Independent Tutor

ITTutoring

Carl has been teaching, tutoring, and training people to teach the LSAT since the early 2000s. He has advanced degrees from UGA, Yale, and the University of Glasgow. He currently meets online with students over Zoom. To schedule a free one-hour evaluation session with him, visit https://www.ivorytowertutoring.com/schedule/

Discussions

LSAT · LSAT Questions

ITTutoring

Edited 4 days ago

2) There are no rules about the essay, because the essays are not graded. Draw a picture using ASCII if you want.

3) Remember, the people doing admissions are people. How would you, a person, feel if you saw two scores? Probably that's how they'd feel.

I don't have answers about the others. But keep in mind, this isn't rocket science. Admissions, for however terrible it feels, is still a human process.

General · Who can afford these consulting prices?

ITTutoring

4 days ago

I've never met an admissions consultant who offered information worth the price tag.

Admissions · How important is the writing sample?

ITTutoring

Sunday, Apr 12

@Pspspsps I don't think there's much difference between the US and Canada in this regard.

Admissions · How important is the writing sample?

ITTutoring

Sunday, Apr 12

The writing sample is a marketing strategy by LSAC. They're probably going to start scoring it, to try to compete with the GRE. When they do, just like the GRE's writing sample, schools will probably ignore it. They certainly ignore it now. As you've said, schools understand the context under which it was written. It's 35 minutes to respond to a topic that they certainly didn't pick. It's a highly artificial environment unlikely to reveal anything important about the applicant.

If a school wants to assess your writing ability, they have many other ways to do so. Maybe if AI gets so good that people can't distinguish it from actual writing, the assessment will take on a new importance. But right now it's just a hurdle. Take it. Do your best. Don't sweat it.

Feature Request · New test interface for August and beyond

ITTutoring

Tuesday, Mar 31

Wow. That is legitimately much worse than the current version.

You can't see all the questions you've flagged just by looking at the bottom of your screen, you have to click on "review mode". You also have to manually switch in and out of "answer elimination mode" instead of just clicking on a different part of the page. You can't see at a glance how many questions there are in a section or how many questions there are per passage.

Study Groups · Nightly and Daily Collaborative Study Session

ITTutoring

Wednesday, Mar 25

@J.Y.Ping Can you guys exempt the Study Room chats from the 'Today's notifications' email that gets sent out when you have unread chats or likes on your posts?

Study Groups · Nightly and Daily Collaborative Study Session

ITTutoring

Friday, Mar 20

@J.Y.Ping Since in a lot of these folks end up doing questions together, it'd also be useful if there were some sort of configurable answer poll that could be turned on, so that people can vote for an answer without having heard what others are going to pick.

LSAT · motivation and help

ITTutoring

Sunday, Mar 15

You haven't wasted your time, clearly. You've improved 11 points! Don't discount the improvement you've made so far just because it's not the final score you're aiming for. You do still have time to get it up eight points before June. It's not mid-April yet, so stop worrying about the decision you'll make then. For now, focus on improvement. There will be time later to make decisions.

Intensive blind reviews might be the key to closing the gap. I recommend them to a lot of students. Don't just do the targeted blind review offered by the 7Sage platform. Try looking back through the entire test on LawHub before learning your score. Be honest with yourself and record how confident you are on your answers to each question. That way, when you finally do submit your test for a score, you'll be able to find those times when you're getting things right but still have doubts. Those doubts are usually a source of score variability.

LSAT · 170+ scorers—recommended prep schedules for the month leading up to test?

ITTutoring

Sunday, Mar 15

Think of it like this: you're bringing the plane in for a landing. You need to guard against burnout and be sure to conserve your mental reserves as you get particularly close to the test. I usually tell my students that the final two to three weeks before a test is when you should be moving into the "polish" phase of study. You should have proven to yourself, through practice tests, that you are able to get a score you'd be happy with. Now's the time to polish the skills, aiming to make them more consistent. In this period you up the amount of practice tests you take and reduce the amount of review. You're trying to get things down to a mechanical process: the test maker hands you a test, you hand them back the score you want.

The final day before the test you should take off from study. The day before that should be a light day of study. That means that your last PT is three to four days before the test, because even though you're reviewing less, you do still want to review some.

Make sure to mind your health and those intangible benefits like being on a good sleep schedule, eating healthy, and getting exercise in those final two weeks. Your brain's carried around by your body, and if you don't treat your body right, your brain isn't going to function at its best.

LSAT · Between two answers and then choose the wrong one

ITTutoring

Friday, Mar 13

The key is understanding that there is no "best" answer. There's a right answer and a wrong answer. The right answer isn't right because it's "better" than the wrong answer; it's right because of something specific in the question or the answer. The wrong answer isn't wrong because it's "worse" than the right answer; it's wrong because of something specific in the question or the answer.

But don't get me wrong. The wrong answer may certainly -feel- like it might be right for some reason. Indeed, LSAC is really good at making a wrong answer feel right, even though it's wrong. @jbucholz below is spot on when he says that you need to try to find a difference between the two answers. There has to be a difference that means one's right and one's wrong, and people often get so caught up in the similarities, they don't considered the differences.

If two answers really were identical, then neither of them could be right, because there's only one right answer.

So, when you're reviewing your mistakes, you really want to be able to say, "Oh, this answer felt right because of <blah>, but it's wrong because of <whatever>." Knowing it's wrong doesn't teach you anything or prepare you for the future. Knowing -why- it's wrong--being able to articulate it to yourself--that's the important thing to review, so that in the future, when you're forced with a similar choice, you have the knowledge to make the choice correctly.

LSAT · At a bit of a loss

ITTutoring

Wednesday, Feb 25

When you're out of fresh material, one thing you can do is go back to tests you took a long time ago and do them with a piece of paper hiding the answers. Write on a separate sheet of paper the answer that you'd predict and your explanation as to why, or if you can't predict, what your understanding of what the question is asking is.

Test day stress can definitely lead to an underperformance. Usually there's also some crutch or stress-reliever you accidentally worked into your practice test regimen. Anything you do to artificially lower your stress while PTing (taking longer breaks, checking answers as you go, not being strict with timing, etc.) can inflate your score and hide some issues you need to address.

Tutoring Marketplace · Longtime Professional LSAT Tutor - $100/hr (with package discounts) - 178 Scorer

ITTutoring

Wednesday, Feb 25

@smittenkitten No problem. Just DM me and I can send you a link you can use to schedule a free evaluation session.

Tutoring Marketplace · Longtime Professional LSAT Tutor - $100/hr (with package discounts) - 178 Scorer

ITTutoring

Wednesday, Feb 25

Now that February scores are out, I figure it's time to ping this post. This is generally the time of year when people start thinking about summer test dates, but I do still have some room left for those last-minute April folks.

Tutoring Marketplace · Longtime Professional LSAT Tutor - $100/hr (with package discounts) - 178 Scorer

ITTutoring

Saturday, Jan 31

@ArleenCeja Send me a direct message here and I can send you info on how to schedule through my website.

Tutoring Marketplace · Longtime Professional LSAT Tutor - $100/hr (with package discounts) - 178 Scorer

ITTutoring

Thursday, Jan 29

Since score release day for January has come and gone, I should add here that I do have room for clients for upcoming tests, and that I also have experience helping people assess whether they should go full tilt for a short turnaround retake or push back for a longer runway.

LSAT · PT159.S4.P3.Q18

ITTutoring

Monday, Dec 29, 2025

The difference here isn't the word precedent, but the modifiers: precedent in case law and common law precedents. There's not been a case that went through Belize's courts where they made a ruling that has become a precedent (a precedent in case law). There are, however, precedents in common law, and Belize's courts have relied on common law precedents in other cases. (The common law precedents became case law precedents when they were used in cases.)

Admissions · Just had the most discouraging consultation

ITTutoring

Tuesday, Nov 18, 2025

My personal lawyer likes to say, 'You take the best move on the board. It doesn't matter if you'd prefer another move. If it's off the board, it's off the board.'

It seems, from this consultant's advice, 'apply early and get accepted' is off the board for you. So it's time to look at what the best move left might be. 'Apply late with a better score' is probably the best move left on the board. Don't worry that this move isn't as good as 'apply early'. 'Apply early' is off the board--if this consultant is right.

I put 'if this consultant is right' there for a reason. You might be getting bad advice. But it's not impossible that your consultant is right. A low enough score does mean straight to the reject pile, no matter what schools may say.

If the consultant is telling you that when you have a 4.0, and the consultant is worth consulting, that means that LSAT score must be pretty bad. If it's that bad, surely, you can improve it with time. The consultant might not be an expert on how long it takes to improve a score from pretty bad to OK enough. It might not be a year. But they're probably correct that you do need to improve. (Unless you just found a terrible consultant.)

LSAT · PT5.S1.Q7 - Two paleontologists, Dr. Tyson and Dr. Rees, disagree

ITTutoring

Friday, Nov 14, 2025

They both agree that the evidence is significant. They disagree about the significance of various aspects of the evidence. Dr. T thinks that the human characteristics (an aspect of the evidence) indicates the footprints were left by a hominid (that's what he thinks the significance of the evidence is--it proves hominids). Dr. R thinks that the cross-stepping pattern (another aspect of the evidence) indicates that the footprints weren't left by a hominid (a different interpretation as to the significance of the evidence).

LSAT · Help, is it an argument or not?

ITTutoring

Wednesday, Nov 12, 2025

The question is not "is this an argument?" but rather, "is the question asking me to treat this like an argument?" Inference questions, Paradox/Explain/RRE questions, Point of Disagreement/Agreement questions--these questions may have arguments in them, but the test maker is instructing you to simply consider everything they say as true and then do a task based on that truth.

For the most part, the question stem will say "argument" if they want you think about it as an argument, to break it down into Conclusion and Evidence, look for Assumptions, etc.

LSAT · Main point: RC

ITTutoring

Wednesday, Nov 12, 2025

Sometimes it helps if you rephrase the question a bit. Instead of saying "what's the main point," say "the entire reason the author wrote this passage was to convince me that..." I find that helps distinguish between answers that are true--something the author did say--but not the main point.

Another way to think about it is that the right answer needs to be broad enough to cover for all the content in the passage, even though it doesn't have to name check every concept from the passage. A lot of times people bite on the wrong answer because there's a word that they want to see in the answer because that word was used a lot in the passage, or it's the most natural word to describe the passage, and they avoid the right answer because it doesn't have that word they want to see.

LSAT · How do you put "few" in a conditional chart?

ITTutoring

Wednesday, Nov 12, 2025

Few and many are words that, formally, mean about the same thing: "an unspecified number". For the most part, choosing one over the other is an emotional choice, not a logical one. I ate at Outback a few times last week. You know I ate there some, but do I consider eating there twice to be "a few times" or do I consider eating there 12 times to be "a few times"? You don't know how small or big a few is, you just know it's not zero. If I switched and said "I ate at Outback many times last week," does that mean more than two? More than six? More than sixteen? You don't know. But you do know I was lying to you if it turns out I didn't eat at Outback at all last week.

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Edited Sunday, Apr 12

ITTutoring

Independent Tutor

💪 Motivated

Longtime Professional LSAT Tutor - $100/hr (with package discounts) - 178 Scorer

Hi there,

My name is Carl, and I've been tutoring the LSAT since the early 2000s, online and in person. These days I mostly work online over Zoom.

I would never tell someone that it's impossible to self-study for the test or that a tutor is absolutely required, by any means. I would say, however, that having the right guidance at the right moment in your studies can both save you a lot of frustration and streamline the process of improving your score. I can guide you from the beginning of your studies or step in as a troubleshooter when you hit a sticking point. I can take a look at the work you've done recently and try to diagnose what's holding you back and provide you with a recommendation of the best next steps to take in the short term and in the long term.

Two people scoring in the 170s might tackle the test in completely different ways. My job as a tutor is not to turn you into a carbon copy of me, but to help you find the combination of techniques and methods that will get you the score you want. Sure, there are certainly some required skills on the test--some questions are impossible, for example, if you don't know what a contrapositive is. But there's also a lot of leeway. There's no one-size-fits-all approach, and I tailor my lessons to you and your needs.

I specialize in helping people move the needle who've been stuck on a plateau for a long time. I offer a free one-hour evaluation session to all potential clients, an hour for us to meet, discuss your troubles, have me demonstrate my tutoring style, and have you ask any questions you have. So, please, reach out if you'd like to schedule an evaluation with me to see if I can help you.

The easiest way to reach out is to use the scheduler at my website: https://www.ivorytowertutoring.com/schedule/ . You can also shoot me a DM here.