I can understand the need for changing the interface to uplift it in certain areas, but I do think that it regressed in certain areas like you mentioned.

What I don't get is how someone looked at some of the parts of the old interface then gave them an extra step for no discernable reason. Blocking out an answer was a 1-step process in the old one, now it's 3 in the new one (click hide, hide answer, click hide to go back to answer select.) Like any script kiddie learning Java or any computer language would know to make their stuff simpler, not harder.

I guess I don't have the brimming intellect of LSAC's hivemind or the apathy of their software developers to understand it, but I do hope they regress those changes while keeping the new interface as it does have some genuine improvements (I think it's easier to read things on this UI compared to the old one, but that preference will be a subjective thing vs. objective)

For LR: make a systematic approach on how to engage stims. For me, I try to understand stims by themselves before looking at the question. I look for conclusions, premises, etc. first, then I try to understand what it wrong with it simply by reading it. Then I engage the question so I have a stronger position when engaging with the answer. This way, I am not second-guessing myself, eliminating bad answers sooner, and giving myself time to conclusively finish a question without biasing myself by knowing what i am looking for. Let the stim lead you to the right answer, versus letting the question bias you into something without thoroughly reading the stim

For RC: Learn how to chunk information. Unlike LR, this advice applies to honestly anything you have ever read. When reading passages, make a mental note of what the paragraph was about. All RC questions refer to something either explicitly or implicitly said in a passage, so being able to quickly go back to relevant parts and get the right answer will help immensely on time.

A secondary piece of advice I have, if you aren't pressed for time, is to read articles from journals or places like the Economist/Financial Times. Their writers tend to engage their audiences in more specific language than other news sources, which sometimes can feel like reading LR/RC when the writing is especially wordy. RC is sometimes said to be the section you "can't improve on", mainly because of how much of a dice roll passages can be at times, but that's not really true. The difference lies in whether you are a light academic reader or someone who has read so often you can discern and remember information like a living encyclopedia.

The way I interact with LR questions (regardless of difficulty) is to take stimulus sentence by sentence and parse out extraneous language (essentially trimming down the the stim to its bare parts so I understand what is being said)

On the higher end, where usually get longer and more difficult, I look for conclusions first then the evidence around it to form the complete thought of what is being told to me. Then, I figure out what's naturally incredulous about the stim. Could be that it makes a bad point on its face, that it's missing something, etc. Only after all of this do I then check the question type. It requires taking things slower, but it works for me.

The reason I advocate this approach for your LR block is because your BR indicates that you are understanding, to an extent, what is being asked. The problem is timed conditions messing with your approach in the later half. By naturally taking things slow and engaging with the questions in timed conditions, you can better set yourself up for success then simply speeding through.

It depends on how you A. articulate what the difference means to you and B. whether that difference has a meaningful connection to what you want to pursue. I'm of the opinion that a PS needs to communicate a clear desire for why you want to pursue a legal career. If you choose to write on this, you should ask yourself why this warrants being that reason and how that will translate into you being a good attorney for what area you want to pursue. You could have had the most eye-opening connection between feelings of home, identity, other facets of life that can reasonably translate into good attorney skills, but if your pursuit in law is to be a criminal attorney in a US city, then it likely won't mesh that well. Again, it depends on how you write it but make sure you think about the audience this is intended for as you write it.

I believe the topic can be a good choice. I would advise you run a draft of it by people so you can get an idea of what sounds genuine, what can sound incredulous or nonsensical (if it is not intended by you), and what themes you want to run in what will likely be a 2-3 pg essay. The punchier the essay, the more weight a committee might give it.

Prefacing my answer, I spent a while convincing myself whether I wanted to do law school in the first place so my opinion stems mainly from an attitude adjustment to the test & understanding the limitations of the exam itself.

To my actual answer, it is really dependent on how you study, whether you are optimally interrogating why you are missing questions/having difficulties with certain questions versus others, and, ultimately, why you are going for this exam at all (this sounds unrelated but believe me that having a reason that pushes you through the monotony of LSAT studying really helps you persevere)

I started with around a 140-something my junior year of college about three years. I treated the test like a interesting but hard curiosity and was doing horrible because I didn't understand, nor want to understand at the time, the material. Now, after life experiences changing my world and me changing how I studied the exam, I'm PTíng around the mid 170's consistently.

I will say that it does take time (for me, I read The Loophole by Ellen Cassidy to solidify an LR approach, read more articles by the Financial Times and Economist to get used to more convoluted writing for RC, and did 7Sage to have access to drills & tests), but I believe you can optimize the approach to either cut down your hours or get more out of the same amount of hours. LSAT can only create so many question varieties and your brain, after exposure to so many, will begin to automatically see consistencies, continuities, and egregious wrong answers when you read similar structures, stims, and answers.

A piece of advice I have to anyone wanting to score in that range is to treat your studying like you're doing a dissertation. Ultimately, you chose to pursue this line of work (which is studying for the LSAT), so treat it like you're trying to present the best product to someone who could change your life (AKA the law schools). Refine your technique, ask questions as to why you're doing what you're doing, and actively think about the stimulus/organize the passage as do questions. In my experience, developing your skills and letting that overtake your opinions on the test has let me achieve ranges I didn't think possible when I was younger.

Now this is why I pay for 7Sage: Actual Logic Games

This new UI is made by the same people who think adding enough icons and buttons to blot out the sun in video games is a good idea

It's cleaner but less intuitive to use, which could be an LSAC decision to rein in higher scoring potentially through obfuscation (I'm not a conspiracy theorist normally but what else could explain making perfectly fine aspects slightly more convoluted, like changing text sizing)

Rant about the hide answer button: why should it require me to activate the button, mask the answer (that also cannot be a selected answer, so you have to unselect your chosen answer to mask said answer), and then reselect that same button to then actually choose an answer normally again, otherwise you'll mask the answer you intended to select. The previous version eliminated all this with a hide button tied directly to the answers.

I agree with many comments on that it is a great tool to measure progress and get an idea of how the LSAT varies its scoring so it is ingrained in the test taker. I do, however, think that including the actual score scales off of LawHub for PTs would be great to have as an index for comparing test performances.

If I got a 20/25 on PT 146.S1, for example, I would like to compare that to the full PT scale so I can understand, relatively, where that's putting me overall for the score, while keeping the PT Equivalent as a way of indicating that my performance can be a variance given the different testing scales.

I think my view is more I like getting down to the analytics of how I am doing versus a practical inclusion, but I still think it would be nice to have for those that want it.