with only five minutes left on the clock. So students often ask me questions like, “When will I start to see improvements in my LSAT timing?” “Will it come with practice, or will I just kind of naturally start to go faster?”
Those questions convey a passive approach toward LSAT timing: If I just keep studying, my timing will improve. Unfortunately, pacing on the LSAT doesn’t quite work that way. In order to become substantially faster, you need an active approach to improving your speed. You have to deliberately select strategies that you will use to improve your speed, embed them into your practice, and reflect on your pacing after each study session. Here are a few strategies to try:
Practice your strategic guessing.
Everyone taking the LSAT will encounter some questions that are basically like quicksand. They suck you in and take up all your time. If you don’t avoid them, you’ll spend forever there and miss out on the opportunity to answer other, easier questions. Plus, if you do stick around and try to answer that question, you’re not that likely to get it right, anyway. You need to get good at identifying which questions these are for you, and taking an educated guess in the most timely fashion possible. Here are two possible techniques to help you improve:
a. Classify questions by difficulty. After a practice session on any part of the test, go back and label each question based on whether it was easy, challenging but do-able, or impossible for you. Jot down some notes on the characteristics that made the impossible ones so hard. Be on the lookout for those characteristics next time, and try to make a quicker decision to move on. (Of course, you may also want to study up on those challenging issues, so you can move those questions from the quicksand category to the do-able category!)
b. Use the 1 minute test. During some of your practice sessions, set your phone to count down 1 minute for each question (or a little longer, like 1:30, if you find 1 minute to be too stressful). After that minute, if you are still working on the question, pause to ask yourself if you are on the right track or you still haven’t really gotten started. It’s perfectly find to spend some more time answering the question, but make sure it’s a conscious choice you make because you think you can get it right, not something you just get sucked into.
Train yourself in the most efficient ways to approach each question.
A large part of improving your LSAT timing is being confident in your strategies for each type of question you encounter. Here are a few key time-saving maneuvers you should have down cold for each section of the test. You can use these as a checklist to see which time-saving strategies you’ve mastered, and which you need to practice.
a. Logic Games:
- Use your previous work to help you answer unconditional questions.
- Use the rule-by-rule approach to orientation questions.
- Master the steps of conditional questions: quick sketch diagram, methodically make connections to the rules, ask yourself “who’s left and what do I know about them?”
b. Logical Reasoning:
- Eliminate wrong answer choices as soon as you notice a glaring problem. You don’t have to read all the words of every answer choice!
- Look out for absolute language and “only” statements. Those should be the first things you verify about an answer choice!
- Rely heavily on the conclusion when answering assumption family questions. Many answer choices can be eliminated quickly because they don’t affect the conclusion or misrepresent it.
c. Reading Comprehension:
- Adapt your note-taking strategy depending on the difficulty of the passage. If it’s easy for you to understand the main idea, you don’t need to spend a lot of time stopping and jotting.
- Like Logical Reasoning, look out for absolute language and “only” statements.
- Verify answer choices selectively against the text—confirm or reject only your strongest candidates.
Repeat easy questions, games and passages.
For many LSAT skills, you need to build automaticity in order to become faster. For example, in order to improve your LSAT timing on basic Ordering Games, you need to get better at the most common types of inferences that show up on the diagrams. One great way to do that is repeating a game multiple times. Each time you practice, time yourself. You’ll get faster as the moves you need to make become more automatic. And many of those moves will transfer to other Logic Games that you do in the future.
The biggest thing to know about LSAT timing is that you can get faster, but it takes practice. You don’t become Usain Bolt by hoping your next run will be the fastest one ever, and you don’t get a 180 on the LSAT by hoping you’ll get faster with time. So get out there and practice your timing! ?
How were you able to improve your LSAT timing? Tell us in the comments!
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Allison Bell is a Manhattan Prep Instructor who lives in the Washington, DC metro area. Allison first encountered the LSAT while getting her Bachelor of Arts in English and history at Duke University. In college, she scored a 178 and very nearly applied to law school. In the end, she followed her true passion, teaching. Allison currently has the pleasure of being an eighth grade English teacher in Northern Virginia. As an LSAT teacher, she has the opportunity to blend her love for teaching with her passion for logical argument. Check out Allison’s upcoming LSAT Complete Courses here.