Quick Tip: Study in Downtime
For most of us, studying for the LSAT is not the only thing we have going on: school, full-time work, or any other number of endeavors can create demands on our time. One thing that can be helpful is to look for any chance you can to study, whether it’s during a commute or while walking to pick up groceries.
How can you study in this downtime? Making flashcards on Quizlet, having a PDF of your Wrong Answer Journal on your phone, listening to an LSAT class, and many other options exist for studying while out. Even if this isn’t as intense or active as when you sit down to study, it can give you the opportunity to squeeze out at least a few extra minutes of studying each day.
Discussion: Building a Wrong Answer Journal
Perhaps the single biggest mistake people make with PrepTests (PTs) is to take too many of them and spend too little time on review. A big part of why people do this is because they don’t have the tools to review properly. One of those tools is a Wrong Answer Journal, where students should log all questions that they miss.
Why is this important? Mistakes are repetitive, and the same themes repeat themselves often on the test; if you don’t learn from mistakes, there’s a good chance of the mistakes repeating themselves. A common trend is for students to chalk up mistakes to “situational” factors (“it was a hard question, but it won’t repeat, so I won’t make this mistake again”) instead of “dispositional” factors (“there was something about my process that needs to be changed”). Thinking dispositionally is key, because the test does in fact have patterns, and few mistakes are just one-off.
This is why the Wrong Answer Journal is so vital. It offers a platform for you to write down errors and, importantly, get a birds-eye view on prior errors, facilitating the recognition of patterns across time. Here’s how I would approach the process.
First, watch videos for any questions that were either missed or flagged. Do a thorough review to understand the question as much as you possibly can.
Second, for any question you watched a video of, add it to the Wrong Answer Journal. Take a screenshot of the question and, at minimum, (a) note why the right answer is right; (b) note why the wrong answers are wrong; (c) explain a pattern or overall takeaway, which can be done by thinking more generally: “Have I made this mistake before? How might I repeat this mistake again?” This can be done for both LR and RC, although the specifics may vary slightly (RC, for example, may include a passage breakdown, while LR would likely just break down the stimulus instead).
Third, commit to reviewing this Wrong Answer Journal daily. Don’t just passively review what you wrote. Instead, look at the screenshotted question and solve it again from start to finish without looking at your notes. Then check your notes; was your process different from the prior time, when you got it wrong? If not, the question needs further review.
This approach is the most fruitful one I’ve found for sustained improvement in LR and RC, and it can really make a difference for getting the most out of test review.