Good question! For any stimulus, regardless of whether its PSA or some other question type, your conclusion could come in conditional form: If X, then Y. This can be particularly challenging with PSA questions. The idea with kicking it up is to "kick up the sufficient condition" (X) and pretend it's one of the premises (aka facts) Then that simplifies your conclusion to just the unconditional conclusion (Y).

For example, imagine the following argument on a PSA question:

Missing Rule: ???

Facts: A

Conclusion: If B, then C.

You could kick up B to the premise set and transform this conditional conclusion into an unconditional conclusion like this:

Missing Rule: ???

Facts: A and B

Conclusion: C.

This strategy makes it easier to spot the missing rule: "If A and B, then C." It might be harder to see that's the missing rule when we look at the original version with the conditional conclusion.

The other commenters have provided some great tips! One additional thing I would try for many LR question types is reading in a skeptical mood. For flaw, strengthen, weaken, PSA, necessary assumption, and sufficient assumption questions, your job is often to spot some kind of gap between the premise and conclusion. So active reading is going to mean being on the lookout for those kinds of gaps and not letting them get away from you. Keep asking yourself, does this sound legit? Do I buy this argument? This mode of reading can make the LSAT more engaging and help you avoid fatigue!

That's really exciting to score a 172 on your diagnostic! I scored a 172 diagnostic about the same time last year, and then my second PT after a couple weeks of studying was actually a 171. After that though, my average score gradually increased, and I ended up with a 180 on the September test. So your goal is absolutely within reach. I might recommend registering for the exam in both August and September, so you have a backup. That's what I did, and I was very thankful I did because there was heavy construction noise during my August exam.

It took a bit of time to see my score start to increase, because I had to go through the lessons and deliberately practice skills like conditional reasoning, quantifiers, the negation test, and low-res summaries. I'd recommend a few things to keep improving:

1. Don't neglect the lessons, especially the less intuitive concepts. You don't have to go through everything, but definitely watch the conditional reasoning and intersecting sets videos and develop a strategy for each LR and RC question type.

2. Do blind review very carefully to get the most out of it

3. Try a wrong answer journal

4. Try the split approach on RC comparative passages

5. Gradually adjust your emphasis from lesson modules to untimed drills to full sections to practice tests. The 7Sage study plan feature is great at doing this for you, and all you have to do is plug in your test date and study preferences.

You've got this!

Congratulations! You're scoring at the very top of the range, so your goal now is to build consistency and confidence so you can replicate that on the actual exam.

A wrong answer journal can be especially helpful at your scoring level. When you're only missing three questions on the entire test, you have the privilege of going really deep with the ones that you do miss to find out what went wrong. I found this, along with a careful habit of blind review, to be one of the best tools to improve my scoring consistency so I was ready for test day.

It's a good idea to keep up a moderate amount of studying after your first LSAT! If you're almost certainly going to take it again in Aug/Sept, then you don't want to take a long break and then have to bring yourself up to speed again. A few days break is definitely fine, and often helpful to keep you from burning out, but a longer break in the last couple months before your test is usually not the best idea.

From an LSAT-studying point of view, it's definitely possible to improve from a 148 diagnostic score to a 160 official score! The important questions are: Where are you scoring at this point, how much improvement have you seen since that 148 diagnostic score, and how are you spending your study time? We often like to emphasize how quality is more important to quantity when it comes to studying. So if you find that it's exhausting to study 2-3 hours a day on top of your master's program, you might be better off studying for less time per day to avoid burnout, or maybe even postponing your test date so you're not stressed about meeting a deadline.

Apart from the LSAT itself, there are lots of good questions to consider about when to apply for law school, how to fit in the other elements of your application (e.g. essays and resumes) that are just as important, and how to build a balanced law school list. @JacobBaska gives some great tips about that. You definitely don't have to apply this year, and law schools often prefer candidates with more work experience, all else equal.

@EchoAGC Yes that's right! Or slightly more precisely, "Which one of these answer choices needs to be true in order for the argument to be logically valid?"

@AsemanShahsavand makes a great point about avoiding burnout! Once you get to the practice blocks, you might find that it feels repetitive to do lots of drills/sections for hours a day on top of full time work. Instead of trying to maximize the number of drills at that stage, you can instead do a smaller number of drills, but really make sure to review your work carefully through blind review, a wrong answer journal, and watching question explanation videos or reading the written explanations. This will make each hour of your study time more rewarding, because you'll be prioritizing quality over quantity. It can also help you avoid burnout because it's less repetitive. You'll be mixing timed practice with untimed review, writing journal entries, reading explanations, and watching videos, which is super important to keeping you engaged. And don't feel bad if you're not sticking to your original schedule. The study plan is there to serve as a recommendation, but if you can't complete everything in the plan for a given day, you can always modify it to suit your schedule and energy levels!

Good question! I agree with @LowriThomas that in most cases, shorter time blocks will be a better approach! As you aim to jump from the mid 160s to the 170s, you'll benefit a lot from blind review and the wrong answer journal, because your mistakes are going to be limited to a smaller set of questions that you can really learn from.

I definitely agree with @PhoebeHopp ! It's perfectly fine to be "behind" on your practice blocks, because there's no perfect amount of time to practice before your exam. The study plan is just a recommendation, and you can modify it to fit your schedule. The most important thing is to fit in lots of quality engagement during the two months you have to study, which means carefully doing blind review, completing a wrong answer journal, and reviewing question explanations so that you learn from all your drills, sections, and practice tests.

You're definitely not alone in feeling anxious after your official LSAT, especially since it was your first time! I would say the first thing to remember is that your feelings about how the LSAT went aren't always going to be perfectly predictive of your score. You might be pleasantly surprised in a few weeks; maybe the section that you felt worst about will end up being experimental, or maybe your rushed responses to some of those LR questions ended up being right in the end. I totally agree with @haena 's points about Score Preview, and I would hate for you to end up canceling this score if it ends up being your highest on record.

Even if your score ends up being lower than your PT average, you've set yourself up for success by taking the June LSAT and giving yourself plenty of time to practice. You can retake the exam in August or later, and now you've gained incredibly valuable experience taking the official test and identifying what areas you need to improve. Most test takers take the LSAT more than once, and your PT average will provide a better prediction of your full potential than one test day that didn't go as well!

Good question! @AriVilker1 gave some good tips for timing and test-taking strategies that you could experiment with. In addition to those, I'd recommend focusing heavily on diagramming conditional reasoning and quantifiers. At your scoring level, you should aim for consistency and confidence every time you translate conditional/quantifier relationships into lawgic. You should be able to take contrapositives and use De Morgan's laws, and make logical inferences like "some before all," "two split mosts," etc. For many students, this part of the LSAT is more learnable and objective to apply on the test. So if you can get really confident with these questions, you won't end up doubting yourself on the answer choices and can devote more time to the other difficult questions that don't involve formal logic.

Good question! It's generally a good idea to work your way up the ladder from easier questions to harder ones, often isolating certain question types so you get a strong sense of the right strategy to use with flaws, necessary assumptions, sufficient assumptions, strengthen/weaken, etc. The drills created by your study plan will usually default to a certain difficulty level that is right at the edge of your understanding—not too easy, not too hard—which is where you'll learn the most. So you can stick with the default level unless you feel like you're not learning from the drills and want some questions that are easier or harder.

I agree with all of @LowriThomas 's tips, including doing untimed drills, working your way up the ladder from easier to harder passages, prephrasing, and focusing on your low-res summaries!

One thing that might explain your underperformance on RC is how you manage your time between the passages and the questions. Take a look at your analytics from recent RC sections, and hover over the overall time that you spent on each passage. You'll see the overall time broken down into the time reading the passage itself vs. the time you spent answering the questions. If you notice a pattern where your time on the passage itself is usually less than the recommended time (green), whereas your time on the questions is higher than recommended (red), that could indicate that you're racing through the passage without developing a strong low-res summary. If so, the questions will end up being much harder than they would be otherwise. Of course, this is just one possibility, and you'll want to check out your specific analytics to see whether it applies to you!

Some other common issues include:

(1) Spending too much time on passage 1-2 and then leaving insufficient time for passages 3-4

(2) Overusing the highlighter tool or written notes on scratch paper, which could interrupt your flow and get you bogged down in the details of the passage

(3) Getting particularly caught up on comparative passages. Here you might want to try the split approach if you haven't already to see if that works better than the sequential approach

Based on your analytics and test habits, you'll be able to conclude which of these is most applicable to your situation! And it might be helpful to sign up for 7Sage Coach or Tutoring so that a tutor can diagnose your specific challenges with RC and help you improve.

That's definitely frustrating! It can feel like this one PT is extra meaningful because it's the last one before your exam, but you should remember that one PT result doesn't erase all the hard work you've done to increase your score. The best predictor of your test-day score isn't the last PT; it's the average of the last several practice tests. If you were scoring higher a few days ago, then you're absolutely capable of replicating that performance on test day. You might even outperform that practice test result tomorrow! I suggest taking a break today and doing just a couple easier drills to put yourself in the right mindset. Right before the exam, it might also be helpful to do two or three 1-star questions that you've seen before. That's what I did before my test so that I was already in "LSAT mode" right before starting, and it really helped with my confidence! You've got this!

Tutoring can definitely help you build up confidence! One piece of good news is that the best predictor of your official score on a given test day is the average of your last five PTs. Sometimes you'll be unlucky, and you'll end up with a score that is a bit lower than that average. But other times you'll be lucky, and you'll actually outperform your average. It sounds like the remote testing environment ended up throwing you off the first time. Now that you're taking the LSAT another time and it will be in person, that won't be an issue any more! The first time I took the official LSAT, there was heavy construction noise that was super distracting. That was in August, and I worried that I wouldn't have enough time to retake the test before I had to submit my applications. But the second time, everything went smoothly, and I ended up seeing my score increase by 7 points.

The fact that you've previously scored 165 means you're absolutely capable of that on test day, and you've still got even more time to practice and improve until then. You were smart to take the test last October, so you still have plenty of time to try it again. Your hard work on PTs, sections, and drills means a lot more than that single score!

I agree with @DaisukeKaga! It will be helpful to take a break before your exam and not do anything too heavy. You definitely have the ability to score 164, and a couple days of lower scores doesn't change that. Sometimes there are just little things that can change how you perform on a given day, but if you take a little break and try another test when you're well-rested, you could see a big jump. As you approach your test, I recommend just doing some short, low-stakes drills with less difficult questions to remind yourself that you've got this! You've also given yourself plenty of time to study for another test, so the pressure isn't too high for this one! Just treat it like another PT, and that can help ease your nerves.

@ottovonb Good question! You're right, answer choice D is also restricted to a specific domain, in this case "new shows that W&W produced last year," that is different from the domain in the stimulus. I should have been more clear in the explanation above that while we can't formally extrapolate these logical relationships to hold for this year's shows, they can at least be suggestive for a strengthen question. So the primary reason that answer choice C fails is the point about vacuous truths, which isn't a problem with answer choice D.

@mapache2426 Good catch! Yes, in diagramming answer choice C, the domain should be "Shows that W&W produced last year," not just new shows they produced last year. The rest of the analysis would still hold, since the rule /Canceled -> /Police drama still would not apply to new shows produced this year.

@IsabellaP Hi, that doesn't sound quite right! When diagramming the stimulus, "should not play the joke" is in the necessary condition (to the right of the arrow). When we take the contrapositive, we flip the arrow and negate both sides. So in its negated form, "should not play the joke" becomes "ok to play the joke," and it becomes the sufficient condition in the contrapositive (to the left of the arrow). This is all valid so far. Whenever we have a logical relationship, we can go back and forth between the original relationship and the contrapositive form whenever we need to. They're perfectly interchangeable. and logically identical.

The problem is if you make a mistake when trying to take the contrapositive, or if you make a mistake while trying to apply the contrapositive to a given situation. That's why B is wrong; not because it relies on the contrapositive of the stimulus, but because it misapplies the contrapositive. Answer choice B tells us /show contempt and /believe it will bring significant harm. It then concludes "ok the play practical joke." This is not a valid inference to make from the contrapositive. It's an example of "affirming the necessary condition," which is a subset of the sufficiency-necessity confusion flaw. You can review this common formal logic flaw here: https://7sage.com/lessons/foundations/formal-logic-flaws/affirming-the-necessary-condition.

There are some great tips here! You can try a few different strategies and see what's best for you, but here are some options that work for different people:

1. Tapering off your time. Like @koi suggested below, if you're taking 70 minutes for a section right now, try decreasing your time little by little until you're within the time limit.

2. Speed drills. Like @rs90460 recommended, it can be helpful to set a goal within the section, like doing the first 10 questions in 10 minutes, and practice this in a drill format.

3. Analyzing how you spend your time on untimed sections. Check out where you're spending a lot of extra time, and try to tighten those specific skills. On RC sections, for example, do you spend a lot of extra time on the questions themselves? Maybe you need to focus more on reading the passage closely so you have a stronger low-res summary and don't need to return to the passage when you get to the questions. Or on LR, do you get bogged down on certain questions after narrowing it down to two answer choices? You might want to flag some questions and come back so you don't lose momentum. Then when you come back, you might see the questions with fresh eyes.

If you just recently started doing timed sections, it's only natural to see a score decrease! It'll take some practice to see your timed section scores improve, but fortunately there are lots of ways that you can get better over time.

You don't need to start taking regular PTs until you've finished the lessons! It's great that you've already taken a diagnostic test, and now you can keep working through the lesson modules. Once you get to the end of RC, you can start mixing different kinds of practice. Generally, you'll want to do mostly untimed drills at the start, then begin working in full timed sections, and finally add in full timed PTs. You can create a study plan to keep up your progress through the lesson library, and it will also help you create practice blocks so you know exactly when is best to start PTing based on how much time you have to study each week and when you finish all the modules.

Best of luck to everyone taking the LSAT today!

100%! It's so important to go in with confidence and pride in the hard work that you've put in.

I'd add that it can also be helpful to zoom in on the specific, relevant difference between the two answer choices you're stuck between. Sometimes there will be two answer choices that are identical in meaning, except for one word that makes all the difference. Or you could have two answer choices expressing a conditional relationship between X and Y, but the arrow points in opposite directions. If you can isolate that one difference, then you'll usually be able to pick out the correct one.