Per the LSAC website: "LSAT Argumentative Writing opens eight (8) days prior to every test administration. Test takers must have a complete writing sample in their file in order to see their score or have their score released to schools. Most law schools require a writing sample as an integral part of their admission decision, and therefore, you should complete your writing sample to meet schools’ application deadlines.

In case you are not applying in the current cycle, please note you have a maximum of one year to complete your LSAT Argumentative Writing sample."

So you can take it up to a year later, but you won't be able to see your LSAT score until you complete it and they process it.

@JerryTianleChen Yep, I'm a tutor who answers LSAT questions from the "Ask a Tutor" button!

I'm not an admissions expert, but from what I know that could make a significant difference at the top schools. Given that you are already capable of getting a 175 and your ability to be patient and delay a year, I'd work at getting that score up. Even if you are able to get into one of your goal schools this cycle, you may be able to get much more merit aid next cycle if you're above their median LSAT. I'd maybe apply this cycle to the ones where you've already hit the medians. But keep studying and practicing until you're PTing more in the 173-177 range, and then take a couple more shots at official scores, with the expectation that your full cycle will be the next one unless you get a great offer from those handful of schools this cycle. Definitely double check this with an expert, but you have a lot of flexibility that you can take advantage of.

I wouldn't do this for the reason you said. The concepts will click for you much faster than they would on completely fresh material. Which means you won't be getting accurate practice. On top of that, you're not seeing any new concepts that you can learn from. For those reasons, I'd wait as long as possible before re-using a PT for timed practice, certainly over a month. But I don't think it's a bad idea to review a PT you took a month before, going over wrong answers and looking at them with a different perspective. That's a better use of your time and effort.

I was in a similar situation, wanting a 175+ and PTing in the 173-177 range. What I'll say is it's very difficult to make 175 your floor. Even if you're capable of a 180, it's tough to never slip and land below 175. So at some point, you just have to start getting official scores up and hoping that one of them pops. My first take was a 173 and my second take was a 177. I didn't feel like much changed in between them in terms of my skill level. So my advice would be to avoid being a perfectionist. You're already in a super high range. Take advantage of that and start getting some shots up. If it were me, I'd be taking that January test if you're hitting that 175 mark a chunk of the time.

This is definitely in the range where you don't want to cancel. Any school that sees a cancel after a 171 is likely going to assume it was much lower than a 168. A 168 is a very solid score and in your reasonable variance range. I'd move on without giving it a sweat. Congrats on the scores!

For me, the key issue on RC timing is thinking about what you can get away with sacrificing in order to gain more time. Maybe you can spend less time on the passages and have slightly worse understanding, but make up for that and more by having more time to look back at the passage and answer the questions. Maybe you can put a hard limit on how long you spend on each question, which may decrease your accuracy a bit, but you may more than make up for that by getting to every question. Essentially, the goal is not to be a perfectionist on understanding every word of every passage, while only moving on from a question when you're 100% sure about it. The goal is to move quickly enough through the whole section, while still maintaining a sufficient - but not perfect - level of understanding.

According to the LSAC website: "In case you are not applying in the current cycle, please note you have a maximum of one year to complete your LSAT Argumentative Writing sample."

You can read up more about in here: https://www.lsac.org/lsat/frequently-asked-questions-about-lsat/frequently-asked-questions-about-lsat-argumentative

If you feel like drilling and the basic review is getting repetitive, you can try going for depth instead of breadth. Instead of journaling a note or two for wrong answers, really hone in on tough questions. Write a proof explaining the stimulus and convincing others why the right answer must be right. Then, write what made the wrong answers wrong. Then, watch the 7Sage videos on it/people's comments. And analyze the optimal way to have gotten the answer under timed conditions. Essentially, become an expert on the question that you struggled with. I'd recommend trying this out, but don't cast aside all the methods that have gotten you this far.

Also, you might want to ask your friends and family if they have a room that fits the criteria better. I asked around, and a few different people were willing to let me use a room for a couple of hours.

To me, this looks like a timing problem. It seems like sometimes the timing works out really well and you get a -0. And sometimes the timing gets you and the quality suffers toward the end. I don't want to generalize too much from two sections, but this was the case for me. Once I was able to create a more consistent process in terms of timing, my consistency on RC improved by a lot. This consisted of: 1. Having a standardized pace I'd go at for each passage (forcing me to skim through tougher details at times). 2. Setting a limit (1 minute) on how long I could spend on a question before forcing myself to make a decision. 3. Other strategies based on my personal timing analysis. Of course, putting these limits could decrease your accuracy on other parts, so I would just experiment with different inputs and see what you get as output. There's a decent chance it could improve your consistency without being at the expense of too much general accuracy.

I would recommend two different tactics that could build your mental stamina:

1. Doing drills that are even longer than sections. This is like weighted training in gym terms. So that when you go back to a regular section, it actually feels shorter and easier than usual.

2. Some people disagree with me that this is an effective use of time, but I think reading somewhat dense books helps. Keep reading past the point where fatigue sets in and you want to put the book down. Additionally, you can practice your RC skills like low res summaries on these books.

This one is so tough to do. By the nature of the test, you have to move through it with enough speed that it's usually suboptimal to be completely certain on most of the questions. Which means the chances that you drop one somewhere unexpectedly are very high. I can't say that I ever solved this problem, since I was still getting 1 or 2 wrong occasionally when I was PTing, but I'd recommend trying these out:

1. Analyze your recent missed questions for patterns (type of question and type of mistake. Maybe you need to read all five answer choice on easy questions more often).

2. Write proofs of your missed questions, where you have to spell out exactly how the logic worked

3. If you're dropping more of the 5 star ones, drill those over and over. If you're unexpectedly dropping easier ones, drill those to see how quickly you can go while maintaining near perfect accuracy.

4. Just keep practicing. Ultimately, the more you see, the more speed and accuracy you'll have, which feed into each other. Whatever process got you this far might also be what eventually gets you over this obstacle.

At the end of the day, though, you're already in the realm of understanding LR extremely well, and this -1/-2 is more in the realm of human error that's very tough to eliminate. Even for the highest LSAT scorers.

This is the kind of thing you can just chalk up to normal volatility. You'll get tests like these, and then the next time you could easily have the first one be the EXP and get a 176. Or you get your standing -2 on the RC that counts. Keep practicing and deepening understanding of the test, and don't focus on these natural fluctuations. Especially given that on the -4 RC the incorrect questions were spread out. It's not like you had timing issues where you rushed at the end and got a bunch wrong for that reason. So I'd say you're progressing exactly as you should be. You're at the level of the test where if you take it a few times, you just need a little bit of luck in your favor one of those times to get a score that pops.

My immediate advice to you is that it's way too early to make any long-term decisions or panic. You should go through an entire curriculum on taking the LSAT (I recommend 7Sage but I'm slightly biased). Once you complete that, you can take an informed diagnostic that will give you a much better sense of how long it'll take you to reach your goal score. It still will just be an estimate, but you can have a much better picture in about a month than you have now. So I wouldn't set any firm dates about 2027 or 2028 until you've done that. The LSAT is indeed quite difficult, but think about other difficult tests you've taken in your life. And think about how much more difficult they'd seem if you took the test without taking the class first!

I'm no superhuman. If I had to guess, I read at around the average speed. However, I get through most RC passages in under 2 minutes. It's crucial to note that there are sacrifices being made here, though. I'm actively deciding to skim through some of the more complicated concepts and return to them if I need to. I'm using my knowledge on what's most important to digest on the first read: main point, different attitudes, low res summaries, etc. With these in mind, I can build a pretty solid map of the passage and where I'd need to go back if there's a specific question on a complicated concept. You can see that there's a very real tradeoff being made here.

Approach 1: Really understand every line in the passage, which would take about 3 to 4 minutes. If I do this, I'll be rushing through the answer choices, but I will probably not need to look back at the passage very often.

Approach 2: Get a good low res understanding in 1 to 2 minutes. If I do this, I'll have plenty of time to re-read sections and search for specific phrases.

In reality, you can do a mix of these approaches. And you can lean more toward one or the other depending on how difficult the passage seems or how much time you have left in a section. But I think the important takeaway is that you know there are tradeoffs being made, and people generally aren't superhuman. You can experiment with these tradeoffs until you find what's optimal for you.

I've got three ideas that come to mind:

1. Being aware that you tend to do makes it much easier to avoid. In that minute before the last section, I would focus up and tell yourself that you're going 100% no matter what your brain starts telling you. And I would make it a matter of pride to finish strong. That being said, I think you'll also have an easier time of doing this on the actual exam, when the adrenaline is going and your motivation is at its highest.

2. It may be the case that you're putting too much thought into some of the more difficult questions throughout the test. I view my brain as having a certain amount of computational power before it becomes hard to think at my best. And I'm careful not to use it all up too early. Of course, this is a tight balance because the LSAT requires you to think pretty hard at times. But on questions where I can tell I am going to struggle to make much more progress, I will cut it off pretty quickly and go with what my gut is saying. This saves time, too.

3. Some people will say this isn't a great use of time, but I think reading somewhat dense books in my free time really helped me. I would force myself to keep reading even when my brain was telling me enough is enough. This builds up stamina and also is good practice overcoming the voice in your head telling you to slack off a bit.

Yes, that's exactly right. "A -> B" and "Some A are not B" are contradictory statements. If you can show that one is true, then you have disproven the other. And if the author makes both claims in the argument, they have contradicted themselves. This is true for any statement that is the negation of another statement. In general, this would be claiming that Statement A and Not Statement A are both true.

I was in basically the exact same position 1 year ago. I decided to take it slow, really learn the content, and practice thoroughly. I ended up progressing pretty steadily and was very prepared for the April and June LSATs. I'm fairly confident based on my practice test scores that I would've been 5-7 points lower had I rushed it.

Of course, if you don't want to wait the two years it's feasible to get everything done in time. You could sign up for the January LSAT and send in your applications in the first week of February. I would just say that between having less practice on the LSAT, cramming in all of the essays for your applications, and still submitting apps late, I would expect a lower quality application than you're capable of.

So if taking the extra year is a decent option for you, I would totally do it. There's so much less stress, and you will likely end up with a much better application.

I personally have never done this, but I'm all for experimenting with different timing strategies. I think for some people it works better to start off with easier questions and work up in difficulty. But for other people, it might be easier to knock out the hardest questions when you're fresh. The one thing I'd say is that you'd have to be pretty confident that you won't run out of time, since you really don't want the questions you don't get to to be the easiest ones. It's probably better to knock out the first half and see how much time you can devote to the more time-consuming questions after. But really everyone is different, so I'd highly encourage you to try out different timing strategies to see what works best for you.

On top of Phoebe's recommendations, I'd suggest doing a lot of experimenting to see what works best for you. Mainly, play around with:

1) How much total time you're willing to allot to passages based on how difficult they seem

2) How much time you're willing to spend reading each passage

3) If you want to give yourself a hard cutoff on per question so you don't spend too much time deliberating

I've seen different advice for all three of these, and for me the optimal rules didn't align with all of the conventional wisdom. So I highly recommend playing around with those inputs and seeing how it feels for you.

@squirrellover They give you six pieces of blank paper and pencils. The only items you will be allowed to bring in yourself are your ID and your login information.

LawHub doesn't have that feature anymore, unfortunately.

Are you effective at flagging questions? If you can identify questions that you're not fully confident on and flag them, you'll have 10+ minutes to go back and double check them. If your blind review is as quick as you're saying, this could be highly beneficial.

But, to address the root of your question, I would use the time to prove two things to yourself: 1) That your right answer is right and 2) That the wrong answer you were considering is wrong. To get a question wrong on the LSAT, you need to get both of those things wrong. So maybe you're too hasty to go with the first answer that you somewhat like, and you have extra time available to verify that the other answers are definitely wrong.

The last thing I'll say is that it seems like you know the answer to your question is that you need to trust yourself that thinking through an answer doesn't mean you're more likely to second guess yourself. So when that thought pops into your head, that's a great indication that you should push through and give more thought to it anyway. Eventually, that'll become habit.

@stronfire12 I think one is enough. I use the full test to work out the timing and strategy tweaks that I want to test out. But you only get enough information on what to tweak after a decent amount of review, which for me is more than a few days. In between full tests, I do drills and sections, with deep analysis on mistakes. Additional full tests would just overwhelm me and likely lead to less thorough review. One was always enough for me, and I didn't feel like that inhibited my growth at any point.