I sometimes equate aspects of LSAT preparation with learning a musical instrument. Each requires deliberate practice — learning an often foreign and unintuitive way of thinking — and patience, especially when improvement appears slow or even nonexistent.
Those who have studied a musical instrument will remember spending a lot of time practicing slowly, often at less than half the speed that the piece or exercise would ultimately be played. Playing a fast piece only at its actual speed leads only to frustration, while practicing slowly and deliberately allows you to think consciously about every step while slowly building up to the point where it becomes second nature.
The LSAT is no different: You must learn to move quickly to complete each section, but it is near impossible to do so without slowing things down first. In this week’s post, we’ll examine why this approach is important on the LSAT and how to make best use of it to maximize your score.
[Discover how to make the most of LSAT practice tests.]
Why Practice Untimed?
I sometimes get pushback from students who have been taught that timing is key on the LSAT. Indeed, regular readers of this blog know I believe that lots of timed work is essential to maximizing your score.
But to do things quickly, you must first do them slowly. This increases accuracy — and subsequently speed — by allowing you to better understand why you’re answering a question wrong. If you only practice under timed conditions, it will be much more difficult for you to analyze and understand where you went astray.
[Know how to manage your time for each section of the LSAT.]
Even worse, without untimed work, you’ll likely reinforce the mistakes that are causing you to answer incorrectly by repeating them. Moving slowly through a question, passage or logic game enables you to think through every step in your analysis and identify errors.
Although it may seem counterintuitive, practicing untimed will also increase your speed. Just as slowly playing scales on a musical instrument builds muscle memory and makes the physical movements automatic, slowly going through each LSAT question will make the steps in your analysis come more quickly and eventually feel natural and automatic.
How to Practice Untimed
The first step to practicing untimed is getting comfortable with the fact that you may spend a long time with a single question. Spend as much time as necessary, even five minutes or more, on a problem to make sure you understand every step you took in the path to the correct answer.
Note that this doesn’t mean that you should do anything extra or different from what you would do under timed conditions — if you deviate from that process, then you’re not preparing for the real test and may be creating additional work that will slow you down on test day.
[Explore three study habits that won’t help on the LSAT.]
Instead, as you follow each step you would normally take to answer a question, ask yourself why you are doing this, what the next step is and why that is the next step. Answering these questions will reinforce the correct process, which will ultimately lead to greater speed and accuracy on test day.
When to Practice Untimed
In general, focus almost all of your initial preparation on untimed practice. As you get more and more comfortable with the methods and processes you’re learning, gently increase the amount of timed work you do until you’re comfortable with most of what you encounter under timed conditions.
As the test date approaches, spend most of your study time doing timed work and examine the questions you got wrong in a slower, more deliberate fashion.
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Make the Most of Untimed LSAT Practice originally appeared on usnews.com
