First, big congrats to all who got their goal scores (or above) in September, and I'm sorry to those who were disappointed with their results. I took my first official LSAT this month, and was pleased to get a 172! When I started studying in April, I was aiming for a 170 and ran into a wall in the high 160s for months - I didn't get above a 170 in PTs until just before September's test.
I feel pretty comfortable with my ability to identify when I'm uncertain with my answer to a question and flag it if it's a 50-50 sort of situation, and I was keeping track of my flags after each section during the September test. Leaving the test, I felt like I totally bombed it, because I had a lot more flags in each section than I figured would be indicative of a strong performance. I reasoned that my score could have ranged anywhere from like a 166 (if all of my flags were wrong answers) to a 176 (if only a few of those 50-50 coin flips ended up being wrong), and I immediately figured it had to have been a bad performance because it felt like a bad performance. This put me in a sour mood for a few days and added a lot more stress to my life the last few weeks than needed!
If there's any point to me writing this post, it's that I encourage all of you taking the test in October - whether for the first time or not - to try your best and leave the score anxiety in the testing center, don't let those thoughts linger with you. At the end of the day, the score you get is out of your hands when you leave that testing room, and stressing about whether you should've gone with C instead of D for a specific reading comp question (an activity I devoted many a shower thought to) isn't necessarily going to help you feel better!
Best of luck to those taking it again soon, and for all who are submitting apps this cycle.
1 comments
This is facts