I scored a 180 on the July 2020 LSAT (it was my first time taking it) and I’m writing to share what I did. I was very encouraged by the 180 experiences that I had read online, and I wanted to write something similar before the memory faded away. If you’re reading this, hi! I’m so glad you’re here! I hope this helps.

Some background: I decided to go to law school during the summer before my junior year, and I wanted to go to a top school. As a double stem and philosophy major I had a GPA below every T-14 median, so I knew that I had to hit the LSAT out of the park.

I started studying in mid-December during winter break my junior year with a 164 diagnostic. I finished the core curriculum at the end of January and scored a 170 on my first post-curriculum PT. By mid-February, I started taking a full, timed practice test about every other week. I treated every practice test as a dress rehearsal—timed conditions, 15-minute break, printer paper and my favorite pens, a bottle of water. (I was prepared to switch over to pencil at some point, but I lucked out when the flex was announced. I got to use my pens the whole time!) I also practiced the first 30 tests I took with 33 instead of 35 minute sections, which helped me learn to pace myself. If I had a headache, wasn’t feeling my best, or really tired, I wouldn’t test. It was very important to me to try and simulate the headspace that I was going to be in during the test itself—practicing bad form, I thought, wasn't a good use of my time.

From February to about June I progressively went through the problems sets as I got better at them. I did most easy sets in Feb and saved the medium and hard sets for later in the spring. I gave myself 100% extra time during the difficult sets (I knew that I would have that kind of time for hard problems during the test) to really hone my intuition on rare problems.

In all, I took 49 practice tests. From late Feb-May, I took one about every other week (for maybe 20 tests). From mid-May (when the semester ended) to July 12th (my test date), I took another 29 (!) tests, about 3-5 each week. I do wish that I had done those first 30 practice tests earlier rather than back-ending my studying as much as I did, but it was workable. For me, taking tests was absolutely the best way to improve. I had a major breakthrough after taking 30 tests mostly because of improvement on LR. By 30 PTs, I began nailing obscure but recognizable question varieties (like certain types of flaws, subtleties in the causation questions, stuff like this). In the first 30 PTs I was usually scoring between 170-174. I staggered the tests so I was doing a mix of old and new, taking PT 41, 51, 61, 71, 81, and then 42, 52, 62, 72, 82, all the way through 49, 59, 69, 79, 89.

When I kicked my studying into high gear in late May, I was aiming for a 10-PT average of 177 (which was my avg BR score). I was taking summer classes and I studied for 1-6 hours a day depending on what I felt I could do productively. I got a 177 average by mid-June and was consistently scoring scoring 173-179. I scored my first 180 in July, ten days before I was slated to test, and my second 180 a few days after that.

Even though I was doing so many tests, I never came close to burnout. I think this was because I never forced myself to study—if I needed a day off, I would take one. Besides that, I felt really absorbed in my studying, like I was learning something new or doing something productive the whole time. I really cannot thank 7Sage enough for this. The videos (which I always watched on double speed), the gamified analytics bar, and the really lovely testing and BR interface made it so freaking easy to study, and I felt like I was always making the most of my time.

I think the thing that really got me through the blind reviewing was the sense that all of the questions are doable, and all of the answers are clear. I absolutely refused to write off difficult questions as oddballs or one-offs, and I spent time in BR internalizing all of the answers so that they seemed completely, patently obvious to me. (Sometimes this meant spending 15 minutes on an LR question. Rarely, it meant spending an hour on an RC question.) If I wasn’t satisfied with the explanations already in the comments, sometimes I would add my own.

Speaking of blind reviewing, here are some things I did by section:

LG: I would do all the games again in BR. At first this meant figuring games out for the first time and correcting lots of mistakes or (for the tricky ones) finding a better way to organize things. When I got better at games this meant redoing the games quickly to sanity-check my answers, and redoing the hard ones until they felt easy (maybe 2-3 times).

LR: Taking 30+ tests really, really helped me improve on this section. At one point it was my best, and I consistently missed zero or one. After 30 practice tests I would thoroughly blind review only the questions I starred or missed since I felt comfortable about all the others. (Again, staying motivated meant using my time really productively! I didn’t BR questions that I was confident in.)

RC: This was an absolute beast for me, and it took me a long time to improve. Even up until my test date I was missing 1-4 questions on this section. What helped me improve from 3-7 missed to 1-4 missed was to force myself to spend 2.5-4 minutes on the passage (longer than felt natural) really absorbing all of the structure, and then answering the questions somewhat quickly. The main reason this helped was that I could remember where to look for details when questions asked for them rather than guessing or rereading whole paragraphs. (Speeding through was very difficult because I would often feel super unconfident on many of my answers, but it was still the best strategy.) In BR, I spent a lot of time internalizing the differences between the best AC and worse ACs on the confusing curve-breaker questions, and this helped me miss fewer of them.

About a month before the test I changed my schedule to include a morning routine. I got used to doing an exercise routine, eating lunch, and then sitting down to do a test, taking it at about the same time during the day that my actual test was scheduled for. (The workout was a lifesaver on test day since I was so full of white hot terror that I needed something to distract me!)

On test day, I get a decent sleep and wake up full of jitters. I do an extra-long exercise routine to help keep myself busy, eat a pasta lunch, and sit down for the flex test. Despite feeling prepared I am visibly shaking and can’t think lucidly because I am so nervous. Thankfully my first section is logic games. I crank through the first three games, and I calm down gradually as I take the test. The last game is wickedly difficult and my nerves didn’t leave me with a lot of extra time. I leave the section highly unconfident on one question and shaky on maybe three. (I still think that I did miss that one question, but everyone’s allowed one miss).

The next section is LR, and it’s a relatively easy section. I get through it with a bit of time to spare, and very quickly double-check all of my starred questions (the one question I am least confident about is a strangely worded number 7, oddly enough—I must have spent three minutes on it).

The final section is RC, and I only just finish the section (I almost always take up the full time on RC, and I practiced with the expectation that I wouldn't have time to double-check anything) but I feel pretty good about it.

And so I got a 180. It took a lot of studying and a lot of luck—things likely would have turned out differently if I had gotten a RC right off the bat or if I had really fudged that last logic game. But my preparation helped me muscle-memory my way through the test even with such terrible nerves—I could really fall back on hardened pattern-recognition. (The LSAT is a very learnable test!) I didn’t set out to get a 180, and I always knew that it was unlikely. My aim was to study enough to consistently hit a challenging but achievable “goal range,” which in my case was 175-180. I could have just as easily gotten any of those scores or lower.

On another note, my lovely partner was studying for the LSAT at the same time that I was. Early on we made the decision not to share any of our practice test scores besides vague reports, like “I got a new high score!” or “I scored in my goal range!” This turned out to be a really great decision! It freed us from comparing ourselves, and it allowed us to be really supportive. (We celebrated the heck out of our scores together when it was all over, though! They ended up with a 177!)