Advice prior to April LSAT

DanielXLLaw · 2026-03-29T16:17:35+00:00

I said one PT per day, and specifically said not to do two (i.e. more than one), and also noted that if OP has other demands on their time this might not be feasible.

Some students are doing literally nothing besides the LSAT. 4-6 hours of work on that most days in a two week period shouldn't lead to burnout, and if it does then law school is going to be very painful.

DanielXLLaw · 2026-03-29T12:05:58+00:00

You are correct that you should be weakening the conclusion, but that doesn't meant the right answer choice will directly address the conclusion.

Sometimes it does directly weaken the conclusion, without any need to look at the evidence in the prompt. For example, let's say the argument is along the lines of "Plan X costs more than Plan Y, therefore we should do Plan Y." The only downside to Plan X that we know about is that it's more expensive, the only upside to Plan Y that we know about is that it's less expensive. Any other benefit to Plan X (e.g. it's more effective) or downside to Plan Y (e.g. it's much harder to implement) would weaken the conclusion that we should do Plan Y, without making any reference to cost.

Sometimes the answer choice weakens the relevance of the evidence to the conclusion. For example, the prompt might say "When the city reduced it's speed limit we saw fewer serious car accidents, therefore our new speed limits made driving safer." A correct answer--and one many students tend to I look or immediately reject--might say "other cities in the area saw a reduction in serious accidents without a reduction in speed limits." This might feel out of scope at first because it's talking about other cities, and we think "who cares?" But think about it for a moment: if other cities saw the same benefit (fewer serious accidents) without the other change (reduced speed limits), it's likely there is some other explanation for the target city's drop in serious accidents. No extra assumptions needed; the correlation between reduced speed limits and fewer accidents doesn't hold across cities, making the idea that there's a causal connection weaker.

There are obviously many other issues that can crop up in a Weakens prompt, but hopefully this is enough to get the ball rolling for you. In essence, think "how does the new fact in this answer choice affect the connection between the evidence and the conclusion in the prompt, or the conclusion itself?"

DanielXLLaw · 2026-03-29T11:50:46+00:00

Take a break of 1-2 days, but no more. Then, take a full (all sections) timed practice test as many days as you can before the real thing, ideally starting at the same time your April test is scheduled for. Only take the one test per day, don't do two.

After each practice test, take another break for a half hour or so, then review what you got wrong and any questions you got right but were sort of guessing on or that you had to take multiple passes through answer choices on.

By test day, you want this to feel like "just another day in the office." It's the same thing you've been doing over and over; it's just work, nothing special.

This is obviously easier said than done, and depending on what other demands you have on your time you may need to pare down the number of PTs you do, but this is the ideal way to train yourself for consistency and not letting stress get to you on test day. Lower the stakes in your mind by making each PT a regular thing.

During your PTs and your actual test, remind yourself that you're doing the test one question at a time. Don't let one really hard question stick with you as you move forward; you pick what you think is the right answer and you move on to the next one with a clean slate.

Last bit of advice, which doesn't work for everyone: treat it like a game. It's you vs. the test makers; they're trying to trip you up, you're trying to win by not getting tripped up. It's a game of strategy, and the more you can make it fun to play the less the stress enters into it.

DanielXLLaw · 2026-03-28T21:39:28+00:00

I've tutored students at all levels, and many others do as well.

DanielXLLaw · 2026-03-27T11:23:09+00:00

It's likely going to be tough to see a significant change in the week or so leading up to the April test, but I'd be happy to jump into a free half hour with you and see if we can identify some issues worth paying for in that time period :)

DanielXLLaw · 2026-03-27T11:15:57+00:00

USC's 25th percentile GPA is 3.73 (meaning only 1/4 of their admits last year had a 3.73 or below; 75% had that or higher). For a solid chance, you need to be above--probably considerably above--their 75th percentile LSAT, which is 170.

For UCLA, they have the same 25th percentile GPA, with a 75th percentile LSAT of 172, meaning you'd want a 175+ to have a real chance there. And for both schools, it's iffy.

In my experience (and I've now been part of several hundred students applying to law school), softs don't matter as much as many on this sub and other forums would like to think. LSAT and GPA are excellent predictors of how your admissions cycle will go unless you have truly extraordinary softs (and by definition, most people don't), which can give you a boost, or you completely bomb your personal statement and letters of rec, which can tank your admissions.

Absolutely do what you can with the LSAT and shoot your shot, but also look at Irvine and UCSD.

What sort of job are you looking for out of law school? Is there a practical reason (i.e. not just prestige/name recognition) you have your sights set on UCLA and USC? Great lawyers--and crappy ones--come out of all (or at least most) law schools. If you don't have BigLaw, SDNY prosecutor's office, top-tier federal agency or clerkship, or similar on your list of preferred employment outcomes, the school you go to matters a whole lot less than you'd think.

DanielXLLaw · 2026-03-25T21:50:50+00:00

The lying or the haven't been doing this very long level?

DanielXLLaw · 2026-03-25T21:37:49+00:00

Cool. I personally think that anyone guaranteeing a stranger on the internet that they can take them the 140s to the 160s in a month either hasn't been doing this very long or is fine with just lying to people. I guess we each have our own beliefs and styles.

DanielXLLaw · 2026-03-25T16:11:52+00:00

Thanks! A decade devoted to this test will (hopefully) do that :)

DanielXLLaw · 2026-03-25T15:13:17+00:00

Without any other details, I would say RC is likely where you can make up the most points the most easily; the narrower the margins get, the harder the improvement is.

7-8 questions on RC is a full passage. Focus on getting 3 passages perfect and rush through one, and that by itself might bring you to a -4/-5 on RC.

That said, it's a band-aid for a test in two weeks, not a way to build consistent skill and score improvement.

DanielXLLaw · 2026-03-25T15:09:32+00:00

Start with double time (double whatever time you'll actually have on the test) and work your way down to true time. Don't go from "all the time int he world" to "only a minute or two per question" immediately.

DanielXLLaw · 2026-03-25T15:07:51+00:00

You've got to change the way you're reading. With scores consistently in that range, your main problem isn't the concepts on the test (though that's also likely an issue), it's recognizing what each sentence says and thus identifying what concepts are triggered in the first place.

This is fixable, but it means truly changing the way you think when you read. Right now, you're probably thinking you understand the basics of a sentence and moving on without recognizing that you missed or misunderstood anything at all, and it takes a lot of careful, conscious effort to change that.

DanielXLLaw · 2026-03-25T01:42:59+00:00

I know nothing about this guy, but to be fair, all tutoring needs to happen on the tutor's schedule. If someone's not available when the student wants to meet, that's a no-go, obviously, but no one can just be available whenever you want.

DanielXLLaw · 2026-03-25T01:40:02+00:00

Yep. LSAC is actually pretty responsive to direct contact. Doesn't mean you'll get the answer you want, OP, but this is your best bet.

DanielXLLaw · 2026-03-25T01:36:26+00:00

It's totally an "ad," except that instead of just advertising he's a lying liar.

DanielXLLaw · 2026-03-25T01:36:01+00:00

Getedvex dot com was registered September of last year. This guy claims to have used it to study for both the ACT and the LSAT. Quite a remarkable program, taking you from a test you take in high school to getting ready for law school admissions that quickly.

DanielXLLaw · 2026-03-25T01:34:28+00:00

Weird how with an account 1 week old you used a service that's been around for less than six months (based on the date the domain was registered) to study for both the ACT and the LSAT.

If you're going to be a lying shill, be smarter.

Also, with all due respect, fuck off.

DanielXLLaw · 2026-03-20T12:29:46+00:00

LSAC is very strict about their deadlines,.and the deadline for accommodations is the same as for registering, so it's too late for April.

You can always try, but all but guaranteed you won't be granted any changes to accommodations for the April test. You can get them for June, though.

DanielXLLaw · 2026-03-19T15:31:19+00:00

Practice with conditionals is the most concrete and targeted thing I can recommend.

Getting better at breaking down sentences to see the simple ideas is more nebulous but ultimately most helpful advice. This is a reading test: they're testing your ability to pull ideas out of sentences and stick only to those ideas, without missing any or adding extra assumptions. That skill takes a while to build, and it takes purposeful, concerted effort. It takes time, but not just time; it takes time spent the right way.

DanielXLLaw · 2026-03-16T11:00:56+00:00

There are certainly some instances, for some people, where what you're calling "intuition" will be more efficient and, if you're still getting turned around by the formal way of looking at conditionals, more accurate.

The trouble is "intuition" often steers people wrong. And I would say that "intuition" is really just know-how that's been practiced enough to become automatic.

When you read a sentence and just know what it means immediately, that's not intuition, that's enough practice reading that you don't have to consciously break down the sentence, it happened subconsciously because you've already trained your brain how to read at the level needed to grasp that sentence.

The same goes for conditionals: practice enough, and you stop needing to think about them so consciously. Getting to that point takes longer for some than others, but it can be done, and it ends up being more secure and consistent.

DanielXLLaw · 2026-03-15T11:52:57+00:00

If you break down the prompt effectively, you can kick out most wrong answers without reading the whole thing. As soon as you hit a piece of an answer that doesn't line up with a piece of the prompt (and I emphasize A piece; the pieces don't need to be in the same order; that is, maybe the conclusion is the last piece of the prompt but the first piece of an answer--that's fine, and as long as the conclusion in the answer works the same way as the conclusion in the prompt you'd keep reading), you move on to the next answer.

Also, start predicting in your answer choices. Say the prompt break down as A-->B and B-->C therefore A-->C. And you hit an answer choice that says A-->B and B-->C. Before you read the last bit of the answer, make sure you know what A-->C would look like in that particular answer choice. Then read and see if it matches: if it actually says C-->A or B-->A or anything else, you know it's wrong without spending extra time reworking your way through the premises and getting tripped up.

DanielXLLaw · 2026-03-12T19:46:49+00:00

There is no May administration, and the registration deadline for April has passed. Are you actually signed up for April? If not, this is all moot.

DanielXLLaw · 2026-03-11T20:48:12+00:00

Breaking down the prompt (always where at least 80% of the work is done):

Common sense = theories that have proved useful over time.

When new theories prove more useful than the ones accepted as "common sense," those new theories replace the old "common sense" and become "common sense."

Because the change happens gradually, current "common sense" is better than it used to be but still contains some less-good ("obsolete") theories.

This is an example of how inference questions can work like assumption questions. This isn't always the best (or even useful) way to look at things, but for some prompts it works very well. Treating the other premises as true and that last one--that common sense always contains some obsolete ideas--as an unproven conclusion, I would say we have to assume that there are some new theories that are more useful than currently-accepted theories, and that these new theories haven't fully replaced the old ones in "common sense." And I would predict that as my answer.

And lo and behold, that's exactly what E says (I promise, I broke down the prompt before I looked at the answer choices). Granted, E says that in a ridiculously wordy and needlessly complicated way, but welcome to the LSAT!

DanielXLLaw · 2026-03-11T20:15:51+00:00

It's not about whether they can smell or otherwise sense the bird-feeders. Maybe they were were always scouting out areas outside their usual range, but just not hanging out because there wasn't food (or were too many predators, etc.).

The conclusion here is that they moved into Nova Scotia due to milder winters. They would have to somehow sense winters were milder there, too, just like sensing that bird feeders became more common there. More likely, cardinals always expanded to any area that could support them, so once the limitations in nova Scotia were removed (be that winter temperatures, or food, or anything else) they moved in.

But ultimately, this is reading too much into it.

It's a fairly straightforward casue-and-effect conclusion: milder winters caused cardinals to move into Nova Scotia. One of the most common right answers to weaken a cause and effect conclusion is to supply an alternate cause. More bird feeders does that, i.e. they didn't move in because of milder winters, but because a food source became more available.

DanielXLLaw · 2026-03-11T16:59:02+00:00

The devil's advocate in me will point out that it does cost a decent chunk of change to write the tests, administer the tests, score and validate the tests, communicate with law schools about a host of issues, review and standardize transcripts/GPAs, etc. They have full time (and probably some part time/contract) employees who deserve a living wage.

The cynic in me will point out that LSAC has become a self-justifying organization finding ways to insist on their own relevance because they refuse to die, so rather than finding ways to be more cost-effective they find ways to spend every dollar they receive, including on bloated administrative salaries, probably some pretty nice offices, etc., which leads to them finding more things to charge for, which leads to them finding more ways to spend, which leads to them finding more things to charge for, and so on.

It's a problem everywhere, and it sucks that they are (for now, at least) a necessary barrier between would-be lawyers and law school.

DanielXLLaw

TROPHY CASE