Speaking from personal experience, I would get LG down to -0. If you do that, you will start averaging about 167. After you get that taken care of, you can working on shaving points off the other two sections. If you want to be in the 170s, LG has to be free.

That is awesome @ , I am happy for you. I really like what you said about how much of a privilege it is to be in this position. I have been working in law enforcement full-time, and then I go to the library to study for 4 hours M-Fri after work. I get home and only get to see my wife and child for like an hour before they go to bed. There was about a week where I was starting to feel bad for myself. Luckily, one night when I was driving home from the library, I became aware of how fortunate I am to even be interested in pursuing higher education. So many people that I come into contact with each day didn't have the opportunities that I have had or didn't have the requisite interest. To be in a position where we get to even think about going to law school puts us in a very rarefied, privileged space. Even when studying for the LSAT gets rough, I find it useful to zoom-out and recognize how fortunate I am to even care about it in the first place.

I hope your October score, like your September one, continues to reflect all your hard work, dedication, and mental fortitude. Good luck on your application cycle!

If you are set on a T14 school, I would cancel your score and retake the test in October. You can still apply, and mention in an addendum that you will be taking the October test. You will still be able to get the advantages of applying early, and you will still be eligible for scholarships. It will also give you time to get your application put together and increase your LSAT score. Regardless of what you do, good luck!

I would use one of the online GPA calculators that give you your LSDAS GPA before trying to determine the LSAT score you'll need to gain entry into a T14 school. Some GPAs go up, and others (like mine) drop. Like @ said, I have also seen people below 3.0 gain admission to schools like Northwestern and Virginia. Also, a 3.5 isn't bad at all. If you want to get a decent gauge on the type of score you need to get in to a given school, go to lawschoolnumbers.com, choose a school, and look at the graph. The data there can give you a rough idea of what you'll need to do.

@ Thank you! That is a really great idea. I definitely am going to do that. I think it will help to hold me accountable for my wrong answers.

@ That would be great!

That is incredible! Congratulations, you are going to have so many interesting opportunities at your disposal. I am very happy for you! Please continue to visit the forums, your wisdom and advice will be greatly appreciated by people like me.

I think you keep the score, and retake. I don't know for certain, but I imagine that if you retake and only go up to a 168, that would still do more to help you than the retake would do to hurt you. I think what you want to avoid is a retake where you come out with the same score or a lower one. If your score moves closer to the schools median, it is hard to imagine that not being better overall.

It is unfortunate that, in regards to atheism, we have to second guess whether or not sharing it will hurt our application. Even if it is well-written, ultimately we are at the mercy of the ones reviewing it. Good luck!

Before I opine, let me plead ignorance. I still have not written a personal statement, and I am even less cognizant of how they are weighed by the reviewers at various schools. This being said, my intuition is that something important would be lost if you omitted the experience. Even still, I think there are some caveats. Your reasoning for leaving religion and/or God behind can matter. It seems contextually counterintuitive to say, but presenting yourself more as a judge than a lawyer would probably be more beneficial. Let me unpack that. If your decision for leaving God behind was subject to a careful review of the two positions, and you weighed evidence, logic, and reason to come to an ultimate decision (like a judge), that seems like it would be a favorable quality in a student. Such a person would thrive in a diverse, collegial environment. I think it shows you are willing to honestly consider other peoples perspectives. If it is presented in a light where you had little resistance or pullback from your family, or it was convenient for you to walk away, you might lose some luster. It would be like you were a lawyer who had every reason to build a case around what was appealing, and acted accordingly. Based on what you have said, it seems you were judicious in the process.

This may be patently obvious to you guys, but it seems to me that the purpose of the diversity statement is to show how you have grown from a difficult or marginalizing experience. As a person who, at one time, considered himself a devout believer, losing my faith was the most trying time of my life. Having my identity and preconceived notions stripped away in an instant was destabilizing. Then having to explain it to my wife, her family, my friends, and the rest of my family, felt humiliating. However, now I look back at it as one of the most exquisite periods of my life. Being lost, and having to parse through moral and social issues applying a different lens, increased my personal ability to feel empathy for others. At the risk of sounding ironic, it gave my life purpose. It is also what led me down the rabbit-hole of philosophy, logic, and now law.

I believe my experience would bolster my application. If yours has been a net positive in your life, I would be surprised if it didn't bolster your application as well. Ultimately, the intent matters most. Why was this valuable to you, and how?

Hey, thanks so much for all of the responses! It's helpful to know how you all approach it. I definitely will wait until after BR to grade my tests. I am slotted for June, hopefully I am around the mark by then, so I don't have to push it back.

Did anyone else have LG (23), LR (25), LR (25), LR (26), RC? If so, do you know which LR of the 25 LRs was the real one?

I have a small moleskin journal, of sorts. I use it to track my progress statistically, and I make note of concepts I wish to employ on my next preptest. The stats pages are like LSAT Analytics, but they display the information with more depth. I track how much of each question type I miss in LR, and which types of games trip me up. I also track the differentials so I can see if I am actually improving on these areas of weakness.

I think you should take your time and go through the Core Curriculum and practice using the Blind Review method. I wouldn't take the LSAT again until your comfortably above the score you want, or you're consistently achieving the score you want in timed sessions. I had a similar experience to the one you had, and I decided to wait until 2018. No regrets so far!

I’m struggling to understand how answer choice C can state “any” ants in the Sahara Desert foraging for food in the afternoon generally don’t use pheromones when the stimulus says “most” species of ants use pheromones. What about the other possible species of ants, those not described by “most,” but which live I n the Sahara and forage for food at no time other than the afternoon, and which do not leave a trail of pheromones? If most species use pheromones, then some species don’t, and it seems theoretically they could be in the Sahara foraging for food only in the afternoon. I’m trying to understand why the answer choice would refer, then, to “any” ants. Any help would be much appreciated.

I do a lot better on the BR when I do it the day after I PT. It seems like the break gives me enough space to look at the questions from a different vantage. That being said, I don't know if that measures exactly what we want it to.

I would recommend getting the Loophole LR. In that book, Ellen puts all of the LR questions into two categories based on the answer choices: Powerful and Provable. Once I went through the book and had a solid purchase on the information, I started saving a bunch of time by going through the first ten questions of a section normally, and then I did the remaining 15-16 by doing all Provable, and then going back and doing all Powerful. It keeps your brain focused on correct answer choices, and it definitely mitigates damage caused by trap ACs. It cut about 5 minutes off of my timing and my accuracy went from missing 3-5 to 0-2 on LR. I was at 167 avg and now I am at 170 avg.

I agree that "often" is like "some". Another word I see on the LSAT quite a bit that reminds me of it is "many".

For me to get to -2-0 on games every time, I had to apply the method outlined in the CC. I would print off the game (usually all four of a given test) and measure the time it took me to answer all of the questions on a given game. Then I would write the time in the top right corner. Once I had completed all four, I would go back and blind review. If I had completed a game in the recommended time limit with all of the answers correct, I would ask whether or not I felt like I "owned" the game. If that was the case, I would write down my best time for that game in my notebook and remove it from rotation. If I didn't get it in the time limit, get all of the answers correct, or didn't feel like I had mastered it, I would print it off again and repeat the process two days later. After I had mastered all of the games from tests 1-35, I would wait a couple weeks and go back to one at random. Just to make sure I had retained all of the inferences. Using my notebook I could look at discrepancies in my time and adjust accordingly. After I complete a PT now, I take those games and apply the same methodology to them. It took me about 3 weeks of studying to get from -6ish to -2-0.

For situations like this, I have found lawschoolnumbers.com incredibly valuable since many of the people who were accepted/rejected to a given school list, in their profile, their soft factors, addendum type, GPA trends, and a host of other data. I will say, all of my information comes from what I've observed and read, but I have not applied to a law school myself.

I find myself in a similar situation to you without the benefit of having a STEM major to explain my GPA, and it seems like I at least have a fighting chance to get into many of the T14 schools. HYS, UChicago, Cornell, and Berkeley are off the menu for me. Even a 180 won't do the trick. For you, Berkeley and Cornell are still plausible. They will do what they have to do to hold their numbers, but it seems like STEM major types or incredible soft factors are situations in which I've seen them make exceptions. You should be a lock for schools like UVA and Michigan. If you have two years of work experience between your undergrad and application, it seems like you'd also be a lock for Northwestern. I'll also note, having your degree from UCLA helps given it is a top public university and there was an upward trend in your GPA.

This isn’t a comprehensive answer, but what I have found to be of great use is the “Notes” text line. I use it to quickly document how I feel about each section right after I take it. So if my first section is LR, I write something like this in the box:

“1st LR: questions 1-10 were quick and seemingly easy. Felt good about mid 160ish level questions. Trouble with last 3. Ran out of time and guessed on last question. / (then I start the next section) RC: Confident about first passage, second passage gave me a little trouble....etc.”

After I Blind Review, it is useful to go back to those notes and see more specifically how your confidence scaled with your actual score. It took me a while of doing this, but I have been able to predict my score within 2 points on every exam, which came in handy while I was considering whether or not to cancel my September test. And more to the point, it gives you more information about which kinds of things you need to exhaustively study before you take another PT.

Like @ mentioned, you should not take another PT until you have good reason to believe you have improved from your last test. I would also recommend everyone go back and listen to those podcasts with Sages like @ @ and @. I think each of them addresses how they prepared between tests in pretty great detail.

A DIVA main, huh?

To me it looks like this:

“If teachers can enable their students to make their own decisions —> then teachers must have the power to make own decisions in classroom.”

Because its not until they had the power that their students would be able to make their own decisions. So it was the necessary condition to that potentiality.

But I do see the confusion caused by until there. I was never good at translating rule by rule. I probably should have just said nothing, and let someone equip to answer this field it, but I couldn’t resist the temptation to engage another 7Sager who also plays Overwatch.

@ said:

This is so interesting! I would love to hear more about this. Do you then read the question first for all of the remaining 15-16 questions and mark them by Powerful/Provable? Do you mark anything on the answer sheet?

I usually read the stimulus before I read the question stem. I do that on the first ten questions (since they are usually the easiest). Once I get to #11, I briefly glance at the question stem to see if it is Powerful or Provable. If it's Provable, without thinking about the specific objective of the question stem, I go back in to the stimulus and read. Then I fully read the question stem and move on to the answers. On #12, if I immediately see that the question stem is Powerful, I just skip the question and go to the next Provable I can find. Once I am done with them, I go back and do the rest of the unmarked Powerful question types.

I find this approach very easy on the digital test. If it was still a paper test, this method would be a bit trickier.

Being nervous about it is normal, but I would definitely recommend postponing your test if you don't think you'll be at your target score by that date. For me, the performance sheet from the disclosed test doesn't matter as much as the score. So if I didn't feel ready for September, I would just postpone to October or November even though they are non-disclosed. When I looked at the October and November tests for my area, there were not test centers within 300 miles of me. So I would check if those tests are being offered near you and plan accordingly.

Here is the Sam Harris guided meditation:

https://classic.7sage.com/lesson/winning-the-psychological-battle/

I like Sam Harris, and his school of thought regarding meditation. I think that JY linked some of his stuff in a former post. I'll have to look for it. Nonetheless, I am sure there is ample content on YouTube. I'll definitely checkout "Headspace".