- Tue Aug 06, 2019 6:41 pm
#67102
KWC,
First, know that you don't need to answer every question in order to get a 99 percentile score. And you can guess at plenty of questions and still get a 90 percentile. The nature of the test means that guessing is not very problematic if used judiciously and strategically.
In LR especially, there is no down side to guessing. I like to think of it as YOU choosing which ones you don't get to rather than the test. You should plan on skipping enough questions so that you end on time. And if you have an extra minute, you can go back and answer one of the ones you skipped. I would skip the ones you usually get wrong or the ones that take too much time. Even if you skip 5 in each LR section, you will likely get 2 right from random guessing. If you do well in the other sections, say getting one wrong in each section, that will give you a 170, above 1/4 of Harvard Law students. Not bad for skipping 20% of all LR questions!
Another thing that you can do is get faster at the questions you are good at, or the easy ones. It doesn't matter where you take the seconds off, hard or easy. See if you can shave seconds off the first ten questions, then you can use that time to attack the more difficult ones. There is often one or two questions that take more than 2 minutes and you still get wrong. Imagine skipping these two. You would save about 5 minutes or 1/7th of the sections time! You could use those 5 minutes to answer a few more questions right. Obviously you want to get faster at answering questions but a large part of prep is budgeting your time and skipping strategically is a big part of this. You don't want to go so fast in hopes of answering everything and then miss questions you could hav gotten right if you had only taken a few more seconds.
One thing I like to have my students do is take "untimed timed" tests. That is, you time yourself, but you can take as long as you need to answer the questions. So, if you get 24/25 right in 39 minutes, you want to slowly get faster but not at the expense of getting more wrong. But you want to get answers right first, then go fast. Anyone can answer all the questions in less than 35 minutes if they get a bunch wrong. Do you get all the answers right if you have unlimited time? Then focus on getting your time down. Do you get a bunch wrong no matter how much time you have? Then focus on getting those answers right.
Finally, work on your prephrasing. There is no method that can both improve your accuracy and reduce your timing better than prephrasing.
