Every test taker must have a plan of action before they start a section. As you
practice, you should strive to determine your personal Pacing Guideline. For
example, how many questions do you plan to complete in the first ten minutes?
The first twenty minutes? How much time do you expect will have elapsed
when you reach question #10? Question #20? Before you pick up a pencil and
take the actual test, you should be able to answer these questions.
First off, we are not advocating that you create a strict timeline that controls
where you are every moment in the section or that dictates when you quit
working on a question. Instead, you must create a loose blueprint for
completing the section—one that uses your particular strengths to create an
achievable set of goals. To give you a better sense of how the idea works, here
is an example of a Pacing Guideline for a high scorer:
First ten minutes of the section: complete one question per minute.
Accordingly, when ten minutes are up I should have completed question
#10.
Next twenty minutes of section: complete the remainder of the questions.
Last five minutes of the section: double-check my work; return to any
question I noted as especially challenging.
Clearly, this Guideline is an aggressive one that assumes that the test taker is
good enough to complete all the questions accurately and still have time
remaining. Your personal Guideline does not have to be the same! Take a
moment, however, to review the above Guideline:
• The test taker assumes that he or she can work faster in the first ten
questions, when the questions are typically easier.
• After the first ten questions, the test taker slows down in response to the
expected increase in difficulty.
• Despite being good enough to expect to finish all the questions, the test
taker doesn’t just sit back and relax for the last five minutes. Instead, he
or she uses that time to re-check troublesome problems.
• The Guideline is relatively loose and contains a minimum of
components.
Here is how to create and use your own Pacing Guideline:
1. During your practice sessions, focus on determining how fast you can
do a typical Logical Reasoning question while retaining a high degree
of accuracy. To do this, you will need to time yourself religiously.
2. Make a benchmark for where you should be after either the first ten
minutes or the first ten questions. Use easy to remember markers (such
as 5, 10, 15, 20) so you won’t forget your plan during the test or have to
stop to think about it. If your Guideline is too complex to remember
without writing down, it is too complex to use!
3. Consider making a second benchmark for where you should be after
either the first twenty minutes or the first fifteen questions.
4. Try to take into account the difficulty level of the first ten questions
versus the last ten questions.
5. Do not make your Pacing Guideline too detailed. The difficulty of the
questions (and entire sections) varies, so you do not want to create a
rigid Guideline that cannot account for these differences. For example,
do not make a Guideline that specifies where you will be at questions
#8, #10, #12, #14, etc. That is too specific and will be unusable if you
run into a few hard (or very easy) questions early in the section. Try to
make your Guideline broad enough to characterize several different
points in the section. If you have more than four or five sections in your
Guideline, it is getting too detailed!
6. Make sure you are comfortable with your plan and that your goals are
achievable. This is not a plan of what you hope will happen, but rather
what your practice has proven you can do.
7. Use the Guideline to help monitor your performance during the test. If
you end up working faster than expected and you are beating your
goals, then you will know that things are going exceedingly well and
that should bolster your confidence. On the other hand, if you find
yourself falling behind the marking points, then you will know that you
must bear down and work a bit more quickly.
Implementing the steps above should not be too difficult, but you would be
surprised at how many people fail to prepare even the most basic plan of action
for each section. In many ways, it is as if they have been asked to run a triathlon
but they practice only infrequently and do not keep track of how fast they can
go without burning out. Athletes at all levels measure their performance
frequently, and the LSAT is just a triathlon for the mind.
Let’s take a look at some other Pacing Guidelines to help you get a better sense
of the range of possibilities:
Can almost finish the section, paces by question number
First ten questions: complete in 14 minutes.
Next ten questions: complete in 18 minutes (32 total minutes elapsed/
3 minutes remaining).
Last three minutes of the section: pick the shortest questions and try to
complete as many as possible. Guess on any questions I cannot
complete.
Can reliably reach question #20, paces by time
First fifteen minutes of the section: complete the first ten questions.
Next twenty minutes of section: complete the next ten questions.
Just as section ends: Guess on remaining questions.
Can often reach the end of the section, paces by time
First ten minutes of the section: complete the first eight questions.
Next ten minutes of section: complete the next seven questions.
Next ten minutes of section: complete the next six questions.
Last five minutes of the section: gauge the situation and finish the section if
possible. If not, pick the shortest questions and try to complete as many
as possible. Guess on any questions I cannot complete.
The examples above represent just a few of the possibilities. Your Pacing
Guideline could look similar or it could be very different. The important thing is
that you find a Guideline that works for you and that you have confidence in.
Then, follow it on test day and always remember that you might have to be
flexible to account for the unexpected.
Within each Pacing Guideline there is room to make decisions during the test.
With practice you will discover your strengths and weaknesses, and you can
alter your approach during the test to maximize your abilities. Here are some
strategy decisions that might benefit certain test takers:
• If you have difficulty managing the large amount of information in
lengthy questions, skip questions that appear overly long to you. The
length of the question does not determine difficulty, but some students
know through practice that long stimuli give them difficulty. If so, avoid
those questions. Just make sure you guess on those questions if you do
not have a chance to return to them.
• If you read a stimulus and are completely confused by what you have
read, you can choose to simply guess and move to the next question. If
you do not understand the stimulus, it will be very difficult to answer a
question about that stimulus and sort through answer choices designed
to test your knowledge.
• The topic of LSAT questions should not be of concern to you since you
are reading for structure and relationship. However, we are also
realists—if the topic of an LSAT question is one you really dislike (for
example, science), then skip it. Word of warning: it is much better for
you to adapt to the topics and get used to them. If a section has eight
science questions, you can’t skip all of them!
• As time winds down, you can make allowances in your approach to the
questions. For example, if you are on question #24 (of 25 total) with
only one minute remaining in the section and you find that answer
choice (A) is extremely attractive, you can choose it and move on to the
final question. Normally you would read all the answer choices, but
when time is low, you can alter that approach if it is expedient to do so.
Another example of “endgame” management would be if you only have
one minute left but two questions to complete, and you choose the
shorter of the two problems.
To help you more accurately calculate your Pacing Guideline, the following
table correlates the number of questions completed to the average amount of
time per question if all 35 minutes in the section are used:
Total Questions Completed Average Time per Question
10 3:30 per question
12 2:55 per question
14 2:30 per question
16 2:11 per question
18 1:56 per question
20 1:45 per question
22 1:35 per question
24 1:27 per question
26 1:20 per question
This table assumes that your problem-solving rate is constant, but it shows that
the typical student can actually spend a fair amount of time per question and still
complete a respectable number of questions. For example, if you use just under
two minutes per question you will still complete approximately 18 questions.
Second, note that as you complete more questions, the amount of time you need
to cut off of your performance decreases. For example, if you complete exactly
22 questions you have an average of 1 minute and 35 seconds per question. To
complete 24 questions, you only need to cut 8 seconds off your per-question
performance (1 minute and 27 seconds per question). This explains why little
adjustments have such a big effect on performance and it also explains why we
are such strong believers in practicing with the techniques until they are second
nature. Most students think that taking a few extra seconds to apply a technique
is no big deal. But those seconds—when multiplied over 20 or more
questions—quickly add up and are the difference between a very good score
and an amazing score. To achieve an amazing score you must be very efficient
and your application of the techniques must be effortless and transparent.
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