Outside of tutoring the LSAT, I like to do long-distance running. A mentor of mine once told me, "people often overestimate the amount of progress they can make in a month but underestimate the amount of progress they can make in a year." His advice could not apply more to studying for something like the LSAT. Pattern recognition, the skill fundamental to success on this test, is most easily instilled over a long period of spaced, repetitive exposure to said patterns. For those of you looking to cram into the current application cycle while far from your goal score, strongly consider waiting a year to apply. I know it sounds unappealing, but imagine this: with a year added to the amount of time you have to study, why not set your goal score higher? The opportunity cost of forcing yourself to apply this cycle might be 5-10 points on your LSAT score that you could have if you wait another year and devote it to studying. This is the conundrum I faced a little over a year ago, and I am very happy I waited (and fortunate to have had the means to).
It's not surprising to me when I teach a concept and the student makes the same mistake two weeks later. That is natural—the correct thought process hasn't been ingrained yet. Without fail, after sufficient repetition and attention to not making the same mistake again, the mistake goes away. It's just that for most people, it will probably take longer than a month. For me, I spent about a year from start to finish, and I probably attempted about 4,000 questions.
More than 3,000 questions of these were from drilling, which brings me to an important recommendation based on what worked for me: drill, drill, drill! Sections are fun, but fight the urge to constantly benchmark your progress if you can. Your accuracy statistics in the previous two weeks in the Analytics section are more than enough!
Focusing on drilling made the LSAT studying process much less stressful and, I think, more fruitful. By drilling, you can see if your answer was correct before attempting subsequent problems, which is SO important if we want to optimize for learning from mistakes. If you take a section and review it all after, it would be a shame if you got two questions wrong for the same reason. If you had known that you messed up the first time, you might've been correct on the second opportunity!
Of further importance is clustering your drills by similarity: either by question type or by stimulus logic. This allows you the opportunity to make a similar mistake soon after you make one, which accelerates the learning process! The mistake will still be fresh in your mind, lowering the chance that you forget about it and make it again.
The ultimate pillar of how I found success is untimed work! Untimed work allows for a thorough understanding of the problem, which is crucial for building your foundation. There is misconception that speed and accuracy are supposed to be built independently. Speed follows accuracy; it is the understanding that you have become very accurate and hence start hesitating less on answer choices. In practice, it is very beneficial to understand why the correct answer is correct and the wrong answers are wrong. Eventually, you will realize that either one of these is independently sufficient for getting the right answer. Speed will naturally come when you are confident in accuracy.
One last thing to note is that another thing that is much more feasibly achieved over a year than over a month is improved reading comprehension. An intuitive understanding of what a piece of text implies is CRUCIAL to a high score on the LSAT. Intuition can be built, but it takes persistent, devoted effort. A good litmus test for success in extracting subtext is how good you are at detecting sarcasm. Maybe find a satirical novel and chip away at it.
I read The Economist for 20 minutes in the morning and a novel for fun until I fell asleep. It doesn't have to be anything crazy hard, just something you enjoy. I stopped reading for fun after middle school (oops), so I picked back up where I left off with YA dystopian novels. It was very fun and very helpful.
As your tutor, I will encourage you to adopt the philosophy I've described above, but I am ultimately happy to work within any constraints you may have. Sessions usually involve me asking you about a specific area you want to focus on, and then we go through a drill I design to target said area. I have an extensive "Patterns in Right/Wrong Answers" document that I built over my year of studying that I leverage in helping you uncover the patterns of the LSAT. I primarily focus on LR, but I also do RC with students when desired.
My official LSAT score was a 174. Currently, I charge $30 per hour for students with an LSAC need-based fee waiver and $45 otherwise. In service of my goal of encouraging people to commit to studying in the longer term, I'm also exploring an option where I charge on a 4 week basis where you can schedule up to 5 hour-long sessions per week. This will be $500 with a fee waiver or $750 otherwise. Here is my website if you'd like to read more about me or my philosophy: https://www.fundamentlr.com/ or you are welcome to text me at +17737919362 or email me at mickey.claffey@gmail.com
Of course, I offer a free introductory call which you may schedule here: https://calendar.app.google/JwBTorg7g9VWmRoK6
If you made it to the end of this post, thanks for reading, and I'm looking forward to getting in touch!
1 comments
I couldn’t recommend Mickey enough. I had always been hesitant about tutoring, but after coming across Mickey’s services, my opinion completely changed. He helped me approach and understand different question types in ways I had never considered before, which has significantly improved my accuracy. Mickey’s guidance has been incredibly helpful throughout my LSAT journey, and I’m very grateful for the support he has provided.