One of the common mistakes that students make when preparing for the LSAT is timing themselves when solving games from the very beginning of preparing for the LSAT.  When you don’t allow yourself sufficient time to understand what the game is about and you don’t struggle through it to solve it, but instead you put a time limit of 8.5 minutes per game, you are much less likely to improve your game solving skills. You will be skimming over games, stressing out about not being able to finish the games quickly enough and will not improve your score.

Instead, at the beginning, you should focus on solving the games at any speed, understanding the strategies and not worrying about the time at least until the time that you are thoroughly familiar with all the kinds of games that might be included in the LSAT test.

Once you are comfortable enough to solve games without the time limit, you shold start working in increasing the pace, as solving the problems faster is ultimately a matter of repetition and experience.