Self-study
Hi everyone! I'm taking the August LSAT and am a splitter (my GPA is below the medians for all the schools I like because I started college as a pre-med major at a school notorious for grade deflation). I've plateaued at 164-166 for about 3 months now and I'd like advice from people who were able to break out of that.
Weaknesses:
Logical reasoning
Net effect/weighing factors (especially when co-tagged with causal reasoning)
similarly, Resolve/Reconcile/Explain
Hardest causal reasoning
Hardest conditional reasoning tags (especially when co-tagged with a lot of other things).
Hard/est strengthen or weaken
Hard/est link assumption
Hard/est most strongly/supported
Reading comprehension
Hard/est implied
Hardest author's perspective
Weaken/strengthen/evaluate
Behavioral issues
Answer-switching (from right to wrong)
Knowing which questions are hardest (and flagging them) but not answering them correctly.
Other helpful info about me:
I take the LSAT with time and a half, and stop/start accommodations;
On LR, I aim to leave 26.5 minutes for the last 10 questions. If it takes me longer than 90 seconds on the first pass to tackle a question, I come back to it. I only flag questions that I feel are really hard; I will note which questions I want to come back to on my scrap paper (that way when I'm reviewing before submitting a section, I know which specific questions to double check).
On RC, I spend 13 mins an 15 seconds on each passage + questions. I read for scale, summarize the main idea of each passage very briefly in a passage map, underlline any theses/main points in the paragraphs, and highlight any indicators of perspective (authors, allies, or opponents).
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If you've experienced the same issues and have any tips for how you resolved them, I'd be incredibly thankful! I can also clarify anything or give more detailed analytics if needed. Thank you again!
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2 comments
Good question! @AriVilker1 gave some good tips for timing and test-taking strategies that you could experiment with. In addition to those, I'd recommend focusing heavily on diagramming conditional reasoning and quantifiers. At your scoring level, you should aim for consistency and confidence every time you translate conditional/quantifier relationships into lawgic. You should be able to take contrapositives and use De Morgan's laws, and make logical inferences like "some before all," "two split mosts," etc. For many students, this part of the LSAT is more learnable and objective to apply on the test. So if you can get really confident with these questions, you won't end up doubting yourself on the answer choices and can devote more time to the other difficult questions that don't involve formal logic.
If your PTs are plateauing, I would try messing around with different timing and certainty strategies. I was able to break out of a certain range just by experimenting with speed and confidence levels. It sounds like you have fairly rigid rules for how long to spend in different situations, and it might be worth challenging those rules. I'm sure you have good reason for arriving at these current parameters, but maybe things have changed as you've improved. Here are some things you could play around with:
How quickly to read through an RC passage depending on the difficulty level
What percentage certainty you need to have to move on in an LR question
What percentage certainty you need to have to move on in an RC question
In which situations it's actually more efficient to stick with a tough question that you've already spent 90 seconds thinking through
That's not an exhaustive list, but it gives you a good sense of the thresholds you can tweak. For me, reading through RC passages quickly and answering the RC questions with much less certainty ended up making me more consistent. I then had enough time to search through the passage on tough questions or go back and understand certain parts of the passage better if I needed to. This may not be the case for everybody; for some, it might be necessary to slow down when reading the passage. But, the idea is that there may be optimizations still available to you that could break you out of that plateau range.