LSAT Forum
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- ohthatpatrick
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Atticus Finch
- Posts: 4661
- Joined: April 01st, 2011
Re: LG Timing
If there were a 2 week magic trick, I'd be a rich man. 
Let me just list a few ideas that might be worth hearing ...
1. Most of our improved speed in Games will come from learning to do ordinary games quickly.
Given that you're almost guaranteed to see one normal-ish Ordering game and one normal-ish Grouping game, you should definitely practice those types of games quite a bit over the next two weeks and set ambitious time goals. We'd like to finish normal Ordering games in 5-7 minutes, ideally. It sounds like you might be closer to the 10 minute mark for each game if you're only getting to three games, so for you, you might want to set a time limit of about 8-9 minutes to get through any game you deem "pretty average".
Some of the ways to get faster here are just smoothing out our mechanics -- getting faster at writing out the list of letters, symbolizing the rules, feeling out whether this sort of game is worth looking for deeper deductions or whether you'd be better off just going to the questions.
Some of it might be trusting your work and moving onto the next question as soon as you think you have the right answer (not forcing yourself to test every single possibility, especially when testing possibilities takes more than a quick second or two).
2. Ditch the hardest question
Normally, in every game there's one question that feels noticeably worse than the others. Sometimes you might get more out of the whole section if you were willing to just ditch that question. For example, if every game has one killer question that takes you 2 minutes, while the others only take you 1 minute, then by skipping the 3 killer questions in the first 3 games, you might free up 6 minutes for tackling 4-6 questions in the last game. That might be a net gain.
For me, if I see one of those awful Rule Equivalency questions that come last ("Which one of the following, if substituted for the rule that _____, would have the same effect in determining the possible arrangements?"), I often just skip it and save it for later/never because it would take me 2 minutes to do it.
3. Be willing to skip a game if it doesn't play to your strengths
Generally, Games get progressively harder. But sometimes, there's a really confusing type of game 2nd or 3rd and then a more familiar ordering game 4th.
If you end up really struggling to figure out a confusing game in the middle and end up not getting time to try the more familiar 4th game, then you might be getting to less stuff than you could otherwise.
That's not to say you wanna skip around the whole section and try and rank them. But, within the first 20 seconds of looking at a game, you have the feeling of either "Oh, it's one of these" or "Wait, what is this?"
(If you don't think you have that sense yet, then that's definitely indicative of the fact that you need more practice with / exposure to games)
If you have the "Wait, what is this?" feeling within 20 seconds of game 1, 2, or 3, then you might as well just glance at the remaining game(s) to see if there's a more familiar task there.
Good luck!
Let me just list a few ideas that might be worth hearing ...
1. Most of our improved speed in Games will come from learning to do ordinary games quickly.
Given that you're almost guaranteed to see one normal-ish Ordering game and one normal-ish Grouping game, you should definitely practice those types of games quite a bit over the next two weeks and set ambitious time goals. We'd like to finish normal Ordering games in 5-7 minutes, ideally. It sounds like you might be closer to the 10 minute mark for each game if you're only getting to three games, so for you, you might want to set a time limit of about 8-9 minutes to get through any game you deem "pretty average".
Some of the ways to get faster here are just smoothing out our mechanics -- getting faster at writing out the list of letters, symbolizing the rules, feeling out whether this sort of game is worth looking for deeper deductions or whether you'd be better off just going to the questions.
Some of it might be trusting your work and moving onto the next question as soon as you think you have the right answer (not forcing yourself to test every single possibility, especially when testing possibilities takes more than a quick second or two).
2. Ditch the hardest question
Normally, in every game there's one question that feels noticeably worse than the others. Sometimes you might get more out of the whole section if you were willing to just ditch that question. For example, if every game has one killer question that takes you 2 minutes, while the others only take you 1 minute, then by skipping the 3 killer questions in the first 3 games, you might free up 6 minutes for tackling 4-6 questions in the last game. That might be a net gain.
For me, if I see one of those awful Rule Equivalency questions that come last ("Which one of the following, if substituted for the rule that _____, would have the same effect in determining the possible arrangements?"), I often just skip it and save it for later/never because it would take me 2 minutes to do it.
3. Be willing to skip a game if it doesn't play to your strengths
Generally, Games get progressively harder. But sometimes, there's a really confusing type of game 2nd or 3rd and then a more familiar ordering game 4th.
If you end up really struggling to figure out a confusing game in the middle and end up not getting time to try the more familiar 4th game, then you might be getting to less stuff than you could otherwise.
That's not to say you wanna skip around the whole section and try and rank them. But, within the first 20 seconds of looking at a game, you have the feeling of either "Oh, it's one of these" or "Wait, what is this?"
(If you don't think you have that sense yet, then that's definitely indicative of the fact that you need more practice with / exposure to games)
If you have the "Wait, what is this?" feeling within 20 seconds of game 1, 2, or 3, then you might as well just glance at the remaining game(s) to see if there's a more familiar task there.
Good luck!
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