by ohthatpatrick Thu May 24, 2018 7:59 pm
You raise a lot of points that show a good awareness of the tradeoffs / variables. There aren't perfect or standardized answers to these questions, so above all you should feel good about experimenting with different approaches (even better if you try an approach at least 3 times and track the data of how many correct answers, including guesses, you end up with).
Part of this could relate to how good your accuracy is when we remove the timing constraint:
if you do an LR section untimed, seeking 100% accuracy, how many wrong answers would you be averaging?
If you're going to drop 5 questions anyway, then it makes a lot of sense to give yourself permission to bail when the stimulus seems to be particularly awful.
If you're only missing about 2 untimed, then your bigger priority is to get quicker at the easier stuff. You should routinely push yourself to do the 1st 10 Q's in 10 mins. (a lot of 170+ LR scorers try to push themselves to doing the 1st 15 Q's in 15 mins). To be successful in going this quickly, you usually need to do several things:
- Be able to take advantage of question type tendencies (knowing the 2 most common places to hide the Conc on ID the CONC ... knowing to be turned off by strong language in Nec Assum and Inference ... knowing the 'right side of the arrow' shortcuts for Sufficient Assumption and Principle-Support)
- Be able to develop specific prephrases for some (but definitely not all) of these first dozen questions, and then to actively scan for that answer, confirm it, and move on.
- Be able to trust your gut when you see good/bad answers, and not be quite as paranoid or agonizing as we might be in the Q13-20 range.
Circling the answers is a great habit, and you have to just let yourself be cool with the idea that you'll have lots of circles you'll never get to revisit. It's a very useful lie to tell ourselves, "I'll come back to this later". Often, our accuracy isn't significantly affected by those extra looks. We're probably going to confirm or return to our original thinking most of the time, so we're not changing much by not seeing them again. More importantly, the time constraint on this test just doesn't give you enough time to reach that threshold of "I've studied this for as long as I'd like to". We have to live with the fact that it's going to, at certain points, be a test of best-guesses. Don't let that psychologically worry you. Everyone's doing it.
Overall, I think that 14 mins for Q11 through 20 might be light. That stretch includes most of the worst questions in the section, so you might wanna focus on really pouncing on the 1st ten in order to allow yourself more thinkin' time on the heavier stuff.
Good luck!
Thank you!