LSAT timing and pacing: finishing the section without rushing it

Almost everyone runs out of time at first, and almost everyone diagnoses it wrong. The instinct is "I read too slowly", so they try to read faster, accuracy falls, and the score does not move. The minutes are rarely lost where people think.

Where the time actually goes

Track it once and it is usually obvious: two or three questions ate five minutes each. Not the whole section running slightly slow — a few sinkholes, where you went back and forth between two answers, changed your mind twice, and left with the one you started on.

That is a decision problem, not a reading-speed problem. And it is expensive twice over: the minutes are gone, and they were spent on the questions you were least likely to get right anyway, which is time taken directly from questions you would have gotten.

Skipping is a skill, and it has to be practiced

The fix is to leave. Give any question a rough ceiling, and when you hit it, mark it and move on. You can come back; you frequently see it differently on the second pass, and you will have banked the easier points first.

This is harder than it sounds, because leaving feels like giving up on something you have already invested in. That is the sunk cost talking, and the minute you already spent is gone whether or not you spend the next one. Practice leaving under a clock until it stops feeling like a loss.

Build pace by making the process shorter, not the reading faster

• Know the question type before you read the answers. Reading the stem first tells you what you are looking for, and looking for something specific is far quicker than evaluating five things.
• Have an answer in mind before you look. Comparing five choices to your own prediction is fast; comparing them to each other is slow and is how you end up torn between two.
• Eliminate on a definite reason. "This says all, the passage said some" is a decision. "This feels off" is a loop you will re-enter.
• Do not re-read the passage for every question. Read it properly once, note where things are, and return to specific lines rather than the whole thing.
• Accept the guess. An unanswered question and a wrong one score the same, so never leave one blank — but also do not spend three minutes converting a guess into a slightly better guess.

Accuracy first, then speed

There is an order to this and going in the wrong one wastes months. Get accurate untimed first, even if untimed means very slow. Speed applied to a method that does not work reliably just produces wrong answers sooner.

Once the method is sound, the clock does most of the compression by itself — a reliable process run repeatedly gets faster without being rushed. Pushing pace before that point trades away the accuracy you had, which is the most common way people spend a month getting worse.