The digital LSAT gives you on-screen tools — highlighting, flagging, an answer-elimination feature — that feel like they should obviously help. In practice, over-using them often costs more time than it saves, and knowing which tools genuinely earn their keep is worth sorting out before test day, not during it.
Highlighting a genuinely key sentence — a stated main conclusion, a critical conditional rule — can help you relocate it fast later. Highlighting liberally, sentence after sentence, defeats the purpose entirely: if everything is highlighted, nothing stands out, and you've spent real time dragging your cursor without gaining a usable signal.
Reserve highlighting for the one or two sentences per passage or stimulus that you'd genuinely want to jump back to — a thesis statement, a pivotal “however,” a specific number a question is likely to reference. If you're highlighting more than a few phrases per passage, you're probably highlighting out of anxiety, not strategy.
Flagging a question you're unsure about to revisit later is genuinely useful — it's the same principle behind the blind review method, catching uncertain answers for a second look. But flagging everything you're even slightly unsure about can leave you with an unmanageable pile at the end, with no time left to actually review any of it properly.
| Flagging habit | Outcome |
|---|---|
| Flag only genuine toss-ups (2 answers you can't decide between) | A short, reviewable list at the end |
| Flag anything that felt remotely uncertain | An overwhelming list with no time to actually revisit it |
| Never flag anything | No second chance at questions you talked yourself out of |
Crossing out eliminated answer choices on screen (rather than just mentally tracking them) reduces the chance of accidentally re-reading an answer you've already ruled out, and narrows your visual field when you're deciding between your final two options. This is one of the lower-risk tools — it rarely costs meaningful time and reliably helps focus.
Practice with these exact tools during your practice tests, not for the first time on test day — muscle memory for toggling highlighting, flagging, and elimination should be automatic by the time it counts, so you're not spending cognitive effort on the INTERFACE during the actual exam.