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claireehaley331
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claireehaley331
Saturday, Aug 30

I want to qualify this by saying that I'm of course no expert- but it took me a while to start to show improvement as well and my diagnostic was right around yours. For me, I had to figure out what the underlying issues actually were to get out of the mindset that it was all situational- I also used to feel like each answer had a unique reason for being wrong and therefore had no idea how to study for it. Rather than spend too much time overprocessing my wrong answers, I went back to basics.

I slowed down and took some time to go through the core curriculum again for certain areas. First, I realized that I really didn't always have a great understanding of conclusion vs premises and why. I did live classes on MC and argument part and spent time reviewing those concepts until I was really solid on that. Then, I reviewed argument structure- spent a lot of time really understanding conditional reasoning (I used outside resources for this) and the causal reasoning structures/common arguments. Taking all of that together, my SA, PSA, strenghtening, and weakening all improved dramatically and suddenly. It's like something finally clicked.

Finally, doing the 10 questions in 10 minutes (or I actually do 15 questions in 15 minutes) on the LR section was so helpful after re-building my foundation. Now, I move through those questions really quickly so I have plenty of time for the harder questions later on. A mindset shift for me was: there is only one right answer, no close to rights answers; and if I don't see the answer clearly, I'm missing something. If it's not clear, I go back and re-read the stim and each AC to pick apart what it might be. What helps me there is identifying what is different between AC and how they are different.

For RC, though that was my strong section from the beginning, I was using too much brain power on those sections and tiring myself out before LR. To get stronger there, I spent more time reading passages and doing the low-res summaries, and reading a wide variety of of materials outside of the LSAT to increase my fluency so I'm not getting stuck on terminology or vocabulary during the test. My study in argument structure for LR also helped me here.

Again, no expert, and I still occasionally have bad PTs. But overall my score has improved and become more consistent in the last month or so after many months of effort and I'm finally regularly crossing my goal score. But it took a while for that to actually happen. Also, when you have a higher diagnostic like that, consider that you might also be contending with undoing habits and assumptions that get you a decent score but hold you back from really taking it to the next level, rather than just building knowledge from scratch.

Tl;dr: I went back to basics and spent a ton of time on argument structure. Then I layered everything back on.

Good luck and don't give up!

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claireehaley331
Wednesday, Aug 06

I am still working on this, but have moved from mid-160s to consistently high 160s/low 170s for my last few PTs. For me, it's really embracing the idea that there aren't "close" answers. If I'm not seeing the clear answer, then I'm missing something about the question. I mark those and move on, then come back at the end. That keeps me from getting frustrated and often having fresh eyes helps me spot what I'm missing to make the answer clear. For RC, I use that same idea but also (and this is super corny), I try to get really interested in what the passage is saying and that helps me not lose the thread or get things twisted in my brain. Also, if you don't read a lot outside of the LSAT, I know outside knowledge isn't required but I will say that being widely read (including on science topics) has made RC so much easier for me. Not helpful for August and hopefully you get where you want to be, but just being honest. Good luck!!

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