What is the best order to work on the Logical Reasoning section of the LSAT?
The LSAT Logical Reasoning questions start off easy, so you get a chance to warm up before you run into the difficult questions that always seem to appear after question 12 or so. I never felt that there was any benefit to be gained from jumping around the section. If anything, skipping around this section will hurt your bubbling accuracy. Just understand that the difficult questions appear in the second half of the section, and move through the first half with appropriate speed.
The best way to work on the Logical Reasoning Section of the LSAT is to simply take the section from front to back.
The questions are not presented in any particular order. However, the first 8-12 questions generally seem to be relatively easy.
Therefore, working on the LSAT Logical Reasoning section from front to back will allow you warm up on these generally easier questions first, before you get to the ‘meat’ of the section.
That means that you should be doing some of these easier questions in less time than the minute and half average for each question. Saving time on these questions allows you to reallocate it to harder questions that you encounter later.
I don’t believe that you have much to gain by trying to find the easiest questions and attack them first. Sometimes, a question with short question stimulus will be very tough. Other times, a question with a long stimulus will be very easy. So you also don’t have much to gain by skipping around and working on shorter questions first.
If you do run into a question that you are struggling with, don’t be afraid to skip it and move on through the remainder of the section, then come back to it later. However, remember that leaving a question blank can sometimes mess you up when you are quickly trying to bubble in your answers. If possible, try and narrow it down to 2 possible answers and bubble in one of those. I always circled the number of questions that I wasn’t sure about, and would come back to that question at the end if time remained.
Doing this rather than spinning your wheels on a truly hard question helps ensure that you will get go straight through the section with enough time to look back at some of these very difficult questions, and also ensures that you don’t miss easy points on easy questions because of time pressure.
Doing lots and lots of practice tests is the key to developing timing and getting a feel for how long you should spend on easy versus difficult questions. Check out this link: https://lawschooli.com/where-can-i-find-every-actual-official-lsat-preptest/ and make sure you have plenty of preptests to do, including recent ones.
