I'm most worried about how to approach multiple choice questions - do you have any tips or general techniques?

First advice I have for you - don't panic! As soon as you enter the room panicking, you will lose control of timing, won't pay as much attention to the wording of the passages, and will ultimately not get as high a score as you know you can get. There are a few techniques/tips that I have personally found useful for myself, and a lot of the students that I have taught in the past. Having said that, every student is different and things that work for one person might not work for the other. I would recommend reading through these tips and seeing how you could adapt them to fit your own personal needs/current level. Are you ready for the first tip? Here goes...

1) Timing - The multiple choice section contains 42 questions, all of which should be completed within 95 minutes. Each passage contains an average of 3 to 4 questions, so depending on the number of questions, you should aim to spend around 8-10 minutes on each passage (and around 2 minutes per question). This will leave time to review answers/go back to questions you weren't able to answer before moving on to the essay section. IMPORTANT: You should be flexible with this as passages are weighted according to difficulty, so you are expected to spend more time on harder passages and less time on easier passages. The timings are therefore just a ball park figure for your reference. 

2) Things to look out for in the beginning - COAST Strategy. Before jumping to reading the questions, I usually find it most useful to tell my students to read through the passage first. Having said this, I also remind them not to just read for the sake of reading, but really bear a few points in mind. I've devised a strategy called COAST, which stands for Context, Objective, Arguments, Style and Tone. During our class, we will go through how to pick each of these things out in the passage and identify how that will help you deduce the right answer by the time you move on to the questions. 

3) Differentiating key question words - it is important for students to understand the difference between an assumption and an unstated assumption, for example, and the difference between an implication and a statement. An implication is something that the author uses to illustrate/support his argument, but it is something that is underlying rather than explicitly mentioned. A statement, on the other hand, is something that the author explicitly mentions or talks about in this passage. Having a good understanding of key question buzz words will help students narrow down the right answers in no time. 

4) Technique for getting to the right answers themselves - do you look at the answers first then read through the essay, or do you do it the other way round? Do you go through each answer and eliminate or do you have a rough idea of what the answer should be and pick out the closest one out of all the options? Depending on how you have approached multiple choice questions in the past, the way you ace the LNAT might vary. Nonetheless, there are a few things that a student should remember when faced with the five options. First, the student needs to remember that they always try to confuse you and include an answer (sometimes two) that is obviously wrong/contradictory to the right answer. This means you can already eliminate those answers and leaves you with 3 options. Second, there can only be one right answer. This means that the two that are really similar (if such options exist) will both have to be eliminated - if one is correct, and the second is similar, then the second necessarily has to be correct. This means neither of them could be right, as there can only be one final answer. Techniques like these are a useful reference point, and we will be building on them throughout the sessions so you will feel confident by the time you do the actual test itself! 

Now its time to put these skills into practice and go through some real life multiple choice questions...!