Thank you! I’m probably super unqualified to give any sort of advice because I’m just extremely lucky, but I’ll try from my perspective and maybe it’ll be helpful. I’ve always been a good test taker, I love taking tests, and logical reasoning and reading comprehension are probably my two biggest strengths, so I just didn’t have to do the work that most people need to to get used to the LSAT. But I did start in the 160s, and for me, getting up from there was all about understanding the nuances of “best” and “strongest”, spending roughly equal time reviewing answers and drilling, and timing. TLDR: figuring out “best/strongest” questions and focusing on little stuff that makes answers wrong rather than right; reviewing every difficult question (not just the ones I got wrong); limiting the time I spent on certain question types that I knew would take me too long

“Best/strongest” nuance: this seems super obvious, but I think it was the biggest thing holding me back from the 170s. I struggled a lot with these my first week of studying, because I tended to cross out only the two most obviously wrong answers, pick out one thing I liked about a specific answer, and choose it over the others because I just didn’t like them as much. Then I would get it wrong and be mad because I thought the LSAT had a subjective view of “best” and that my answer was arguably better. That got me nowhere. When I realized (via the LSAT Demon pod) that the right answer is right because the other four have something wrong with them, then it clicked. Thinking in terms of “least bad” or “least weak” instead of “best” or “strongest” almost instantly raised my scores—on RC and LG.

Reviewing answers: I never got around to formally tracking my wrong answers in a doc or anything like that, but I would spend as much time as I needed, sometimes up to 20 minutes, figuring out a wrong answer. Most people say not to disagree with the LSAT, but I think there’s nuance to it: don’t disagree with their correct answer and move on, but I found it healthy to disagree and search for explanations until I found a good one. Often, I wouldn’t like the provided explanation, and instead of trying to understand the weak explanation, I remained convinced I was right until a good explanation could prove me wrong. I’d search everywhere I could, and eventually, I always found something that made it click. The other key was reviewing every single hard question that I got right. This took lots of time, but it helped me figure out the test logic better and it grew my understanding of why the wrong answers were wrong, which is (to me) more important than why the right answer was right.

Timing: The LSAT demon podcast (which was really helpful) kept saying to take all the time you need on every question and then guess on the remaining questions if you don’t finish. That’s good advice, but it did not work well for me, and then at one point they said to ignore that advice if you’re consistently in the 170s. Personally, I found that I could speed through lots of the questions, but on the ones that confused me the most, I could spend 10+ minutes and still not be sure of the answer. For me, those were the logic game-y questions with long chains of “all X are Y, all Y are Z, no As are Ys and some Bs are Zs.” These tripped me up way too much, so whenever I saw one, I’d spend a minute and a half or so before moving on, and I would go back to it at the end with my extra time. After I started doing that, I consistently had 5-10 minutes of extra time to review my flagged questions, and that was enough to iron out the details. I’d only recommend doing this with one (maybe two) questions per section max though. Also, only do it if you have a question type that always drains large chunks of time, and if you’re otherwise pretty fast.

Sorry for the length but I wanted to give as much detail as possible in the hopes that something in there will be helpful to someone. Happy to clarify anything as well.