- Fri Nov 15, 2019 6:48 pm
#72029
The official answer is that it is different for each student. What would be the rationale? Well, here are some things to keep in mind:
1. You don't have to answer every question to get a great score. In fact, you can guess at 20% of the test and still have a good shot at a 165 or higher.
2. You should choose which questions to skip, not default to the test makers. You can be sure that they don't have your best interest in mind when they arrange the test questions. So avoiding just answering each one in order until you run out of time is a good idea.
3. "Difficult" is defined by LSAC differently than you or I. First, there is some subjectivity to it because what might be easy for you is not for me. But what I mean here is LSAC defines difficulty purely by the percent of test takers who get a particular question correct. But we all know that just because 50% of people get both question 15 and question 25 correct doesn't mean that they are equally difficult. Surely, Q15 is more difficult in this example because many people didn't even read question 25 before running out of time and either left it blank or guessed randomly.
4. Building off 2 and 3 we can assume that difficulty peaks in the late teens and early 20s and that on the whole questions 23-25 or 26 will be slightly easier. Why is this a good assumption? Well, this rewards the best test takers with extra questions and thus differentiates test takers, which is the very definition of a good standardized test. They need a way to magnify small differences into big ones. In real life there is no practical difference between a student who scores 165 and 175, but it is very important for schools and therefore LSAC to have a nice bell curve. Making the last few questions slightly easier will boost the top scorers that much more.
So, what do I recommend to my students? I don't do it by number but by page turn. Before every page turn I recommend transferring your questions to the bubble sheet. Usually there is a page that contains questions 16-20 or something like that. Skip that pair of pages and go to the end. Then come back and do the "hard pages" and bubble in each answer as you get it, as you should be getting very low on time. Make sure you leave enough time to guess the ones you skipped.
TL;DR:
Skip the pair of pages just before the last questions (usually around 16-22) then go back to them because there are usually the most difficult questions.
). That might change your mind about the approach you are talking about.