LSAT Mastery and Timing Practice Reading Comprehension

Many people believe that in order to improve their Reading Comp performance, they must read faster. This is true to an extent, because the time pressures of this section are quite challenging. However, the pursuit for speed leads many students down the road of impractical strategies. Some try not reading the passage at all, soon thereafter discovering how ineffective this approach is on the LSAT, however well it may have worked for the SAT. Some try skimming the passage to save time, choosing to spend the majority of their time wrestling with the answer choices. And others try reading the questions first, hoping that it's possible to seek out the answers instead of understand the passage. None of these approaches is ideal. Masters utilize a method that maximizes speed and accuracy, and they do this by familiarizing themselves with the structure of LSAT passages and the nature of the questions. The secret to success is not to simply push yourself to read faster, necessarily, but to learn what to read for. You see, LSAT passages, like legal cases, contain a bunch of details surrounding one central issue. Your task on this test, as it will be in law school and later, in your legal practice, is to see through the details to the underlying framework of the passage. Grasp the central issue at the heart of the passage (typically two sides to an argument), understand which details support which side, and identify which side the author of the passage stands on, and you've got it! This is what we call The Scale, and your success on the LSAT Reading Comp will depend entirely on how well-formed your conception of the scale is. This is exactly what law students and lawyers must do when presented with the myriad details of any particular case.....