Self-study
I am taking the LSAT in April. I have been trying to get through the Core Curriculum since October, and I just find a lot of the diagrams and skills that they recommend using to not work for me, or to be more confusing to understand. Any recommendations on what I should focus on to get my score from 150 to 160?
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I honestly feel that instead of helping me is dragging me down! I've only taking this course for like a week, I had a 145 LSAC Prep course before taking it, so I went to the LSAC website and learned from there, I decided to pay for a private course like this one and I feel like is not helping whatsoever! so I'm like super frustrated at this point
Personally, something that has been the case for me and was recently mentioned on Powerscore crystal ball was that diagramming basically doesn't click until it does. It just kind of happens. One day it doesn't make sense and then the next day it does. I would say if you stick with it and really practice everyday, it'll make sense eventually (regardless, you need to understand the rules and argument forms, etc). I also thought it didn't work for me when doing the curriculum, but I plateaued and had to really commit to the basics before jumping to the harder stuff. Diagramming is all about understanding the basics so you can get the harder questions correct later on without writing it out. With all that said, if your goal is a 160, you can definitely get by without mastering lawgic. Personally, what I found to be most helpful was doing the core curriculum, then testing to see where I was, and then doing the Loophole afterward. I committed to doing all the work the Loophole told me to do and once I came back and started testing on 7sage, my score jumped up to about a 163 after about 3 weeks of doing that (from a 151 diagnostic). This required constant commitment. I was doing 3-4 sections a day of the old tests and wrong answer journal them (almost every tutor would say do much less and focus on quality over quantity + definitely wrong answer journal, but I wanted exposure to as many questions as possible and with your shortened timeline, I could see either pathway being beneficial depending on the type of studier you are). I would maybe focus on doing one older and one newer LR section (without burning the truly most representative ~pts 146-154). I would also take a RC section a day (denying RC early on for LR has cost me dearly). And I would take a break and then review them afterwards. I would say if you do all of that, I would feel very confident in getting a 160+. That's just my two cents tho and everyone is different. What I will leave you with is that I had a similar mind set that I could do things my way and still improve my score (albeit my goal has been a 170+), but I didn't really start improving to a proficient level until I left that mindset behind and realized there are tried and true ways to improving and shaping them to fit me somewhat made sense, but just disregarding them and thinking I could just pt, waj, and significantly improve ended up being incorrect. As cliche as it is, it was only once I embraced the uncomfortable that I actually saw steady improvement. Good luck!