LSAT Tip: Timing

People often struggle with timing on this test. Part of what makes the LSAT difficult is that you've got to think clearly and quickly: sometimes those two things battle each other.

If struggling with timing, it could benefit your score to treat the last 5 or so questions in a section as sort of a "bonus round." Like on Wheel of Fortune when you've already won the game but now you're also trying to win the car. Imagine an LR section with 25 questions. You rush through it because in your mind you've got to complete all 25 of them. And imagine that "x" is the number of questions you end up answering incorrectly on that section. X might end up greater by trying to answer all questions than it would have been had you entirely given up on those last 5 questions and taken more time on the first 20. In fact, if you randomly guess the same letter on all 5 of those final 5 questions, you've got a reasonable shot of getting 1 or more of them right. And if you get all 5 wrong, but by giving up on them you get nearly all (or all) of the first 20 right, you've scored well on that section. Worth noting that this doesn't apply for students aiming for a score in, say, the 99th percentile of all test takers. But, the nature of percentiles demands that that's already rare.