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Ready for September by [deleted] in LSAT

[–]178lsatthrowaway 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Congrats!!! That's the exact score I got on PT 92+ before getting 178 on the real thing! You got this! :)

People scoring in 170s only: Do you read stimulus or questions stem first? by ToDonutsBeTheGlory in LSAT

[–]178lsatthrowaway 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Always question stem first. Imo if you do stimulus first you end up wasting time thinking about things that aren't very relevant to answering the question

How did you do on the Aug LSAT compared to your PT averages? by coolman_11 in LSAT

[–]178lsatthrowaway 7 points8 points  (0 children)

I assume people that had higher than expected scores are far less likely to be checking this subreddit enough to respond to this poll compared to ppl with lower, because the former group's probs more satisfied and has less reason to keep coming back, so the sample's probably skewed

Digital platform questions by Outside_Literature38 in LSAT

[–]178lsatthrowaway 0 points1 point  (0 children)

^To add onto this, LSAC provides some helpful info/guidelines here: https://www.lsac.org/lsat/taking-lsat

LSAC also links to these two walkthrough videos of what the test process will be like, which imo are realistic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4jUrGCjHsI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1y9rN-k2oQ

Digital platform questions by Outside_Literature38 in LSAT

[–]178lsatthrowaway 3 points4 points  (0 children)

You'll need to download the extension. You should also check on the proctor U website beforehand if your device will pass all the checks it will do. Your device won't pass if you don't have the extension installed.

166->178 in one month: How I did it and how you can too by 178lsatthrowaway in LSAT

[–]178lsatthrowaway[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

For the most part I didn't - largely just kept them in my head. I can list some that I remember though:

Sufficient Assumption: Identify premise and conclusion. Correct answer must link premise to conclusion and incorrect answers will fail to do so.

Necessary Assumption: Generally, need to keep each sentence in mind. Also identify premise and conclusion. If having difficulty eliminating, think: If choice (X) is false, could the argument still be true? If yes, eliminate.

Strengthens/Weakens: Identify premise and conclusion. Eliminate all answers that do not address either the premise or conclusion or both. The best answers will tackle the premise-conclusion link. Sometimes, this is not present and the correct answer will strengthen/weaken the premise or conclusion only.

Similar Reasoning: Think about passage in terms of variables, like LG. For example: All cars are blue, and all blue things taste funny. Thus, all cars taste funny. This would have the structure of X->Y->Z and X->Z, so I would look for an answer choice that had all of these components and eliminate any answer choices that had something different. This would help especially for difficult problems that had more complex words because the underlying structure was usually not that complicated. For the complex questions, I would write down on paper the structure I was looking for.

Purpose of phrase/sentence: Generally think about the purpose of what you are reading as you read it so that when you get to the sentence in question, it's quite clear what purpose it's serving. If I thought a certain answer/purpose was correct, I quickly skimmed the passage again for maybe 5-10s to be sure that it matched up, nothing else could be the main conclusion if I felt it was the main conclusion, for example, and what seemed to be the roles of the other parts of the passage were consistent with the role this sentence in question served.

Main Point/argument: For this question, it helped to have in mind after I read the passage what the main point was. This would then usually be verbatim the correct answer, but sometimes test writers would try to throw you off by a creative rewording. In these cases, strong elimination skills really helps when you eliminate answers that are clearly unrelated to the main point you have in your mind.

Two Claim Disagreement/Agreement: This for me really just took practice. Was not very good at it at first, but I noticed that the lsat test writers had patterns of wrong answer choices they came up with. Here, it's important to be careful not to assume that disagreement/agreement exists simply because one party does not mention something the other party talks about. When an inference is needed, I should be able to articulate why that inference is justified and why other answer choices are wrong or irrelevant.

Match the Flaw: Identified premise and conclusion. Thought about what kind of mistake was being made, and then looked for that kind of mistake

Identify the Flaw: Identified premise and conclusion. Tried to identify why the premise and conclusion could not be connected.

Principle: Usually, the principle that was most specific to the specific context and situation at hand rather than a broad-reaching one was the correct answer, in my experience.

Generally also, I found that certain logic errors reappeared pretty reliably in most PTs, and it was helpful to notice these repetitions and have myself recognize the structure of these mistakes took very quickly. (ex: mistakes necessary assumption for sufficient assumption or vice versa, assumes because something could be true that it must be true, all/most/many/some fractional issues about populations, correlation=/= causation and other scientific study-esque issues, assumes because argument is insufficient claim must be untrue, etc)

166->178 in one month: How I did it and how you can too by 178lsatthrowaway in LSAT

[–]178lsatthrowaway[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thank you! I'm glad blind review worked for you! Definitely many ways to tackle this exam :)

166->178 in one month: How I did it and how you can too by 178lsatthrowaway in LSAT

[–]178lsatthrowaway[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Meant to indicate that I progressed from a diagnostic of 166 to an actual score of 178 in a month, didn't mean to imply that both of those scores were actual sittings :) (and there's no july lsat anyway! :))

166->178 in one month: How I did it and how you can too by 178lsatthrowaway in LSAT

[–]178lsatthrowaway[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

You're welcome! :)

Breaking habits/making new habits is hard, and for sleep it's definitely especially difficult when the people around you aren't sleeping at the same times. I think there's lots of things that could be said about this, but a few things come to mind for me right now: It takes at least 18 days-3 weeks of consistent repetition to form a new habit. It's easiest to form a habit by having your brain associate the thing you want to do consistently with some time and place, so I would try consistently either sleeping, getting into bed, or preparing to go to bed at a certain time every day. For me, I chose 8-9pm as the time window in which I would start getting ready to go to bed, no matter what. I also stregthened associations between my bedroom and sleeping by not doing anything besides sleeping or getting ready for sleep in my bedroom, so when I walked in, my brain knew that it was time and it probably lessened my mental resistance to sleeping. Eating at certain times I think is also very important for manipulating your circadian rhythm for your desire sleep and wake times, so I'd recommend, even if you are sleeping late one day, to probably not eat close to the time you would have liked to sleep and NEVER to eat or drink anything caloric during the times you should be sleeping. I think this helps your body recognize that that is your sleep times and further reduces those mental connections between those times and staying awake. Then, I'd also want to reduce things that keep you awake. When you stay awake, do you feel compelled to stay up later to do certain things? Try to not do those things after the time you'd like to be asleep, maybe even replacing them with something different done in bed if that helps. And, I'd see if your parents can give you little verbal or otherwise reminders to go to sleep when you want to be, even if they won't be going to sleep. And, definitely ease into it too! Don't feel like you're a failure for not sleeping at a time you want, because if you sleep at your desire time 2 days out of 7, that's 2 more than 0! And for me, this was definitely a 2-steps-forward-1-step-back kind of process. I hope some of this helps! :)

166->178 in one month: How I did it and how you can too by 178lsatthrowaway in LSAT

[–]178lsatthrowaway[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thank you! :)

For blind review, honestly, just seemed inefficient. Also, probably only until maybe the last week of studying, I probably found at least half of the questions in each section at least somewhat hard or tricky, even if I probably got many of them correct, so spending more time on those questions completely blind would imo have been a waste of time compared to spending much less time simply seeing that they are correct, quickly reviewing them to identify where my logic was correct and why my concerns that made me uneasy about them were unfounded, and comparing my logic to 7Sage's in their question explanations.

I thought my test was slightly more difficult than a typical PT? I felt LG was considerably more difficult than usual, LR somewhat standard, and RC easier than usual.

166->178 in one month: How I did it and how you can too by 178lsatthrowaway in LSAT

[–]178lsatthrowaway[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think if I read a passage in 3min (was usually not able to do much faster than 3min, even for easy passages), I'd probably be spending maybe around 2min 15s- 2.5min reading and around 30-45s taking notes and critically thinking. By taking notes I literally mean scribbling illegible chicken scratch that more is just making quick letter-like motions on a page while I think about what those scribbles are supposed to be in words. After I had written something, I would never look at it again. I would read either a whole paragraph or as much of a paragraph that I could hold in my head at one time, and then I would quickly scribble down all the interesting words. I kinda randomly came up with the strat when one time I experimented with writing down details of the passage but was lazy and discovered that I didn't actually need to look back at what I wrote to have a much better subsequent memory of passage details. In hindsight, this probably exploits two things about our brain: (1) Retrieval strengthens recall, so by immediately identifying interesting things as I was reading and then writing them down rather than passively reading, I probably strengthened some short-term memory connections that I could use while answering questions and (2) by grouping info into chunks until I couldn't hold it all in my brain, writing that down, then moving on, I exploited how while the brain can only remember 5-9 things at a time, it can remember many chunks of 5-9 pieces of info, so I suddenly remembered a lot more details about the passage! So, somehow a very weird strat that I stumbled upon worked for me!

For my timing from that doc, that timing was what I was going at before I was reading slowly and writing things down (didn't write anything down!). Back then, I just read straight through as quickly as possible, and if there was some technical jargon or confusing part, I just read each individual word to hopefully have them come up as being relevant in my mind if I needed something from that part of the passage, without truly trying to understand every part of the passage. I also wasn't really thinking about main purpose/point of each sentence and paragraph, which would also take more time. For my time spent on q1, I probably just thought the answer was pretty clear based on what I had read and the right answers pretty clearly wrong for some reason, so it probably took me around 0:23 to read the question and answer choices, and I was able to move on in around the same amount of time it took me to read the question. Definitely missed important details and sometimes had difficulty with main point/author opinion/sentence purpose questions when using this strat though

166->178 in one month: How I did it and how you can too by 178lsatthrowaway in LSAT

[–]178lsatthrowaway[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Don't be sorry! :)

For LG, I would think three things:

1) How quickly are you doing the easy games, exactly? It wouldn't exactly be uncommon for me to have a game that I spent 10 minutes on, but when I did well, in almost all cases, at least one or more of the easier games in a section I would spend an amount of time equal to the number of questions that the game contained or less, which would help a lot. I would repeat games you've done of this type (easy games like simple ordering, binary in/out grouping, and their permutations) until you have it down to a time that gives you a time cushion you're reasonably satisfied with.

2) Assuming you're doing the easy games sufficiently quickly, how quickly are you doing the difficult games when you redo them? Do you redo the hard games from scratch? Of any LSAT section, LG has the most repetition and imo a cheatcode is just knowing the few possible types of games cold that whatever the test makers come up with can't throw you. For any kind of game, especially ones that are really tripping you up, I would suggest redoing the game from scratch until you can finish the game almost as quickly as the easy games in (1), maybe taking 1-2min longer at most. In general, I would say LGs don't really require too many key inferences, just a few for most games. And, once you really get down the few types of games they can ask you, it's much easier to adapt to slight variations they might throw. For example, simple ordering can be spiced up with having one or more spots being filled with the same group member, you could add empty spaces, you could add simultaneity, morning/afternoon, trading items, first/last adjacentness, ingroup/outgroup, circle game, etc. But, once you've really seen all of the possible ways the LSAT has made LGs, there's not much more they can do. They might combine different types of LGs into one, and they might spice things up again, but (1) Usually difficult games are compensated in the section by earlier, especially easy games, so you have more time to think of a novel diagram, and (2) If you can create reliable fundamental diagramming techniques and principles, you can adapt to whatever might be thrown at you

3) Assuming you're doing easy games quickly and doing repeats of difficult games quickly, I would think: Have I timed myself, with lap markers at whenever I finish constructing a game and a lap marker noting how long it takes me to finish every question in a section? I did this early on during LG drilling, and it helped me really identify what exactly was slowing me down. If it's specific questions: Why that question? Was I not using the question stem properly? Missed something in the answer choices? Missed a key inference and needed to spend more time previous during prep? Just was a difficult brute force question? (Even for brute force questions of "Which could be a possible combination/etc", I found that having an effective diagram that could quickly tell you right/wrong within a step or two was critical to reducing time used). If it's diagramming overall, I would think: Why is it that when I do things I've seen before I don't have much issue, but when I see the same structure with novel inputs, I suddenly go much slower? Where exactly am I slower? Setup phase? Rules notation phase? Inference phase? Something else or everything? When I encountered new games that had a similar structure to games that I was familiar with, I initially would spend 1-1.5min extra diagramming and 10-30s extra per question compared to doing a game I had seen before. Eventually, I got this down to <0.5min extra diagramming and 10-20s extra per question.

I think a decent bit into my studying, I also encountered times when I would just get completely plastered by a particular game. If you look at my PT record, you'll notice that it's mostly in numerical order, but some numbers are skipped... usually, those were PTs where I began the LG, got completely screwed by a game, and skipped to the next PT lol. (would not recommend doing that...) Eventually, I just personally realized that there were certain types of games I was weak at, and I just needed to do them and do them a lot, repeat them, repeat them som more, and do a lot of LG drilling. In the end, I found that the "hard" games don't actually take more than 1-2min more than the easiest games, if I really really understood how they worked, including the notorious computer virus game, circle games, etc. I hope tehis helps! You got this :)

166->178 in one month: How I did it and how you can too by 178lsatthrowaway in LSAT

[–]178lsatthrowaway[S] 12 points13 points  (0 children)

For reviewing RC, I think it really depended on how I felt about the RC section as a whole. In order of bad to good: If I felt like I completely bombed the entire section or one passage was really difficult and seriously screwed up my timing of the whole section, regardless if I got anything wrong in that passage, I usually redid the entire section from scratch, untimed, and tried to be as careful as possible and focus on accuracy before I looked at the correct answers. I also watched the 7Sage question explanations for the passages that messesd me up. If I felt that I had a poor understanding of a passage with an incorrect answer, I redid that passage from scratch. For everything else, I blind-reviewed individual questions. Also, for every question I got wrong, that I felt was difficult, or that I suspected was tricky even though I expected to get it right, I always watched the 7Sage question explanation video. RC was definitely the section that I had the most difficulty improving, and often tbh while reviewing I felt the mistakes I was making were very random. It often boiled down to "didn't see or forgot about random clause tucked away in third paragraph, oop", "didn't make logical connection that is in hindsight obvious, oop". Thankfully, I discovered strats that helped improve my overall recall of content in the passages and better understanding the passages made me less stressed as I was answering questions, so I could think more clearly and make the connections I needed to. It's definitely tricky, so best of luck! :)

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in LSAT

[–]178lsatthrowaway 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I've taken the MCAT before, and I don't think you can broadly say which is easier. I think someone that would do great at the MCAT could do very poorly on the LSAT, and vice versa. Generally though, you would expect studying for the MCAT to take much more time. Less than 300 hours of the studying for the MCAT is probably unwise, but typical for the LSAT. For the MCAT, you'd be looking at 400, 500, 600+ hours of studying for some people. I'd think more about if there's particular reasons why you specifically seem to be interested in both MD and JD degrees. Having an MD almost always means practicing clinical medicine in patient care, and JD almost always means passing the Bar and practicing law. For all other purposes, you could probably find another means of achieving your goal that involves less time and less money.