Self-study
I underperfomed on the June LSAT. I want to start all over again and dedicate more time and energy to get my desired score. However, I don't really know what my next steps should be other than keep drilling, blind reviewing, and PTing.
So I wanted to ask those who have more experience than me on this test what things helped them out tremendously. My biggest dream is to break into the 170s. I know that I can do it, and I know it takes a lot of work. The problem is that I don't know how to get there. I feel as if my studying process is not good enough since I haven't seen a major improvement. What can I do?
Any tip would be highly appreciated.
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4 comments
Hey there. Sorry for the underperformance; that's not a good feeling.
Drilling, blind reviewing, and PTing is exactly what you should be doing! What matters is how you do them.
Quality over quantity. If you're doing question type-specific drills (which are a great method of studying), keep them short (5-10 questions max). This helps you lock in and be intentional about your process on every question. What are you specifically tweaking in your approach to improve? Gradually increase the difficulty of the questions on the drills, starting with 3 stars. If you're not consistently hitting at least 80% right, you haven't quite mastered that question type.
In-Depth Review. When you're reviewing your missed questions, don't just identify why the right answer is right and why your answer is wrong. Think about why you chose that answer in the first place. What was the misunderstanding that led you to believe that was the right answer? What's a concrete change you can make to approach these questions differently? Finally, don't just review the questions you got wrong. If there are questions that you got right but took you extra time or you went back and forth between answer choices, those are worth reviewing too!
Elimination-Style Drilling. When you get a question wrong on the LSAT, you didn't just think the wrong answer was right. You also thought the right answer was wrong. On every (untimed) question, eliminate every answer but the one you choose, and highlight what it is you didn't like about that answer choice.
I hope that's helpful, and good luck with your studying!
@PhoebeHopp Thank you so much. I never tried doing type-specific drills because I always felt like I was running low on questions and had to constantly re-use the same ones all the time. While I never memorized them, I somehow felt like I was cheating. So I mainly focused on doing sections and PrepTests, and drills only when it came to conditional logic, since I wanted to do as many as I possibly could to get faster at diagramming, or simply know when to do it and when to skip it.
I think my main problem is that I'm usually stuck between two answers (shocker, I'm sure most people go through this) and often select the wrong one. This mistake is easy to fix during blind review, because the trap answer was forcefully eliminated and I also have more time to understand why it was wrong (and that it was wrong, too!), but when I'm doing a PrepTest or a section, there's no way for me to know how or why I should choose one answer instead of the other. I mean, of course there are some techniques I could use (for example, one answer is too extreme, or it focuses on a set that the main arguing is not interested in, etc). But under timed conditions it's so hard to see those flaws.
@UcraniaMerino If the trap answer is forcefully eliminated, that means that you're not including correct questions in your blind review. That's an important setting to keep on, since it will keep you honest for wrong questions. That may not be enough, though, so you might want to go extra blind. By that, I mean re-doing all flagged questions that you think are potentially wrong before looking at the answer. Getting more practice picking between those two choices without any indication could be very important for you. Not only for improving your accuracy in selecting between the two, but in improving the speed it takes to resolve the two. Being faster and more accurate in those two-choice situations pays dividends throughout the test, as you pick up extra time for later difficult questions.
@AriVilker1 I think you're right with this. As soon as I got my result I turned on every single one of the blind-review options. I think I cheated myself a little bit by turning them off since I was only reviewing what I explicitly knew was wrong. But if I were doing things correctly, then I shouldn't even know what was right and wrong in the first place. Maybe that's what caused me to fail this test?