@businessgoose It would largely depend on what you think is actually holding you back on official tests, but what helped me more than anything was practicing speed early on in LR, that way I had more time for harder questions. My first official test I essentially ran out of time on the first section (had to guess on ~3 questions), which had never happened to me during any PT. I started focusing on speed, limiting the time I spent on questions, and revisiting flagged ones at the end of the section rather than letting uncertainty become a time sink.

I also macrodosed creatine on test day lol, and I took like 5 whole minutes of box breathing to calm myself down before starting. Not sure how much those two things helped, but who knows.

My first ever diagnostic was a 168, I studied for ~2 months, got a 176 on at least one PT... and got a 168 on test day. It happens. On the actual test day, I effectively ran out of time on at least one section, which had never happened to me with a PT. The higher stakes I can only imagine made me treat each question as more important than I would on PTs, slowing me down. On the very first section (an LR) I had 3 or 4 questions I had to make "educated" guesses in ~15 to 30 seconds on. Worse yet, these were the hardest questions, including lengthy parallel flaw ones.

Something I would highly recommend is focusing on speed. I started doing this with LR especially, trying to spend basically as little time as possible on the earlier questions. That doesn't mean I "rushed" them, but as soon as I knew I had gotten the answer, I moved on -- no double checking, no second guessing, no checking for traps. Just check it and move on. If you aren't sure of the answer after exhausting a reasonably short period of time (on these early questions), I'd recommend that you pick your best bet, flag it, and move on.

This strategy frees up your time for the harder questions later in the section. The second time I took the LSAT (this August), I had ~75% of time remaining by half way through, but by the end of the section I had maybe 2 to 5 minutes remaining, not nearly 25% leftover, since I had used a lot of that extra time for the hardest questions I encountered. This extra 2 to 5 minutes was intentional rather than accidental. With my early approach, I was fortunate if I had any extra time left on sections, but I had not intentionally designed my pacing to guarantee it. With my second approach, I guaranteed I would have LOTS of extra time by half way, and then I would strategically use up that extra time as needed. I put hard limits on how much time I would spend on any individual question before forcing myself to pick the best, flag it, and move on. At the end of the section I would use those 2 to 5 minutes to review the flagged questions (and I usually would not change those unless something overwhelmingly convinced me to do so).

Also, winning this extra time with speed is something that I found greatly reduced my stress, both on PTs and the actual test day, which overall is a bonus in terms of focus and accuracy.

This early-speed timing strategy applies pretty much exclusively to LR. For RC, you can't do this, since the passages don't necessarily get more difficult as you go. For RC, the passage length and difficulty of comprehension can maybe act as rough guides of how much time you should allot to reading it before forcing yourself to move onto the questions. As for the questions on RC, my best advice would be don't overthink things, flag the ones you're unsure of (but pick the best option, always), and then move on. Best case, you have time left over to review the flagged ones.

If you think about the alternative case, if you don't have time left over to review the flagged ones, then that means wasting extra time on the question would have deprived you of needed time for future questions. So in virtually any situation you should not let a question act as a time sink, since you'll either (A). need the time you'd have wasted, OR (B). if you don't need the time you'd have spent, then you'll get it back at the end of the section and can revisit.

This timing approach is the single biggest thing I changed in terms of my test-day strategy, beyond just studying the logical stuff itself. I got an 8pt improvement second time around.

@Isabella! I spent a lot of time on the live sessions, mainly LR since that's the easiest to improve. RC is definitely still my weaker of the two. I found that even working through problems that felt obvious forced me to identify the logical structures better than I otherwise would have. I was going largely off feel before. Being able to definitively identify conclusions, premises, and even graphing out problems just for the sake of practice (even if I wouldn't on an actual PT or test day), are all things that helped me build confidence.

@MichaelWright Thanks!

Hi Michael, I just wanted to say the conversation we had on another thread a while back was very productive. I acutely remember one or two questions on test day that I would have been very confused about had I not looked more into those question types (parallel flaw/ reasoning). I was able to score a 176 this time around.

@nicaves I waited quite a while doing literally no prep hoping to get off some waitlists haha. I only decided to retake the test a few months ago. Maybe 5 or 6 months in between? I was not studying during that time.

I ended up getting a 7sage subscription around June, and grinded it. I'm most productive in huge bursts, so my strategy of doing one month of intensive, obsessive studying might not be the best advice for most people.

Also, the first time I took it, it was the January LSAT. I did my applications late because I didn't even decide I wanted to pursue law school until November. I didn't retake it until now because I didn't want to risk cancelling scores, so I waited to be fully prepared.

That being said, if I was consistently getting much higher PTs and still had time in the cycle, I definitely would have retaken it, especially if score preview was an option. You still have plenty of time this cycle and can always just score preview it, so it really comes down to whether you think you'd realistically see an improvement or are just gambling for better variance. I will say that this time around I had much greater confidence in my answers. Even though I was able to get a 176 PT prior to my 168 in January, I had nowhere near the confidence or speed I had this time around. So yeah, the extra studying definitely helped.

This same thing happened to me the first time around just due to the stress of it all, I took it again and just got an 8 point improvement and a 176 which aligned more closely with my PTs. Don't let this discourage you guys. Second time is much easier. More familiarity, less on the line (since you already have at least one score locked), etc.

176 also. LFG!!!!

@Allen_the_Alien That is simply not how MBT works.

MUST be true means true under every reasonable hypothetical consistent with the stimulus. The whole method is to construct scenarios and see whether the answer survives. If I can build a consistent world where the stimulus is fully true and the answer is false, then that AC need not be true.

Although the correct answer can still be found by working around LSAC's horrible question design, that doesn't make the question valid as an MBT. So no it doesn't really "all work perfectly" unless we throw away the "must" out of MBT, which we unfortunately just have to do sometimes.

In my opinion, this question is invalid as a matter of "necessary" assumption.

The argument is that the conflation of CE with OMS causes CE to be particularly dangerous at high altitudes. So let's try the negation test on the credited answer (A):

"The treatment for ordinary mountain sickness differs from the treatment for cerebral edema." --> "The treatment does not differ."

Okay. Does the treatment being identical prevent conflating the two from being especially dangerous? No. The timing of a treatment might be urgent for one condition, while not urgent at all for another. Conflating two such conditions could be incredibly dangerous even if the treatments are the same.

Based on that, I don't think the credited answer meets the bar for "necessary." Arriving at that conclusion could easily throw some people off, but we should not be so quick to dismiss the AC just because it's questionable. Surveying the other answer choices, none are anywhere as strong as A, even though we can poke holes in it. The takeaway here is that sometimes you just need to pick the "best" answer, which might not be a perfect one.

After spending an embarrassingly long time analyzing this, there is precisely one distinction between E and C that rescues E and not C, and it has nothing to do with speculating on how stoplights may affect things or what "new" stoplights means in a technical sense. It boils down to this:

The stimulus averages over "workers in downtown Gastner", so E's downtown congestion necessarily reaches them, while C's suburban roads reach them only on speculation the stimulus never resolves.

That is the only coherent standard to resolve E and C. Any other answer choice standard is speculative at best and can be weaponized against both, or used to defend both. Sure, stoplights might speed up traffic; they might also slow it down. But we don't need to speculate about that, because choice C doesn't even necessarily affect the commuters in question. E does.

I think this is a super nasty question that forces you to really understand what constitutes valid LSAT reasoning. It might seem deceptively simple if you don't understand LSAT rules, then its a nightmare if you mostly understand them, and then its simple again once you really understand. My way of solving this question had nothing to do with diagrams. D seems obviously correct as a matter of argumentation. But I already know what people will object "but wait! aren't we not supposed to affirm their premises!" No, you aren't. But it's not a premise. They grant that it's conditional. They are saying "if the data are correct." If they had instead said "the data are correct," then the conclusion would follow based on LSAT reasoning, given zero new assumptions. It is only the word "if" that made D valid, otherwise you'd be right to reject it for a restatement of a premise / calling into question a premise.

What a lovely and arbitrary normal-curve-manufacturing change that does absolutely nothing to evaluate your abilities 😍 Thank you LSAC 🙏