Beginner Questions

[LSAT99.9]

Hello,

I recently began preparing for the September 2016 LSAT (on Monday). However, I have one question concerning my preparation. As I am now learning the material for the first time, I find myself taking longer than the amount of time we have on the real LSAT to solve questions, in the various drills in the bibles. Is this okay? I feel a little nervous even though I know I only recently began prepping, as the focus of the LSAT is to be accurate AND fast, not simply accurate. Hence, should I limit myself to the amount of time alloted (e.g. 1 min 25 seconds for logical reasoning)?

Thank you very much.

[Clay Cooper]

Hi LSAT99.9,

Thanks for your question. It is a good one, and one a huge number of students have.

The short answer is no, you shouldn't be worried, for two reasons:

First, you are going to get faster as you continue to prepare. Students very often ask about speed in answering questions when they begin their prep work, and my response is always the same: getting faster happens when you get better, so to speak. In other words, as you learn more about the test, the individual sections, and the specific question types, your skill in answering them will improve. You will begin to recognize patterns that you hadn't seen before and will be more comfortable with types of reasoning that probably seem foreign right now. So, if you work diligently to prepare, you can expect your speed to increase.

Second, when the real test rolls around in September, some students will still not be comfortable moving quickly enough to finish all of the questions in a given section on time. That is normal and inevitable. You should know though that, if that turns out to be the case for you - if the fastest pace with which you are comfortable still leaves questions unanswered - then your strategy at that point should still be to maintain your best comfortable pace; it is unlikely that speeding up so much that your accuracy suffers will be a good strategy score-wise. That may sound fatalistic, but hopefully it will reassure you that, if you do what you can to prepare as well as possible, there is no need to try to force yourself to go faster yet.

I hope that helps! Good luck with your prep, and please keep asking any questions that you may have.