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Personally, I completely skipped the practice blocks after I finished foundations, LR, and RC blocks and went straight into doing full preptests and sections under timed conditions. It helped my "priorities" section be more indicative of my actual problem areas, so I would do a few preptests and sections over the course of 2 weeks and change my priorities to "last 14 days" then do drills from my problem areas from a more updated sample of my scores. I think it is definitely beneficial to get a new baseline after going through the foundations because your problem areas could be completely different from when you started, and you don't want to neglect current problem areas and over-practice on areas you have straightened out after completing foundations. I went from a 154 diagnostic to getting 180s and 179s on my most recent preptests, and I think a big part of it had to do with first learning the foundations (which can lead to a huge score increase and the elimination of a lot of problem areas that you have have started with) and then targeting the areas I still had trouble with (and the best way to figure that out is to take a full preptest/ sections due to the full range of question types).
In short, yes, it is worth it. Good luck!
@Jdunni Thank you for your response! That is kind of what I have been doing in terms of quality over quantity, I used to spend HOURS every single day doing sections and drills, but after June I have cut back a ton. It has honestly helped a lot because my review is much more thorough when I am doing fewer questions and I'm less angry about studying lol which is probably going to be beneficial for the retake. Thank you for the suggestion of the older PTs, I will definitely be implementing those. I forgot those were an option since automatically disabled, but I feel like I am definitely at the point where its time to use those. I also did not know that about LawHub, but I will check it out because that would be great if I could get some new sets straight from the site!
Hi everyone, I am looking for guidance after receiving my score from the June LSAT. I got a 168 on the real test but I had been scoring in the 170s on every PT I've taken for the past 2 months. I had not gotten below a 171 since April, and I scored a 175 on both PT 158 and PT 159 (the last ones I took before the real test). I had also been practicing in environments similar to test day conditions to make sure that the testing center didn't throw me off since I took it in-person. This in combination with hitting my goal scores repeatedly on PTs made me feel relatively confident going into the real thing, but I ended up scoring around 5-7 points below what I had been scoring on PTS. This was the first time I had ever taken the real thing, so I'm wondering if it could have been test day nerves due to having never experienced the real environment before or if there is some kind of disconnect in my understanding/thought processes. Another issue is that I have been studying since late January and do not have any fully fresh PTs or sections left. Any advice on what I can do in the meantime between now and my retake in August to perform at the level I had been performing at on my PTs would be greatly appreciated!
I struggled with RC for a long time, and a lot of the common advice that I was given never really worked for me, especially "low resolution summary" because I would find that my summary was actually either completely wrong or that I had missed important details and focused on stuff that didn't matter. I was told not to get into the habit of highlighting when I first started because it "wastes time", but I recently started highlighting while reading the passages and it has helped me a ton by forcing me to look for important information and focus better on the reading. I tried the method of highlighting the authors attitude/main point/ etc. in different colors and I do feel like THAT is kind of a time sink, but just going through with one color while reading and just highlighting specific words that you feel are important to the passage doesn't take much extra time and I find that it helps sustain my focus more than just going through and reading it passively (I would waste so much time losing my place and skimming over sentences that are probably important and by the time I got to the questions I would realize I had a very poor understanding of the passage). I find that it is like a return on investment when you spend some extra time fully grasping the passages because you can answer the questions quicker + with more confidence. At first it is kind of hard to decide what is important enough to highlight because it all seems important, but with a lot of practice/ taking a lot of sections it becomes pretty easy to figure out what is important/worth highlighting and what is not, and developing the skill of discerning important information in the passage actually helps a ton.
If you want to try this out, here are some things I have learned through trial and error about what to highlight and what not to highlight:
Do highlight:
words that indicate author's attitude or a certain person/group's attitude toward something (ex. if author refers to a phenomenon as "unfortunate", highlight "unfortunate", if a scientist being discussed in a passage refers to a new technology as "groundbreaking", highlight "groundbreaking")
differing positions/different groups (ex. "critics argue ____", proponents argue ____", "historians do ___ but scientists do ____"), you really only need to highlight "critics", "proponents", "scientists," or "historians" just to differentiate them, if there's a question about either's stance you can come back to the passage. I had a lot of trouble differentiating different groups that do different things and I wouldn't catch the difference when passively reading, highlighting the different groups has helped a lot.
main point (ex. "We should do ___" or "This is ___ because ____")
Do NOT highlight:
Examples, only highlight what the examples seek to prove. If you have an understanding of what the example seeks to prove then you can easily refer to the passage to find the stated example.
Entire sentences, stick to words and short phrases. Highlighting entire sentences make it difficult to discern what is actually important within the sentence (you can/should highlight multiple separate words in one sentence if they are important to the understanding of it), and highlighting entire sentences makes it tempting to highlight the entire passage, then this strategy loses its purpose. Sticking to words/ short phrases trains your brain into determining what is actually important.
This is just a brief explanation but feel free to message me for more details if you need more info, I am happy to help!