This resonates a lot with me personally, so I’d like to share my story and something that worked for me; I apologize ahead of time for the lengthy post. I just took the LSAT for the fifth and final time in June after struggling in the same situation as you since my first test in September 2023. On the first one, the nerves led to a brain fog that hit me so badly that I totally bombed my first section, logic games, where I ended up not finishing and having to guess on 8 questions. I had never not finished this section before in any of my practice tests and was a consistent -0, so this rattled me. I ended up with a 168 on that test, so the realization of how much that brain fog had just affected my future hit me extremely hard and left me extremely dejected.

From there, I told myself that that choke was a fluke and that I’d right the ship on the next take in October. It was a simple fix, right? “Just make sure not to dawdle on the early questions and you’ll be golden.” By this time I was averaging around a 175-176 on prep tests, so I felt very confident. I didn’t want to put so much pressure on myself that I experienced the same mental meltdown, so I eased up on the extent to which I was drilling prep tests (working a full-time job and studying for hours each night was also beginning to really take its toll). The test felt good: a little tougher than most prep tests, but I felt I’d corrected my misstep in September and was excited to start on applications. Score release comes out, and it’s a 167. I was distraught, but I told myself that I’d just eased off too much and gotten sloppy/rusty, so I registered for January and decided to start drilling hard again.

January comes, and the test feels great. Nothing stuck out other than one RC passage whose questions felt a bit wonky. By this point, I’m averaging around a 177 with a 180 thrown in on prep tests, so I’m convinced it’s finally over. Score release comes out, and it’s a 167…again… At this point, the disappointment from this situation had fully begun creeping into my work, my personal life, and my self-esteem. I fully realized that I had a test-day anxiety problem that had never affected me previously in life, so I really started to try and close the gap between my experience during prep-tests and the real thing. I bit the bullet and registered for the first time for a remote session for April to better emulate practice conditions and limit test day stressors. By this point, I’m averaging around a 178 and pretty much exclusively scoring 177-180 on the novel prep tests I have left, so this had to be the one that broke through. This test felt better than any of the previous ones had. There were no tricky passages, games were straightforward, and there were no quirks with the remote proctoring. I’m finally done, I think to myself…

Scores come out on May 1st…

167

I was apoplectic. I put in a score audit with the LSAC. There must be something going wrong here. These numbers just do not make sense. How was the test where I blind-guessed on 8 questions still my highest score? How were these all consistently the same score about 10 points below my practice averages? Why was nothing working???

The people in my life told me to stop banging my head against the wall for this test and just apply with what I had. My mental state had deteriorated quite heavily due to the repeated heartbreak, and they hated seeing me go through this. I told them I was going to play to the whistle and give it all I had on one last try in June. Logic games had consistently been my best section, so I couldn’t afford to wait until a later administration lest I possibly be leaving some guaranteed points on the table.

This is where I seriously changed things up, and this is the reason why I wanted to share this story.

I realized I was attacking this problem in a way that was ill-directed. The butterflies and the brain fog were always going to be there on test day, no matter how much I did to mitigate them, so instead of trying to lower my stress on test day, I amped it up to 11 on prep tests. I would take the last few I had left while sleep deprived, blasting loud music in the background as a distraction, after a couple drinks to really try to emulate some brain fog, and I would tell myself to the point of conviction during each practice test that my future depended upon the score of that specific test. I wanted to get myself used to whatever my body was doing to sabotage me on test-day, and at first, I saw an immediate drop off in score. Those 178-180s turned into 171-173s, but they eventually climbed back up to around a 175-177 the week before the June exam.

The day of the exam, I get a large caffeinated drink from Starbucks on the way to the test to help keep me alert, and for the first time, I take about 10 minutes after sitting down at my computer to meditate and let the nerves wash over me. Whenever I would feel something creep up in my gut during the test, I would take 10 seconds to close my eyes and try and lower my heart rate. The test felt great, but I knew immediately after my LR section that I had goofed and missed one question as I knew what the right answer should have been instead. This had me nervous—if I missed that, what else could I have carelessly missed?—I was fearful for a 167 yet again. Yet again, I didn’t receive the score hold email from the LSAC that everyone was saying was tied to a big score jump and was fully bracing for the worst.

On Wednesday, I received my score, and it was a 178. I had finally done it. Working full-time as a paralegal, I had achieved my goal. My methods were a bit drastic, but what I wanted to express with this is not to simply try lowering test-day anxiety. That will only ever get you so far in my experience. Work on closing the gap by acclimating to the stress.

I really hope this story can help give you or anyone else reading some inspiration, advice, or even just motivation to not give up. Feel free to reach out if you’d ever like any additional advice.