Self-study
Entertain this hypothetical for me.
You are scheduled to take the LSAT in exactly 3 months. Assume you, at your current practice score and place in your lesson/practice plan, have 90 days to study full time. You aren't made of money, but you have enough to cover your expenses and get access to a reasonable amount of resources (for example, you can't afford to hire a personal tutor to coach you every day but you can subscribe to the 7sage Live program). 90 days to lock in and become an expert in the LSAT.
What would this look like for you? What kind of advice would you give to someone who has this opportunity? How would you structure your study plan? How often would you take a practice test? How would you adapt your study plan as you go to adjust for new problems/progress? Regardless, I'd like to hear what this would look like for you, not me. I want to gain some more perspective.
Me personally? I've taken 4 practice tests before subscribing to 7sage two days ago. My scores in order are 155, 161, 156, 165. My studying for the past few months has been on the back burner. I don't feel the need to complete lessons, but I can be convinced otherwise. I feel like when I read The Loophole and did lessons my score suffered in the short term from 'reinventing the wheel,' so to speak.
My priority is locking my time management down, especially on RC. I'd probably spend 6 hours practicing per day, 3 hours of drilling and 3 hours of untimed practice + review alteration, followed by two hours of wrong answer journaling, blind review, and reviewing and taking notes for certain question types I struggled with that day. Or maybe switch those up, do blind review for the day before and follow it up with practice. I think I'd alternate RC and LR daily, but I don't have a reason it just feels right.
Before you ask I was laid off yesterday. Please don't pity me because I hated that job and I didn't need it.
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5 comments
I've been studying full time for a while now, and my advice is to first stabilize your scores. Once you are consistently out of 150s, focus on getting out of low-160s, high-160s, low-170s, etc. I think I made the mistake of trying to immediately jump out of 150s too quickly without actually learning the content. And don't burn through your PTs! Especially PT145-159.
I do spend around 6-7 hours of studying a day, and I take one day off a week and do one PT a week. It has changed over the past few months, but I am currently following this schedule. I do blind review the day after my PT, with no recommendations on (7sage has a feature that suggests recommendations for blind review questions, i.e. questions you got wrong, flagged, spent too much time on).
I fortunately don't have to worry about living expenses, but I have definitely been digging into savings for LSAT prep materials (especially since it's been taking me a little longer than I expected). Thrift used LSAT prepbooks online, watch free Youtube videos, and find what works best for you. Some people on 7sage also offer free or discounted tutoring, so I would look into that. 7sage also has 'office hours' and a robust community of people who will respond to your questions.
One more thing about The Loophole, it's a great resource but has pushed students to take shortcuts and rely on patterns that don't actually work a lot of the time, especially on the more recent exams. I fully believe that LSAC has become aware of the types of 'powerful/provable' words that students default on and have been trying to remedy that over the years. After I read The Loophole, my scores also suffered a bit because I tried to apply her hacks rather than actually thinking logically. I don't think any one resource will be the best for learning for every student, so I tried to gain as much insight as I could from different platforms and prepbooks.
Three months is a deceptively short amount of time, so don't burn out and try to cram everything in all at once. Good luck!
@haena
I'm excluding 145-159 from the drilling pool right now. I don't think I've ever heard of setting short term goals for scores like stair steps. I've always subconsciously assumed people just shoot for the moon and hope their score gradually goes up. How did you do this? My gut tells me that I'd risk overcompensating for variations in my score week to week, i.e., after a fluke PT with a great RC score I'm inclined to emphasize it less until I get whiplash from a bad score on the next PT.
Also thank you for vindicating me with regards to the Loophole. I cannot describe my frustration at that book. I feel like I naturally have a good instinct for the logic of this test which was completely scrambled by the time I finished it, and it read like it was written by a tiktok influencer still in the 9th grade.
I appreciate the advice.
@AndrewMcGinnis I definitely understand your concern about overcompensating! Especially for RC, I have quite a bit of score fluctuation depending on the passage. I like your strategy of switching LR/RC every other day, but I also think you'll find that one or the other will require more time and effort. I neglected RC for a really long time (honestly still do), and I think that it has harmed me in the long run.
As for the short term goals, I also assumed the same thing. My diagnostic was a 157, and I was really impatient to get a 170+ immediately. I stayed around my diagnostic for months, and I have been very slowly hitting every possible plateau since then. It was really crushing every time I would hope for a 170, and I would just be getting 150s despite studying a ton.
What I have learned over time, is that 75 scored questions on an exam is really not a lot of questions. So being stuck in 150s was not a sign that I was getting 'worse,' but it was just that my diagnostic score and the PTs I took in the beginning happened to be around the same number of questions incorrect. And if you have some score variance, it's important to remember how normal this is. It's even calculated by LSAC on your report, it's called a 'score band,' and I believe that its ± 3 points from your score. This is why a lot of students take the LSAT a couple times; 75 scored questions leaves a ton of room for plain human error, and eventually you will be able to work your way around them.
The last thing I'll say about the score goals that I wish I knew earlier was that depending on where you are averaging, each question will be worth something different. Around the mid-range of scores, you may need to get 2-3 more raw points right to move up 1 scaled point. Around the 170+, missing 1-2 questions can drop your scaled score by 2-3 points. In other words, the higher your score, the more points you risk losing per question. In my opinion going from 150s to 160s was significantly easier (though not easy by any means) than going from 160s to 170s. A lot of it has to do with the raw number of questions I can get wrong as my scaled score increases.
Sorry for another long response, but these are good questions you're asking!
For me, the majority of my study time would come from drilling. I'd take one PT a week, making sure I'm saving the most recent PTs for closer to the test. From those PTs, I'd note which question types I was missing, even if I got them right on BR, as well as the question types that I guessed on, took extra long on, or toggled between ACs on. I'd do a WAJ for all of those.
Then, I'd target each question type one by one with small drills (no more than 5 questions). I'd do elimination drilling: not only picking the right answer, but eliminating every other AC and explaining why. I'd start by doing drills of 3* questions, untimed at first. When I was consistently hitting 100% accuracy, I'd move up to 4*, and repeat. I wouldn't consider that question type mastered unless I was consistently hitting 100% in every timed drill of 4-5* questions. but if I could feel myself getting frustrated and seeing diminishing returns, I'd switch to another question type for awhile.
Timing-wise, I'd do one day of a PT, one day of reviewing/wrong answer journaling, and four days of mainly drilling. I might do LR days and RC days, or I might do both on a given day depending on how I was feeling.
I would make sure that whenever I was studying, I was locked in. If I felt myself starting to phone it in, I'd take a break or call it for the day. For me, depending on the day, that could be after anywhere from 2-4 hours. If you're not getting quality study time in, the quantity doesn't matter. 1 or two great, focused hours is worth way more than 4-6 hours of 70%.
I'd also make sure I still had a life: seeing friends, going for a walk, hitting the gym, goofing around. This test can get in your head, so keeping everything in perspective helps.
No pity, but congrats on no longer having a job you hate!
@PhoebeHopp All of this is great stuff. I'm gonna follow your practice test method to a T.