Hi Anna,
It’s wonderful that you have developed such a strong grasp of the concepts tested on the exam that you are getting almost everything right!
At this point, there are quite a few things you can do to hone these skills in order to increase your speed without sacrificing accuracy: Be diligent about pre-phrasing, practice with a timer, analyze everything that takes you longer than it should have (as well as everything you miss) and look for patterns, revisit the proper processes for any areas of weakness you identify in order to ensure complete mastery, work out a time management strategy for each section, and finally, review some materials on test mentality, which should help you to stay focused and efficient under stress.
Here are a few suggestions for implementing these ideas:
Pre-phrasing
Make sure that you are getting the maximum possible benefit out of pre-phrasing answers in Logical Reasoning, as well as in the other sections. Getting good at pre-phrasing will save you a lot of time you might otherwise spend debating over incorrect answer choices that are designed to look correct. If you can approach the answer choices knowing what the correct answer needs to look like, you will have far less difficulty ruling out even very appealing wrong answers. Since becoming a fast and accurate pre-phraser does require practice, force yourself to do it by covering up the answer choices until you’ve created a pre-phrase, and then every time your pre-phrase misses the boat, figure out both what was wrong with it and how you can better pre-phrase a similar question in the future.
With Logic Games, you should be able to pre-phrase for a number of specific questions (such as thinking first about any random variables in a “could be true” question or, conversely, focusing on the most restricted variables in a “must be true” or “cannot be true” question). But the most important form of saving time by pre-phrasing in Games is generally the time you take when constructing your initial diagram to think about the relationships among the rules in order to draw inferences about what must happen or cannot happen in the game as a whole. The better you can become at identifying inferences, the faster you will be able to get through the questions in any game. So every time you do a game, go back and find any significant inferences that you missed and think about how you could recognize similar inferences more easily the next time you encounter a similar configuration.
Practicing with a Timer and Identifying and Addressing Weaknesses
Start using a timer whenever you practice (not simply for full practice tests or practice sections), and take note of the types of problems or games or reading passages that are taking you longer than the average time of 1:25 or 8:45. Even if you are getting all of these right, you’ll want to find out why they required such an investment of time and figure out a strategy for handling similar challenges more quickly in the future.
Thoroughly analyze not only questions you get wrong, but also everything that takes you longer than you think it should have. Not only do you want to learn why the correct answer should have been easy to isolate, but you also need to focus on how you were misled into choosing or thinking about an incorrect answer. Since the test is so consistent over time, the more you know about the mistakes you’ve made, the faster you will be able to avoid the same traps the next time you encounter a similar situation.
Monitoring your speed question by question will also allow you to pick up any patterns in question types or game types that take longer than they should, so you can identify any areas where you are still uncertain about the most efficient approach to take. You can then go back and re-read the relevant sections of your study guides to make sure that you have thoroughly mastered the relevant foundational information. This will help you to recognize any differences between the approach you are actually taking and the specific strategies you’ve learned for efficiently approaching each type of situation you encounter on every section of the test. The more regularly you can apply these practices now, the closer they will feel to a sort of second nature that you can employ on test day without needing to stop and think.
Here is some excellent advice from Nikki on how to make the most of this practice during your final weeks of preparation:
http://blog.powerscore.com/lsat/bid/153 ... al-Stretch
Section Time Management
As you practice timed sections, make sure that you develop a consistent habit of moving on from and/or simply skipping the most difficult questions, games, or passages, rather than allowing them to take up excess time that could be more profitably spent on multiple easier questions. Then, once you have completed the easier questions that are more likely to bring you the most points, you can use the remaining time to go back to the hard questions (or hard game) that you are less certain to get right. Skipping the most time-consuming questions sounds easier than it is, so you will want to make sure that you give yourself plenty of practice getting used to deciding how you want each section to be organized rather than just taking the questions in the often far from optimal order in which they are given to you by the testmakers.
Another time management strategy that many people find helpful in logical reasoning is saving some time at the beginning of the section by attempting to complete the first ten questions (which are generally easier than the later questions) in ten minutes, which will leave you with a significant chunk of time for the more difficult questions. In addition to trying this out when taking timed sections, you can also practice on a question by question basis by seeing how many you can accurately answer in 60 seconds rather than 1:25 seconds. You can also pick up speed in games in a similar manner by giving yourself a little less than the average of 8:45, and seeing how far you can get in that reduced time. If a game takes you longer, think about what you could have done differently to increase your speed, both in terms of inferences you might have seen but didn’t and questions where you could have found the correct answer more efficiently.
As you work with strategies such as these, it should help you not only to improve your speed but also in turn to reduce some of the stress created by having to work under timed conditions.
Laura
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