LR Strategy Help

[allybock]

Hi!

I have been taking practice sections/doing practice questions in LR mostly for the upcoming LSAT in November. There are several questions that I get wrong but when I go back to them to examine the right answer, I see that it is the answer I left open. In other words, I almost always cross out three choices and leave my top two, and when I choose between my answer and the correct answer, I choose wrong.
For some reason, I am understanding arguments, conclusions, and fact patterns just fine, but when I go to pick the answer choice I'm looking for, I am not as successful. I don't know what I should be asking myself or how to adjust my strategy in a way to help me bring the answer choices back making sure I picked the right one without taking up so much time.

Any suggestions? Thanks so much!!

[Brook Miscoski]

Ally,

Your question cannot be answered with complete reliability without having examples. I can give you some general observations that we have when people do what you describe.

1. You say that you are getting "several" wrong on a test section. "Several" means "more than two, but not many." If you are getting three or four questions wrong on the LR section, you are performing at a very high level on LR. Have you taken the time to go through all of the questions that you reduce to a few answer choices, to see your accuracy overall when you have not eliminated all of the wrong choices? My guess is that overall you are extremely accurate in that scenario, so you want to be careful about any adjustments you make.

2. If you are analyzing the stimulus properly but picking the wrong answer out of the two contenders, see whether this is associated with a particular kind of question stem. If it is, solution! If it's not, check whether the wrong choices you pick have detail words that take them out of scope. You can also check whether you occasionally pick strongly relevant choices that may even address the critical issue, but accomplish the wrong task. In short, you are looking for whether you need to fine-tune (a) a specific question type; (b) your close reading of each contender; or (c) staying on task.

That's what I can give you without having examples. Again, if you are only missing three or four questions on an LR section, that should be a reason for confidence even if you need a few more points to reach your goal.