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Timing: Not All LSAT Questions Are Created Equal

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Manhattan Prep LSAT Blog - Timing: Not All LSAT Questions Are Created Equal by Chris Gentry

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And so you want to answer every question, but you shouldn’t spend the same amount of time on every question. And ideally, you’d like to use the easy LSAT questions to buy time for the harder LSAT questions.

So what can we do in our practice to implement this?

At first, nothing.

I’m sorry; I’m sure that’s not the answer you wanted to hear. But it’s true nonetheless—you can’t address timing until you’ve addressed accuracy. This is a recurring theme in LSAT studies. My colleague Daniel Fogel discusses this here, using an analogy about playing the piano. Another analogy is exercise or sports: you have to master correct form of an exercise before you can focus on power or speed. A few months ago, I learned that there is a “form” to running, which kind of blew my mind! I would never have thought that such a fundamental, basic activity has a “wrong way” and a “right way.” Come to think of it, there’s even a right way and a wrong way to breathe!

So form (accuracy) first, speed second. Master the process fundamentals for each question type.

Once that’s done, here is my advice to work on speed: improve where improvement is possible. And as I write this, I’m struck by how “Captain Obvious” that statement is—it looks even worse on paper than it sounded in my head! Oh well…doesn’t change the fact that it’s the foundation of my speed strategy.

I work on speed in the problems that I can do quickly. Fortunately, most LSATs follow a pattern:

  1. The first 7 LR questions are usually pretty easy.
  2. The first game is usually pretty easy.
  3. The first RC passage is usually pretty easy, unless it’s a Comparative Reading passage (Passage A vs. Passage B).

A word of caution: RC and LG vary more in this respect than LR, so if one of the “firsts” in either of these sections is hard for you, don’t get overly concerned. That said, this pattern holds true for 90+ percent of the LG sections from 10 recent LSATs, and 80+ percent of the RC sections from 10 recent LSATs.

So I take three LR sections, three LG sections, and three RC sections, and I’ll do the first few questions from each with a stopwatch running. (The first from 3 sections, not one, because of the potential variation in LG and RC.)

Then I compare my time against a benchmark: multiply the number of LR questions by 1.4, the number of RC questions by 1.25, and the number of LG questions by 1.5. These benchmarks assume a total of 25 LR per section, 28 RC per section, and 23 LG per section.

I’m looking to beat those benchmarks by at least 5 minutes. So for example, I want to finish the 21 LR questions (first 7 from each section) in fewer than 24 minutes.

Then I check my answers. If I’ve missed more than one question, I go back to fundamentals for that question type. These LSAT questions are supposed to be the easy ones, and I shouldn’t be missing many, if any, of them.

Since this happens after I’ve done all my foundational work over 2+ months of studying, I should only need 2 or 3 iterations of this speed drill to feel fairly comfortable with it. This is not “spamming” practice tests or LSAT sections!

I’m now ready to take another full practice test, and see how close I can get to (or by how much I can exceed!!!) that 170 mark!

Good luck! ?

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Chris Gentry is a Manhattan Prep LSAT, GMAT, and GRE instructor who lives in Atlanta, Georgia. Chris received his Bachelor of Science in chemical engineering from Clemson and JD from Emory University School of Law before realizing that he genuinely enjoys the challenge of standardized tests, and his true passion is teaching. Chris’ dual-pronged approach to understanding each test question has helped countless of his students to achieve their goal scores. What are you waiting for? Check out Chris’ upcoming LSAT courses here.