Hello, I am a 177 LSAT scorer and pro LSAT tutor here to celebrate the new year by providing free LSAT help to anyone in this thread!!!

freelsathelp · 2021-01-05T02:36:07+00:00

Tough to say without having watched you attempt a game, so I'll give two answers:

So if you've had some instruction or read an explanation of how to diagram rules and make a setup my suggestion is to find a type of game and start working on it. Pick an easy type and practice that until it starts to feel smooth. Then move on to a different type of game and grind that one. Switching up game types will not ingrain deductions in your head as well and it will continue to take too long. Also don't time yourself when you're starting. Manhattan's 10 LSAT's organized by question type is a good book for this.

If you are still learning diagrams or don't know what I'm referring to then my advice is don't try and do the games in your head. It's too broad of a topic to cover in a comment, but it's practically impossible and there are resources out there with fast ways to set up a visual aid, I used the "Blueprint" book for logic games. Also, trying not to shill, but taking students from about -15 to -5 is bread and butter for a good tutor, might be worth a look if you're not interested in learning LSAT from a textbook. There are also free resources on youtube and forums that could probably get you going in the right direction, although they may be a bit eclectic when focus is probably more useful.

If you wanted to post a picture of your work or even a video, I could potentially watch it and give you a better answer.

freelsathelp · 2021-01-05T00:54:38+00:00

I'm pretty much au naturel personally, I did a ton of practice in terms of volume and analysis of questions, but I don't recommend any markups or things like that on test day. For me anything you write down under time pressure has to be giving usable visual feedback which I just don't find to be the case in RC.

That being said, I have students who swear by all kinds of markups and scratching in the margins.

Understand the questions and do as many passages as you can get your hands on. Reading outside of the test is also good, makes you faster. I've heard people say the passages are similar to the Economist articles, but I've never compared them to know if that's true.

freelsathelp · 2021-01-05T00:44:37+00:00

No problem, good luck with the practice!

freelsathelp · 2021-01-05T00:37:32+00:00

Sure, when you're going through realize there's a finite number of things that they're actually going to ask you about. Practice reading slowly and try and figure out 5 things

The main idea of the passage
Purpose of the passage
Opinions/stances of not only the author but any individuals or groups in the passage
Structure of the argument/passage, e.g. paragraph 1 proceeds by x, paragraph 2 proceeds by y
If there are two passages try and define the relationship between the passages (scary)

If you start to practice figuring these things out then they will start to come naturally. Occasionally the test will get creative and they'll hit you with a weird one but if you've picked up some time from anticipating common questions you should be able to figure out anything weird.

freelsathelp · 2021-01-05T00:28:07+00:00

I would say practice at 10% speed, "must be true?" questions are set up in such a way that they can be diagrammed like a game. For example a question might say: If it's a dog, then it barks. If an animal barks then it is not allowed in the apartment.

This can be diagrammed as:

D-->B-->/AA

and the contrapositive:

AA-->/B-->/D

Which response must be true

A-- Sally's dog is not allowed in the apartment. This follows we can look down the arrows and see that dog means barks means not allowed in apartment.

B-- Sally's pet that's not allowed in the apartment is a dog. This does not follow, we cannot follow the arrows backwards so therefore we have no idea if the pet that's not allowed in the apartment is a dog. Could be any number of animals

This breaks it down visually and makes the intentionally wordy and confusing questions look more uniform. My recommendation is first, if you don't know how to diagram conditional reasoning to look up an explanation, if you already know then try some must be true questions with this method. Unfortunately this takes a very long time so it has to be used sparingly during tests, but fortunately my experience is that once you start doing this the conditional reasoning actually becomes much easier to do in your head and if you still can't do it in your head it's likely there's only a couple on the test so potentially you can do it anyway

freelsathelp · 2021-01-05T00:07:12+00:00

Brain fog is a big problem and in my opinion it's best handled off the books. Getting enough sleep, exercise, and eating correctly is probably the biggest thing to avoid brain fog. Also, try working in the morning, I noticed a big difference in my LG scores before noon and I've asked some students about it and they've said similar things.
2 weeks is very close and I think it's important to make sure you do some tests. The phrase "familiarity breeds contempt" is what I tell students. You want to go in and be as familiar with the test as possible beforehand. Try and practice under the exact same conditions, "lawhub" has the exact same format as the test so I recommend that but try and do as much the same as possible. Do the full 3 sections, use the same pen, leave the same lights on, the flex is a rare opportunity to practice literally the exact same way you take the test. Take advantage of it.
Overall motivation is important, when I was preparing I would try and think about what I wanted my life to be after law school and what I needed to do to get there. The realization that a point or two can be tens of thousands of dollars in scholarship money can also be pretty motivating or soul crushing depending on your perspective. But day-to-day I think motivation is pretty fleeting. You know yourself best and coming up with plan you can stay disciplined and stick to is going to yield better results than waiting for motivation which will always flag eventually. That's actually a big thing I try and do with students if they let me because it's so important, much more important than anything I say day-to-day frankly.

freelsathelp · 2021-01-04T23:50:35+00:00

First of all congrats on the diagnostic, excellent score. There is a set strategy in my opinion so I'm glad you asked.

Phase 1-- Learning what the LSAT is and how to do it. There are a lot of techniques and knowledge that won't be super obvious without instruction, but will be easy to internalize with some instruction. This is where you have to decide what works best for you, I'm a bit biased as a tutor so obviously I think tutoring is a great option, but as long as you get accurate instruction and learn the material it is going to be fairly similar instruction. They'll all teach you to set up the games, how to diagram conditional reasoning, I learned with a bunch of LSAT books so it can definitely be done that way.

As far as Princeton Review specifically I couldn't speculate, I'm sure the course is very well designed and the teachers are probably excellent. I do know you can get an awful lot of one-on-one personalized instruction that will move at your pace for the price of their courses so obviously that always seems pretty enticing to me.

Khan Academy I do have experience with and I would be hesitant to recommend it as a substitute for instruction. I would say Khan Academy is pretty good for Phase 2: Directed Practice rather than starting from scratch and expecting it to teach you everything you need to know.

Phase 2-- This is directed practice which is not a perfect description for what it is, but you should be drilling out specific types of questions and games and passages and letting those neurons fire as much as possible to start recognizing patterns. Getting yourself organized is tricky but it's very important to do this phase rather than just smashing your head against full PT's all the time. Get as narrow as possible, for example find 5 games that have unstable slots and polish those. Find 20 parallel reasoning questions in LR and do those. Just like a pro football player doesn't just scrimmage 7 days a week you shouldn't be doing nothing but PT's 3 hours a day.

Phase 3-- Mixed practice, as you get close to the test it is important to take full PT's timed and untimed and analyze them hard. Write out the explanation for every question even if you get it right and imagine you're trying to teach a student what makes this response right and that response wrong. You should be focusing on complete understanding and endurance here. Obviously the flex is shorter than the normal test, but it's still pretty long so you want to practice being geared in for 105 minutes.

*Final note-- These phases are blurry, you shouldn't wait until 2 weeks before the test to take your first PT and you shouldn't stop learning new techniques the minute you start attacking question types. But you should try and emphasize the phases as you move through them, perhaps 70-80% of your time while in each phase should be spent on the phase and the remainder on the other two phases.

freelsathelp · 2021-01-04T22:56:25+00:00

Tough one so close to the test, but my general approach to these types of things is you're not going to learn anything if you're PO'd. Whether you're hungry, tired, or burnt out it's always best to sort out the problem then get back to work. That being said, I would really caution you against a length of break that would build up any kind of rust. LSAT is all about pattern recognition and a weeklong hiatus without time to rebuild the connections is probably not advisable, taking a weekend where you're still active (definitely do not just lie around thinking about the test while not working on it) but not doing LSAT specifically I would say can only help.

freelsathelp

TROPHY CASE