Ideal amount of Time spent for Setup

[Jay]

Hi Powerscore,

To what extent should I spend time on the setup?

I constantly hear from LSAT top scorers to take time in the basic setup and make inferences as much as possible before you jump into the questions.

But many times, I find myself spending too much time on the setup and unwittingly make all the possible inferences (all possible templates) and confuse myself even more as I go through the questions.

Sometimes, I finish games even faster as I go through the questions. For example, I usually do local questions first and as I do local questions I learn about the game pretty fast.

So, I face the dilemma. More time on the setup? or Less time on the setup but jump on to the local questions? I know it's case-by-case, but generally speaking, which do you think is better? Little word of advice please.

[Jeremy Press]

Hi Jay,

You should always spend enough time in the setup to diagram the basic scenario correctly (i.e. getting the best visual depiction of the base, the variable lists, and the rules), and to make the basic inferences that are very common in whatever particular type of game you're working on (e.g. "Not-Laws" in Basic Linear games, contrapositives and conditional chain relationships in Grouping games, distribution possibilities in games with uncertain distributions). I find for most students this takes somewhere between 90 seconds to a few minutes.

Beyond that, my own rule of thumb is not to get too much more bogged down in the scenario unless there are a limited number of templates that can be depicted relatively quickly (no more than 4 templates, in my opinion; though some people will feel comfortable extending that to 6 or even 8 templates, which, for my own personal comfort level, is too many).

After you finish the game, you may realize there were some "advanced" inferences you didn't notice initially. Ask yourself if it would've been realistic to see those in a time efficient way at the beginning of the game (before you worked on questions). Sometimes the answer to that question will be "no." Other times, you'll see that there was actually a very doable, realistic way of spotting the inference without adding to your setup time. That's a win for future games with similar types of rules. But don't feel like you have to make every single possible inference before you work on questions. If you think that way, you will almost certainly spend too much time on the setup itself.

I hope this helps!