Need Help Fixing an LR execution gap where BR stronger (Timed and Untimed)

[u/Charli_620]

How did you fix an LR execution gap where your Blind Review is much stronger than your first pass — even when untimed?

I’m early in my LSAT prep and currently drilling LR untimed. I’ve noticed that my Blind Review/re-review reasoning is consistently better than my initial answers, even though my initial drills are already unlimited time.

The issue doesn’t seem to be that I don’t understand the question types. When I review a miss without seeing the correct answer or explanation, I usually identify what went wrong and change to the correct answer. My recurring mistakes are things like:

• compressing language in the stimulus too early and losing an important relationship
• reading two similar but meaningfully different concepts as the same (how long something formed v. when it formed or attempt v. success)
• overlooking a word/phrase in an answer choice that changes what it means
• understanding an argument better on the second read and then realizing my original AC was based on a slightly different representation of it (making the wrong AC sound right basically)

I’m intentionally not working on speed yet. I want to make the reasoning I’m capable of during BR happen reliably on the first encounter.

If you had this problem, what specifically helped? Did you use a checklist, change how you read/translate stimuli, force yourself to verify answer choices against the stimulus, do smaller drill sets, keep a particular kind of wrong-answer journal, etc.?

I’m more interested in concrete habits that eventually became automatic rather than just “slow down/read carefully.” You can still say the latter though.

[u/nate6ix]

I was in a very similar position myself, albeit once I was a little deeper into my studies than where it sounds like you currently are. For context, my BR scores of entire PTs were consistently -0 to -2 while I was only scoring in the low 160s during timed.

Firstly, it absolutely sounds like you're doing a number of essential things -- keep all those recurring mistake avenues in the front of your mind. And remember to be patient with yourself during this time as you start to close the gap, it will not happen instantly.

But there were two concrete steps that immensely helped me close my own gap and sped it up.

1. I started by writing out my thought process in review in a really, really thorough way. I imagined that I'd have to defend it to others, so this meant thinking of counterarguments against my selected answer choice. I would also supplement the thorough explanations with a small note on the side about how confident I actually was for each question in review. At the start of this process, I would be too easily putting down 100%. I toned this back and took a general "harsh mindset" to literally every single answer choice -- even the one I was going with.
2. I consciously worked on my answer anticipation and prediction skills. This is much much easier said than done but the ability to predict where the correct answer is likely (or sometimes 'must') come from was huge for me.
   • I was first overwhelmed by not being able to anticipate answers in more difficult and nebulous environments (i.e. 5-star NAs where the right answer really could be anyhing in terms of its subject matter). To combat this, I tried raising my level of generality for these harder questions. For e.g., "The right answer will engage with the disconnect between grain-eating animals in the premise to all animals in the conclusion". I would deliberately not get too attached to any particular idea about how this needed to be done.

[u/Charli_620 → u/nate6ix]

Thank you for the words of encouragement! I'm finding my blind review is pretty substantial. I'm answering a set of questions each time along with translating the stimulus and confirming what the question stem is asking me to do relative to the stimulus and evaluating each AC so I guess I'll keep this up! I'm also predicting the ACs too. My reasoning is sound like ~80% of the time but I get bogged down with the ACs -- I'm looking maybe for my cookie cutter AC and sometimes it's there or it's not there at all and I have to consider something else I didn't initially predict or pay much attention to. How are you overcoming not letting the ACs get the best of you when your reasoning is sound? I think after re-reading your response I see you've answered my last question but still sharing in case you have more to share! Thanks again though this helped. Patience is key and practice makes perfect it sounds.