I’m currently scheduled to take the August exam in a couple weeks. I’ve been averaging 163 on my practice exams, but I would love a 168+ to make myself more competitive for T14 schools. I am planning to target T30 schools more generally, with some more “safety” schools outside that range as well. If it’s helpful at all, my LSAC GPA is apparently a 4.1. Currently I work a full-time job in the legal field and only have a maximum of 2 hours a day to study.
Since I’ve been missing a handful of LR questions each section, I’ve been focusing on untimed drills of my weak LR question types to up my pattern recognition and understanding. My thought process here (for focusing on LR) is because LR has more scored sections. However, with my limited time, I don’t know if I’m spending too much time deep diving into my individual wrong questions. How should I balance my time with these drills and reviewing them?
I’m also stressed about RC questions, as I tend to run out of time. My tendency is that I spend over the target time on the passage (1min+ over) and then I am either under or over for the questions, depending on difficulty. I think I have a problem with being concise in my low res summaries which hurts my recall in the questions. I also have been using the highlight feature, but maybe I need to abandon it if that’s what’s slowing me down?
Essentially, between LR and RC, what do you think I should focus on in my time before the exam? Do you have any other tips?
1 comments
I'm not sure if this will be helpful for you, but with RC for myself, I often skim the passages first. I don't read it word for word when I'm doing a skim, then I move onto the questions. Like for what a certain word is used for, or what purpose a sentence serves, you don't need to read the entire thing to get an idea of what the word "hypothesis" is being used for. It's dependent on the surrounding sentences most of the time, not the surrounding paragraphs.
Then, if I'm still struggling on an answer, or it needs something broader, like the summary, I'll read it a bit more thoroughly. However, a lot of questions, at least when we're going for timing, don't need for you to read the entire passage! This is why the search function is so awesome. If you're doing a comparative passage, and it's asking you what was mentioned in both passages, just use the search function. It should cut down a lot of your time if you're not using it.
I still love & use the highlight feature, but I don't have a method for it necessarily. I just highlight what stands out to me.
Some people recommend reading it and trying not to go back to the passage while doing the questions. That definitely works for some people, but it doesn't really work for me. Everyone is different for sure, but this is what works for me and my RC accuracy has gone from -10 to -3. :)