Good luck everyone!

Tomorrow, the biggest challenge will be psychological.  Stay calm and collected and you’ll get the LSAT score that you’ve been getting on your timed LSAT PrepTests.

If you have any last minute questions, concerns, or just want to chat, we will be on this post until 1am.  Hit us up!

First, a word of caution:

The honest truth is that for the vast majority of students, low scores are not properly attributed to test anxiety, because the vast majority of students have large gaps in their fundamentals that have nothing to do with nervousness. Your mindset counts for a lot, but you can’t relax your way out of knowing how to take a contrapositive.

If you’re looking to improve your score generally, the curriculum is this way. If you’re looking to ensure that you can apply what you’ve learned correctly on test day and hit the same range of score that you’ve been hitting in practice, then keep reading.

1. Interpret your bodily reactions differently

Let’s say that you get the butterflies every time you look at the cover of a fresh LSAT practice test. Rather than interpret those butterflies as nervousness, train yourself to interpret those butterflies as excitement, a sign that you’re about to do something awesome. This has two benefits – it avoids the nervous thoughts, and it puts your mind into a positive mindset.

2. Put your fears on paper

Also known as “Flooding Therapy”, this is a great way to alleviate stress. The key to this technique lies in the fact that your brain interprets your thoughts differently once they’ve been expressed concretely, versus just floating around in your brain. You know those times when you just have to get something off your chest? Yeah, it’s basically that. This technique has been used with varying degrees of success with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder patients, so it’s probably more than powerful enough for even the most test-anxiety-crippled LSAT taker.

To do this, simply sit down for about 10 minutes or so before you take a practice test and make a list of all the things that you’re worried about. It can be as large scale as thinking you’re going to flat out bomb the test, as detailed as thinking that you missed 15% of your flaw questions on the last test, which is higher than your usual 12%, and you’re scared that it might get worse, or as seemingly irrelevant as you thinking that you don’t look very presentable on this particular morning. Whatever it is, get it out. One study showed that a 10-minute “emotion-dumping” session led to a 15% increase in performance over a control group that just went through their normal pre-test routine.

3. Meditate!

The goal of meditation is to train your mind to block out distractions. We’re not just talking big distractions, either – while the ability to focus while sitting next to the guy who blows his nose every 4 seconds is a nice side bonus, it’s not the main thrust of the exercise. The goal is to be able to focus through the more subtle things that creep into your mind – in particular, the thoughts of doubt and worry that sabotage you while you’re busy trying to take the test.

You should be entirely awake and alert during the process of meditation – this is not an excuse to take a nap before you start a test. Close your eyes and focus on something. Focusing on your breathing is great since it’s readily available. Don’t let any other thought enter your head. If you find your mind wandering, give yourself a mental slap on the wrist, push those ideas out of your head, and return to focusing on your breathing. Do this for ten or fifteen minutes at a time, twice a day if you can manage it.

This will be exceedingly difficult for the first few weeks, and you will probably be pretty bad at it to start. Eventually, though, you’ll begin to notice that your mind wanders less and less. This is the mental training that, down the line, will enable you to push aside those feelings of doubt and worry and focus your entire attention on beating the LSAT.

4. Positive Self-Reinforcement

One of the simplest and most effective ways to get all those feelings of doubt and worry out of your head is perhaps the most obvious one – just remember how awesome you are! By the time test day arrives, you should know exactly what you can reasonably expect to score, so why allow the doubt to creep back in? Test day is neither the time nor the place. Remembering that you’ve been hitting your target score consistently for the past month and a half goes a long way toward squashing your nervousness. Remember your highest score, remember that time you wrote a perfect logic game section, remember that time that you got every flaw question on the test right – remember SOMETHING that will remind you that you can conquer the test in front of you.

5. Practice under mild stress

Practicing under stress doesn’t necessarily have to mean that you should have the weight of the world on your shoulders every time you take a test. Actually, all that really matters here is that there is something – anything – at stake. If you adhere to a practice test schedule, odds are that you already put some amount of pressure on yourself to do better the next time. Unfortunately, there’s no real pressure to perform and no immediate consequences to doing poorly in practice (except perhaps a slight ego hit). And you’d better believe that on test day, when so much is at stake and the consequences of doing poorly are very real, you’ll be feeling the pressure to perform.

So, create your own consequences. For example, maybe you can put a quarter in a jar every time you miss a logic game question, or maybe you can do five pushups for every logical reasoning question you miss. No matter how trivial the stakes seem, the fact that your performance now has real consequences attached to it on a day-to-day basis will train your brain to function under stress.

Again, I must reiterate – none of this replaces real understanding of logic, and you still have to make sure that your actual LSAT capabilities are on point to do well on this test. That being said, if you get nervous when thinking about test day and you want to avoid a big letdown, try one (or all) of these things, and stick with it. By the time test day rolls around, you’ll have trained your mind to dispense with the worry and the nervousness, leaving you free to rock the LSAT to your fullest capabilities. The rest, as they say, is up to you.

Good luck!

Jonathan Wang is a professional LSAT tutor, head instructor for PreProBono’s Summer Fellowship, and featured instructor for 7Sage.

We’re happy to announce an addition to the 7Sage team: Graeme Blake!

Graeme has over 4 years of experience under his belt.  He scored a 177 on the LSAT and went to law school, for a while, at UT and McGill – they’re like the Harvard and Yale of Canada.  We’ve learned Reading Comprehension techniques from him that we hadn’t heard of anywhere else before.

Apart from working with 7Sage, Graeme is the moderator of Reddit’s LSAT forum, and is the author of Hacking The LSAT, a book of explanations for LSATs 29-38. He’s taught LSAT courses for two major prep companies, and helped many tutoring students get into law school.

We want everyone at 7Sage to keep in touch with what LSAT students are going through, so Graeme will still be tutoring. If for nothing else, we recommend at least an hour of tutoring with Graeme for the Reading Comp advice alone.  He’s pretty awesome.

Send us an email to set up a lesson!

Our students are telling us that they are starting to see logic games videos on YouTube that look like our videos. One student, Emilie Eisold, emailed us saying “Look what [you] did. [You are] inspiring all these others LSAT instructors to be like 7Sage!”

Wonderful.

When we first put these videos on YouTube for free over a year ago, we had no idea what would happen. All we knew was that we wanted to make our quality instructional videos accessible to everyone. But, in truth, we didn’t know whether people would like our videos, if they’d even watch them, if they would help anyone learn. When you’re doing something new, there’s a huge chance that you’re just plain crazy. We rolled the dice anyway. Read more

I used to love Mad Libs when I was little.  Kids would get a couple books of Mad Libs on their birthday, and then have to protect them from their friends who didn’t have any of their own and wanted to use up their valuable Mad Lib books.  Friends like me ;).  Well now I can make my own using the interwebs, so I don’t need friends anymore!

This is a special Mad Lib, it makes LSAT questions. Try it out here: LSAT Mad Lib Maker

Look below for the one I did myself.  I’m sure you can make a better one.  Not.

LSAT Mad Lib – Hell is not perfect, no fails on perfect land (by Alan)

People who say that Hell is perfect are clearly wrong. On perfect land, fails by water is not a problem. Consequently, farmers whose land is perfect do not build playpens to prevent fails. Yet I hear that the farms in Hell are dotted with playpens.

The author’s conclusion in the passage depends on the assumption that

• (A) the only cause of fails is water
• (B) there are playpens on farmland in Hell which were build to prevent fails
• (C) playpens of the kind found on farmland in Hell have been shown to prevent fails
• (D) on perfect land there is no fails
• (E) the only playpens in Hell are on farmland

We have unbundled LSAT PrepTests 63 (June 2011), 64 (October 2011), and 65 (December 2011) along with their HD video explanations from our LSAT Premium course.

You can purchase the 3 preptest pack here for $79.

We received demand from the June students who didn’t want to purchase our entire course, but did want to learn from those three most recent preptests. Smart. The Last Minute PrepTest Pack gives you those three preptests for instant download and printing. More importantly, you get access to HD video explanations for each of the 100 questions in those tests. The video explanations walk you through every question in its entirety including the stimulus, the passage, the question stem, the right answers (and why they are right), and the wrong answers (and why they are wrong and why people might mistakenly think they are right). Each video is short and to the point. They are in HD and can be played back at faster (1.3x, 1.7x) speeds. If you are taking the test in June, you really should take PrepTests 63, 64 and 65 if you haven’t yet. You still have time. If you have taken them already, this is the perfect set of video explanations to check your thinking against.

As with all our Logic Games explanations, the ones for these three preptests are already provided to you, free of charge, on our Logic Game Explanations page. Study hard!

Okay, we’ve been working our asses off here trying to get LSAT prep materials up here for you in time for the June LSAT. Time is ticking down! So… three super exciting announcements! (or do they just sound super exciting to me because I haven’t been getting enough sleep?)

LSAT Premium is ready to go!

LSAT Premium has all the great curriculum from LSAT Complete, and adds 10 very recent LSAT PrepTests (56 to 65).  And of course, 7Sage’s signature explanation videos for every single question, that’s 1000 more questions explained in our HD videos.

Logic Games Explanations for PrepTests 30-65 are all available

We put up the logic game explanations for PrepTests 46-65 earlier this week, and now they are all up.  That is over 140 logic games, all explained in HD.  What’s the fee?  Zero dollars and zero cents.  Yeah, we are actually serious about our mission to liberate the LSAT :).

LSAT Free – The free trial version of LSAT Complete is available

Okay, so this is old news for some of you 7Sagers.  But in case you haven’t heard, we opened up the first four days of our LSAT Complete course for everyone to try for free, no strings attached.  You can register and start using LSAT Free in less than 60 seconds.

(Photo credit: jurvetson – http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/)