Self-study
I've been preparing for the LSAT for some time. I took the test in January and plan to retake it in June, or possibly August if needed. While people often say that speed comes with practice—and I do feel myself getting faster—I also find that I tend to misread questions when I try to move too quickly. My Blind Review (BR) scores are at my target level, but the gap between my actual score and my BR is significant. Does anyone have advice on how to close this gap or improve performance under test conditions? If the solution is simply more timed practice, I can do that, but I'm unsure how much time I should allow for the tougher questions. Any guidance would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!
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4 comments
The only way you could ever close the gap is if you can reliably score 180 (desirable), or you don't improve your accuracy at all with infinite time (undesirable).
I understand it is normal to see your blind review score and think, "if only I could get this score timed." The question is, how are you going to do it? Well, you need to get better at the LSAT. If you went faster without getting any better, you'd miss more questions... which is exactly what is happening when you take a timed test. You go faster and miss questions you would have solved given more time. If you were better, you wouldn't have needed the extra time to solve them.
All you can do is get better and your timed score will follow from that. Keep practicing both timed, to gauge your progress, and untimed to get better. Solve the problems and learn from them. Once you internalize the patterns, doing them again in the future becomes much quicker.
@Karl! It truly is a marathon! I will keep trucking along, thank you !
This is a super common problem. I wouldn't even call it a problem -- it's more like a fundamental element of everyone's process. It's common enough, anyway, that I made a video laying out the basic basic beginnings of an answer to your question.
More detail than that requires more information about your particular case. Feel free to reply here with any follow-up questions you've got. (That goes for anyone else reading this, as well.)
@MichaelWright Thanks so much ! I noticed that I second-guess myself a lot, and that's often a time sink. I am trying to find more ways to build my confidence. I'm sure shifting my priority from the score itself to the little experiment will be helpful.