I know lots of us joke about the LSAT turning us into dorks who are obsessed with the minutiae of pencils, but I'd like to stress a seriously important lesson I learned recently: don't use mechanical pencils to take your practice tests. As you might know, mechanical pencils aren't allowed when you take the real thing, and regular wooden pencils do behave differently in an important sense. Specifically, they get more dull more quickly than mechanical pencils do.

This is actually extremely important for logic games, which require you to write and diagram clearly and precisely. I found that my pencils were getting dull by the end of my LG sections, resulting in lighter and thicker marks that actually took appreciably more effort to read and understand. Whereas I could quickly tap a mechanical pencil on the table to draw more lead, I either had to make due with my wooden pencil or switch to another one. This would have been a real, although obviously surmountable, problem had I only started using wooden pencils on test day.

So, as neurotic as this may sound, do yourself a favor and get a feel for the performance of your pencil of choice. The last thing you want to be worrying about are your writing instruments.