I've been teaching LSAT classes, hosting seminars, tutoring, and answering questions online since 2009, full time since 2016. Your success is my passion! Every time one of my students gets a good score, and every time they get an acceptance or scholarship offer from a law school, that makes it all worthwhile for me. I work with students at every level and with any learning style.
Discussions
Don't rush the process, take the test when you're confident that you'll get a score that will get you into a school that you would be happy to attend. If that's in February or April or next September, that's fine! At some point soon I would suggest you try a full, timed practice test just to see where you are, but don't just grind away at PTs or practice questions. Read about concepts and strategies, listen to podcasts, attend free webinars, do untimed practice, and basically just build your understanding of the kinds of things you are going to encounter on the test and learn about your own strengths and weaknesses.
Oh, and if you take a PT, say, next weekend, and you knock it out of the park, then maybe go ahead and sign up for January? Who knows, you might be ready far sooner than you think! You'll still want to study and practice, but at least you'll know what you're starting from.
Good luck, have fun!
There may be a lot of little things you could be doing to help make that transition, but I'll share a few ideas for your consideration.
First, when you review your practice questions, don't just settle for "I understand now why the right answer is right." Ask more questions, like "what made each wrong answer wrong?" and "what made some of the wrong answers attractive?" and especially "why did I reject the right answer?" That last one is extremely important, because that's where you really start to learn about the kinds of mistakes you've been making. If you get a question wrong, then you rejected the right answer for a bad reason, and you need to make sure you never use that bad reason as justification again.
Here's another: imagine it was up to you to explain every question on the test to a room full of people who just don't get it. Take on the mindset of a teacher, and think about how you would break it down. Show your imaginary class how the stimulus was structured, how the passage was organized, what the clues were regarding the premises and conclusions and the main point and purpose. Before you even say a thing about the questions, explain the source material that those questions are about.
BTW, doing this allows you to reuse material that you've already used, so you don't need to waste a PT!
Finally, here's another way to reuse old material to improve your own understanding: ask yourself new questions about old stimuli. Maybe the question was about the flaw in the argument. Move past that, and ask yourself how you would strengthen that same argument, and what the author assumed, and what the method of reasoning was, and what you would look for in a parallel reasoning answer, etc. In RC, if they asked you about the purpose of the second paragraph, go further and ask yourself the purpose of each of the other paragraphs. If they asked you to strengthen the argument made by the opponents, follow up and ask yourself how to weaken their argument, and how to strengthen and weaken the other arguments in the passage, including the author's arguments.
Just a few ideas to juice up your approach and get you more confident about what you're doing so that you can be more consistently accurate and push that score a little higher. I hope those help!
That's a clever trap answer, but it's wrong because the general conclusion in the first line is about being worthy of praise or blame, but the claim about nations is not about praise or blame. Thus, it isn't an instance of a group that cannot be worthy of praise or blame. For answer D to be correct, we would need to be looking at a statement like "nations, for example, cannot be blamed for the mistakes made by their leaders." Even better, an instance would be more specific, like "it would be wrong to praise Canada for their national health policy." I think your use of "example" in your question is the right one - an instance is an example, a particular case in which that thing occurred.
It's also not an instance of blameworthiness implying conscience, because it's not about blameworthiness, just about conscience.
Ask yourself why the author included that statement, and what other statement it relates to. Why tell us that nations do not have consciences? To connect to the claim that blameworthiness implies conscience. Why tell us that? To connect to the claim that groups cannot be worthy of praise or blame. And all of that is meant to support the conclusion in the final sentence.
One way to improve on identifying the author's perspective is to actively look for it while reading each passage. The author chose their words in a way that indicates that they have thoughts and feelings, and if you read with empathy, trying to hear where they are coming from, you'll pick up on those clues.
Another is to base your answer on research in the text, because these answers aren't based on anything other than what the author said. If the question asks about their view of something specific, go back and check the text to see how the author spoke about that specific thing. Not just what they said, but how they said it - was there something positive in their word choices? Something negative? Are they amused, or concerned, or skeptical?
And when you find yourself stuck between two answers, you might consider revisiting the text one more time, because one of those answers has zero support in the text. Don't make any assumptions about what the author thinks, but base it solely on what they said.
In your review, be sure to ask yourself a few key questions about every question that you missed:
Why was I attracted to the wrong answer? This is how you improve your understanding of the ways the test makers are actively trying to distract and confuse you.
Why did I reject the right answer? Again, this is a way to learn a lot about the way the test is made. What did the test makers do to make this correct answer look bad? And what are you doing that you shouldn't be doing? For example, are you rejecting answers not because you see that they are wrong, but because they are confusing, or "too obvious"?
Don't just settle for understanding why the right answer is right. You need to understand your own mistakes, and also how the authors of the test are laying traps.
One more tip: in your untimed practice, try predicting a couple wrong answers. What kinds of answers are they likely to put in there that will trip up someone who is less prepared? If you know the traps and can predict them, you'll be less likely to fall for them.