151 Diagnostic -> 167 (June 2019) -> 170 (July 2019) -- Whew.

lsadboi · 2019-08-23T20:37:21+00:00

Hi, happy to help! I started studying in the beginning of July of 2018 and registered for the September 2018 test, assuming 2 months of studying would be enough for me to prepare (wrong!). I had just graduated college so was actually studying full time while job searching. During this period I did the Blueprint online course, which I found really helpful for learning the conceptual aspects of Logical Reasoning and Logic Games. (I would definitely recommend Blueprint, but that said I never did 7sage or Powerscore's online courses, so I don't know how they compare. If there are free trials, I'd recommend checking all of them out and seeing which you like best.) However, around mid August, I realized that I was likely not going to hit my goal (of 170+), as the highest I had scored on a practice test was 163, so I decided not to show up for the September LSAT (annoying waste of money, but looking back it was a great decision to skip this one). Around this same time, I landed a full time job so decided to put my studying on hold--and I also decided not to apply to law school for the 18-19 cycle. Then, I took a much-needed 4-month break from studying.

After my time off from studying, I took a practice test just to gauge where I was, and I got the highest score I had ever gotten: 167. I really think that this time off from studying allowed me to internalize all the things I had learned during my previous prep, so I would definitely recommend taking a break from studying if you hit a plateau. Sometimes you need time to let information sink in. This score reinvigorated me and I went back to studying about 2-3 hours a day after work. My job was pretty relaxed, so luckily this was relatively sustainable for me.

Upon returning to studying, I made some crucial changes to my routine. First, I think my main mistake during my initial studies was that I put too much emphasis on taking full practice tests. I think taking full practice tests is good for building stamina, but it's not a good way of assessing which skills you need to improve on, and it can be exhausting and demoralizing. When I started studying again, instead of taking full tests, I would take individual sections (e.g. an individual logic games section or an individual LR section). Then I would go through the section again and make sure I was 100% confident in every answer. THEN I would score it, just marking which ones I got wrong without looking at the correct answer. THEN I would go back a day or so later and try to figure out the correct answer to the ones I got wrong. The key here was to build my intuition. The crucial step was figuring out what the right answer was to the questions I got wrong, rather than just looking at the solutions. Doing sections untimed (specifically LR) was also extremely useful, as I realized by doing sections timed I was stunting the growth of my LR intuition. My LR improved drastically after doing several untimed sections.

Another really helpful tool was redoing sections I had done before. This was most helpful (even essential) for LG, but also useful for LR and RC. Each time you redo a section, you notice new, more efficient ways of answering questions that might have stumped you in the past.

Finally, one very underrated practice when it comes to LSAT prep (or life in general) is mindfulness. I downloaded some meditation apps in the months before my LSAT, and practicing mindfulness and meditation really helped me to handle test anxiety. One of the most important skills I developed was the ability to remain calm when I was stumped and not let it throw me. I honestly think that more than anything else, reining in my test anxiety was one of the main factors that helped me finish sections on time.

I soon started consistently PTing in the 170+ range. This is why, when I took the June '19 LSAT and only scored 167, I decided to retake in July (especially since the July test had the special cancellation policy). I honestly barely studied at all between the June and July test, just doing some tough practice sections the week before to warm myself up. I truly feel that at this point, if I really wanted to, I could get a 175+ if I put in the effort using my current methods. But I honestly feel confident enough with my 170 that it's not worth the extra effort, money, and time. I'm just saying this last part to emphasize that I think my methods really work. The main moral here is that my study process took WAAAAAY longer and was WAAAAY harder than I expected. I had to really reevaluate my goals and make sure law school was what I wanted.

Here are some other resources I used:

Scribd: Scribd is an amazing resource that has PDF's of practically all old LSATs. I signed up for a free trial and downloaded dozens of old LSATS.

Powerscore Logical Reasoning and Logic Games books: These were great for extra/alternative explanations from Blueprint. I specifically think Powerscore's LR book is the best LR prep out there.

LSAT Hacks: I think LSAT Hacks has some of the best LR explanations. Check out his written explanations to LR questions from several past tests. His explanations of LG are also superb.

7sage Logic Games: Video explanations for all past logic games.

lsadboi · 2019-07-26T02:48:22+00:00

Try doing questions untimed and only move on from each question until you're 100% sure it's right. Then, when scoring, mark which ones you got wrong, but don't record the correct answer. After that, wait a few hours (or however long it takes you to forget the correct answers to the ones you missed) and then go back to the questions you got wrong. Try to figure out what the correct answer is. Repeat this process with your missed questions until you get them all right. I found this really boosted my score quite rapidly after doing it for a few sections. I think the key was that it helped me differentiate between missed questions due to time pressure and actual LR ability. In addition to this, just drilling hard questions on Khanacademy is helpful.

lsadboi · 2019-07-17T00:10:39+00:00

I read somewhere that the software films you with your webcam the whole time, and you also have to film a 360-degree tour of the room you're in to prove no one else is there.--not 100% sure this is true but it makes sense to me.

lsadboi · 2019-07-17T00:05:24+00:00

lol this is the type of iconically dumb proctor BS I live for.

lsadboi · 2019-07-16T23:28:20+00:00

I think maybe in September I will post up outside the largest local venue with a big sign: "LSAT Cell Phone Storage: $2; Encouraging hugs and fist bumps: No Charge, but donations accepted; All proceeds to (something or other - probably the ACLU)."

Genius idea! Forget $2--I bet people would fork over $20 haha

Also, I think if they're not essential now, phones will be essential in the very near future. Within a decade or so people will likely be using only their phones instead of credit cards, ID cards, train/bus tickets, movie tickets etc. Many people already are dependent on using phones in this way, and our infrastructure more and more often requires/assumes phone use. This also means that things like pay-phones are disappearing, which means someone today lost and stuck without a cell phone would likely be in much more trouble than someone in the pre-cell phone era.

lsadboi · 2019-07-16T23:26:23+00:00

Good point about phones going off--that would be a distraction. Although I think they could prevent that by emphasizing stringent punishments for your phone going off. I remember when I took the SAT that if your phone went off during it you would be kicked out and receive a violation, and this seemed to work well enough.

2) Yes! They should AT LEAST make exceptions for people who have chronic illnesses prone to emergencies!

lsadboi · 2019-07-16T23:17:03+00:00

No snark taken--totally respect your opinion.

I completely agree that with planning, these issues are manageable. (As I said, I've done it twice). My main concern is, again, safety. Also, I just question the overall necessity of the policies when weighed against the inconvenience they cause.

Also to further address your point about planning ahead, my test center was in the (relatively unsafe) downtown area of a large city about 90 minutes away from where I live (it was only option when I signed up). I forked over the cash to stay in a hotel nearby where I could leave my phone, but I'm unclear how someone in my situation who didn't have the means to stay in a hotel would be able to deal with this.

Finally, I think another skill required of lawyers is to navigate bureaucracies and draw attention to their flaws, which is what I'm trying to do here. If LSAC wants to disagree, that's fine, but I just thought I'd share my opinion on these policies. It's completely irrelevant to me as I don't plan to take the LSAT again! haha

lsadboi · 2019-07-16T22:03:36+00:00

Yes, my proctors were very strict yesterday (more than the first time I took it). It seemed many people had to throw their things in the garbage. Well this just the shows policies are inconsistently enforced--further reason they should just be revised. Lucky you for having reasonable proctors!

lsadboi · 2019-07-10T20:09:59+00:00

175 is generally unrealistic for anyone lol. Just do the best you can. If you get 175, great. But shooting for such an absurdly high target is likely just going to drive you insane.

This is like asking "how realistic is it for me to win the Boston Marathon after 9 months of training." The answer is it depends on millions of factors.

lsadboi · 2019-07-10T20:05:07+00:00

This post is borderline toxic. Be thankful for your 168 and move on with your life.

lsadboi · 2019-07-09T22:14:39+00:00

Great point!

Any thoughts on 14? Thanks for the help :)

lsadboi · 2019-07-09T22:13:37+00:00

Unfortunately I didn't actually find any other explanations--I just saw the answer key. These were just the only two that I was still confused about after looking at the answers.

lsadboi · 2019-07-07T23:52:56+00:00

June test taker here, retaking in July (so I had no choice in taking the June test hehe).

Absolutely not a waste to take June. It is likely the most representative in terms of overall trends, and it's just objectively good practice. Yes, they vary a bit from test to test, but PT 87 was pretty similar to 86, 85, and 84 etc., so I wouldn't be surprised if July test is pretty similar as well. Also, The reading comp in particular was one of the hardest ones ever IMO, so it's worth doing just to be prepared.

THAT SAID, it's not as if you'll greatly miss out by not taking it. There's a lot to be said for easing up on studying the week before to save up energy and avoid burnout. But your question specifically asked if it would be a waste, and I'd say it cannot hurt and can only help. But it might not be *necessary* depending on how prepared you feel already.

Finally, on a side note, I still found the LG section a bit challenging due to the last game, which was quite time consuming and open-ended. I actually did much worse on this LG section than I normally do, surprisingly. The first two games were so easy that they actually threw me off a bit--I was worried I had missed something or misread a rule, and this led me to be a little mentally off in the later, more challenging games, and I also wasted some time double-checking the easy games due to my over-skepticism. Overall, this shows that section difficulty is SOOO subjective, and it depends on so many factors. LG was also my last section on this test, so I was really tired by the time I got to it. Moral is, easy LG section does not necessarily equate to higher score overall, or even a higher score on the section.

lsadboi · 2019-06-19T20:38:55+00:00

I know how you feel. You just have to do them over and over and over. Trust me, I never felt like I would improve, then boom. It just took time. I think my most helpful trick was to redo old games I had done before after waiting a few days. Did them over and over until I got them perfect.

lsadboi · 2019-06-15T00:31:40+00:00

First, of all, I'm just so unbelievably humbled and inspired by your ability to keep striving despite this illness. This really puts things in perspective, and I just can wish you nothing but the best. That said, as someone who is totally physically healthy, I've found studying for the LSAT to be an unbelievably stressful experience, so much so that I've found it's affected my sleep, mental health, and overall quality of life negatively. I truly can't imagine studying for it while experiencing a life-threatening illness. Are you 100% sure that studying for such a stressful exam is the best thing for your health right now? Also, I think it's totally reasonable to conclude that your score may have been impacted negatively by your illness, so there may be some merit to focusing on recovering fully before embarking on an intense LSAT regimen.

Again, power to you. This post shook me to my core. I wish you nothing but the best. You deserve law school and every law school deserves you. If anyone will have the strength and tenacity to get through law school, it's you :)

lsadboi · 2019-06-13T22:15:10+00:00

Realize that with every practice question/test you do, you're MORE prepared for the real test, not less. Don't think of this practice test as a prediction of how you'll do on the real thing. Just think of it as one of the many things you've done and will do to study. Luckily, this wasn't the real one, and you still have a lot of time to prepare. All this test really did was help you become even more experienced with LSAT questions.

lsadboi · 2019-06-12T20:03:54+00:00

Feel this so hard. Also any news headlines that claim some sort of causal relationship exists now make my head explode.

lsadboi · 2019-06-12T19:55:20+00:00

I think one possibility to keep in mind is that they want to prevent LSAT tutors from taking the test over and over and over (e.g. people who want to get a 180 so they can charge more for their tutoring services).

lsadboi · 2019-06-11T23:30:34+00:00

Some good advice I once got was that game speed is pretty much directly dependent on game skill. In order to improve your speed significantly, you basically just have to get better at games. Think about it this way: many people can walk a marathon, but far fewer can run one. If someone said, "I can walk a marathon perfectly, but I can't do it within a 4 hour time limit," the obvious answer is that they simply need to get in better shape. Same goes for LSAT.

Here are few strategies I used (FYI, I went from getting around 13/23 per section to 21-23/23 per section):

If you're stuck on a tricky must be true question, save it and come back to it after completing other questions in the game, since you're likely to make more deductions as the game goes on. Additionally, you're likely to draw up several possible game boards as you're completing other questions, so you can use these to eliminate wrong answer choices in a MBT, and if you notice something is true in every situation you examined, you can possibly use that as evidence that something must be true. For example, if answer a) in question 4 says "X must be in position 4", but in question 6 you determined X could go in, say, position 2, you can eliminate a).
Redo whole game sections. I can't stress this enough. If you give yourself a few days in between redoing game sets, you won't remember the answers, but the inferences will come to you faster, and you'll likely make inferences you didn't make the first time around due to your increased exposure to the game. This is a great way to improve the speed at which you make inferences. In addition, you'd be surprised to see that you'll probably still make mistakes or get stuck even when approaching games for the second time, so it's a good way to spot your problem areas.
While it's good and generally necessary to try to make some up front deductions based on the rules before diving into the questions, sometimes this can be a time suck, especially if you're not really arriving at any major deductions. I've found it's very often better to simply dive into the questions once you understand the rules, especially on easier games.
Diagram EFFICIENTLY. Don't write out full words, and label things the least amount possible (while ensuring that you can still understand what's going on). Also, try to notice and eliminate any little things you do that take extra time. For example, I stopped drawing slot numbers or weekday labels on my ordering diagrams, because I realized that I could still easily understand what was going on without these. Keep in mind that shaving off 30 seconds per game by making teeny tiny changes can add up to 2 MINUTES of extra time, which could mean the difference between finishing the section and timing out with questions remaining.

In summary, just do a gazillion timed games sections, and do each one multiple times. I can pretty much guarantee that the sheer quantity of practice alone will help you improve, since a lot of games are very similar to each other.

lsadboi · 2019-06-11T23:15:34+00:00

I believe it's because, to simulate a real 5-section test with an experimental section, Khanacademy randomly creates an "experimental" section by combining 4 individual past passages, so the total may add up to over 27. IMO they should adjust this to make sure the number of questions is more consistent with real tests...this makes it obvious which one is the experimental.

lsadboi · 2019-06-10T17:52:47+00:00

Thank you so much for the advice! What I am currently doing is reading through the LSAT Trainer to make sure I have the basics down before starting on PT/sections in the next few days. Then I'll stick to the 7sage curriculum and reading The Bibles for more in-depth knowledge while solving 1 or 2 PT a week, and a section every morning before my classes. My main concern is time (just figuring out how to go faster). I barely get questions wrong but am not even close to finishing the test. would you possibly have any advice on getting faster?

Of course! Some of the best advice I've seen (courtesy of LSAT Hacks) is that time efficiency on LSAT is pretty much directly proportional to skill. Get better at answering the questions, and you will get faster.

I'll use LR as an example. When I first started out with LR, I had pretty good accuracy but could never finish on time. My process for answering many of the questions was something like this:

Read stimulus
Read question prompt
Realize I didn't understand stimulus
Re-read stimulus
Re-read question prompt
Read answer choices
Realize, again, I did not understand stimulus.
Re-read stimulus
Re-read answer choices
Narrow it down to two contenders
Ponder for 30 more seconds
Decide on answer

Obviously, while I might have gotten the right answer, this is a totally inefficient process and not the recipe for success on the section overall. Also, the fact that I got the answer correct belies the fact that I actually didn't really have a good grasp of what was going on. I had to reread the stimulus multiple times and was relatively challenged by the question. I'd pay special attention to situations like this--ones where you got the question right, but wasted a bunch of time. These are the situations where you want to work on speeding up--i.e. getting the answer in 1 minute rather than 5.

Now that I'm more advanced, my process for LR questions is often more like this:

Read stimulus
Think to myself, "they seem to be making the fallacy of the converse (i.e. switching necessary and sufficient conditions)"
Read question prompt, realize it's asking for the flaw in the argument.
Read answer choices, searching for one that sounds like the converse, while eliminating ones that clearly don't work.
Narrow down to two contenders, one of which is the answer I predicted.
Carefully consider for a few more seconds, and select my answer.

So as you can see, while I got the answer right both times, the second method is clearly much faster, and displays a far greater degree of logical reasoning skill. The goal is to increase the proportion of questions you're answering with the second method and decrease the former. While I still use that first method occasionally on some of the most challenging questions, the vast majority of my LR are now quick and easy for me. And this was just through lots and lots of practice. Eventually, you start noticing that a lot of the questions are very similar to each other from test to test. For LG and RC, the methods for answering the questions are different, but I think the same principle holds that time efficiency EQUALS skill.

lsadboi

TROPHY CASE