Breaking into 170s

Hi there! If you're scoring in the mid to high 170s in blind review, that's a sign that you have a really solid understanding of the LSAT when you're not under time pressure. There could be a couple of things contributing to your PT score vs blind review difference, and I'd guess the biggest one is that time pressure.

You might want to try targeted timing drills, where you drill sets of 5-10 questions starting at 200% time, then 100% time, then 90%, and then 80%. Do this specifically for question types that you feel are taking a long time or causing extra anxiety on your PTs, and start with lower difficulty questions, then repeat the timing sequence with harder questions as you start to feel comfortable! This should help improve your accuracy in timed, high-pressure situations. Make sure that as you drill you're reading carefully and justifying your answer (and eliminated answers) as you go, since I often see that careful reading and clear justification are the first to go when time pressure shows up.

You might also try targeted drilling focused specifically on reading carefully or justifying your answers, if one of those seems to be a recurring problem. And my other tip for breaking into the 170s on PTs is to treat the test as a game with learnable rules, and a game made by people whose intentions you can identify and work with! Trap answers were written by a game maker with the goal of tricking you. So start looking for trap answers and asking yourself "why might the test makers want me to be tricked by that?" or "what faulty line of reasoning are they anticipating with that answer?" identifying those trap answer patterns will make your elimination in timed settings faster, and will help you avoid faulty lines of thinking even when you're trying to move quickly on a PT. Hopefully that helps!

1 comments

Josephine Tutor
3 hours ago

Hi there! If you're scoring in the mid to high 170s in blind review, that's a sign that you have a really solid understanding of the LSAT when you're not under time pressure. There could be a couple of things contributing to your PT score vs blind review difference, and I'd guess the biggest one is that time pressure.
You might want to try targeted timing drills, where you drill sets of 5-10 questions starting at 200% time, then 100% time, then 90%, and then 80%. Do this specifically for question types that you feel are taking a long time or causing extra anxiety on your PTs, and start with lower difficulty questions, then repeat the timing sequence with harder questions as you start to feel comfortable! This should help improve your accuracy in timed, high-pressure situations. Make sure that as you drill you're reading carefully and justifying your answer (and eliminated answers) as you go, since I often see that careful reading and clear justification are the first to go when time pressure shows up.
You might also try targeted drilling focused specifically on reading carefully or justifying your answers, if one of those seems to be a recurring problem. And my other tip for breaking into the 170s on PTs is to treat the test as a game with learnable rules, and a game made by people whose intentions you can identify and work with! Trap answers were written by a game maker with the goal of tricking you. So start looking for trap answers and asking yourself "why might the test makers want me to be tricked by that?" or "what faulty line of reasoning are they anticipating with that answer?" identifying those trap answer patterns will make your elimination in timed settings faster, and will help you avoid faulty lines of thinking even when you're trying to move quickly on a PT. Hopefully that helps!

1

You've reached the end of the comments.

Discussions

Breaking into 170s

Confirm action