Hi there! Diversity statements can be a great way to build on your narrative. 7sage's admissions team would love to talk through this question further with you—they'll have expert advice on what it could add to your application and how effective it may be for you. If you'd like to schedule a free consultation to talk with one of our admissions specialists about your diversity statement, here is the link to set that up:

https://calendly.com/7sage-admissions/free-consultation-with-7sage-admissions?utm_source=F_W_Re&month=2023-01

Hi there! I think the advice to save a lot of drills for later is sound, but I personally would modify it a little. The drills are placed in the curriculum where they are to help reinforce the material as you go and help you retain information, so I would say unless you're really feeling solid on what you just learned, try doing one of the drills to make sure you're comfortable applying the concepts in practice. If you find you're struggling, try another one or two to get it down before you move on! It takes a little longer to work through the curriculum this way, but it also helps a lot with mastering the material, and you can always build custom drills to practice according to your analytics once you're finished with the basic lessons.

Best of luck working through the core curriculum! If you ever find you need additional explanation or drills more tailored to your personal needs as you move further along in your LSAT study, you can always schedule a free consultation to discuss it with one of our tutors here: https://calendly.com/7sage-tutoring/7sage-tutoring-free-consultation?utm_source=FCA_A

One thing I might suggest doing to supplement what you're learning from foolproofing is game board set up drills—look at fresh games from older tests you won't use for PTs and try to figure out how you should attack them, getting as far as you can with your board and inferences, and answer the first question. Then watch JY's video explanations to see where your logic hits a wall and give yourself an idea of where you should pay attention to in games like this. This is a more rapid-fire way of learning to recognize and respond to new games than foolproofing, but you can feel free to foolproof games you use for these drills afterwards as well. If you need help coming up with more drills tailored to your needs, feel free to set up a free consultation with one of our expert tutors to talk over what an effective study schedule looks like for you!

You do get a lot faster with time and practice! But more specifically, one thing I'd suggest is taking extra time to think about how to attack each question most effectively when you're on blind review. Is a question based more on the rules or on comparing answers to a board? Is there a way to eliminate wrong answers quickly? If you have to rely on testing answers, does anything stand out about the right answer that would clue you in that it's a useful one to focus on earlier in the process? Is there a board from a previous question that provides a potential answer? These are all ways that I've been able to approach LG questions more efficiently and spend as little time as possible on them without sacrificing accuracy.

If you need help figuring out where to start on these strategies, you can always schedule a free 30-minute consult with one of our tutors here for more advice: https://calendly.com/7sage-tutoring/7sage-tutoring-free-consultation?utm_source=FCA_A&month=2022-12

This depends on you, really! Since you don't see your score till after completing BR, generally most people want to BR as soon as they can after a PT, but you certainly don't need to finish BR the same day as the test. I tend to tell my clients to start on BR the same day they PT, but the day after is usually when most people finish, and some people do BR over the course of a few days or occasionally adjust how much of a given test they BR. If you need more tips as you settle into studying, you can schedule a free consultation with one of our tutors here to get some personalized advice. Best of luck with the June LSAT!

This is definitely a strategy I've seen tossed around in discussions before! When I was studying for my own LSAT, in particular I saw a lot of people who would advise others to perfect LG and only then move on to improving the other sections, because LG is the most learnable/perfectable of the sections. But while I think it has its uses, generally my impression is that this strategy is most effective for people starting out in their studies rather than those who need to pull up their score for the next exam. When you're just getting to know the test, cramming down strategies for one section will give you a more thorough understanding of how to attack it in more manageable pieces, but once you have a solid baseline I think it's best avoided unless you have a serious gap in your score on one section type vs the others. There's nothing wrong with having a day or week be more focused on a particular section, but doing that consistently can hold back your performance on the whole test, as several other commenters have attested to.

The thing about the breakthroughs that lead to score increases is that they're not really predictable, and they tend to get harder the better you get at a given section. It could be that your next LG breakthrough is going to come a lot later than your next RC breakthrough would if you were studying that as well—by spreading out your studies, you're giving yourself the best opportunity to hit all of those potential score increases ASAP. If you're not sure how to balance your studying, you can always schedule a free consultation with one of our tutors here to get advice on how to proceed most effectively on the path to your goal score. Best of luck with your April retake!

Hello there! So 80+ will be the closest to the current test, as you've heard, but with so little time remaining until the April test I would advise you to adjust your current study plan. I think you should start doing weekly practice tests now with PTs in the 70s, then move to the 80s once you're finished with the core curriculum. While you're not finished with the syllabus yet, in my experience studying alone doesn't really prepare you for the LSAT, and it's not the kind of test you can cram for! Here's a few reasons why PTing alongside studying will probably give you better results:

• You'll get more opportunities to put your studies into practice. While the information in 7Sage's core curriculum is incredibly useful, you'll retain it a lot better if you're applying it to actual test questions in close proximity to when you go through the lessons. Drills also help here, but they're not a replacement for PTs, because...

• The LSAT tests your timing and mental stamina as much as your skill at parsing the material. It's several hours of nearly nonstop critical thinking, with very difficult material to analyze, and you have to complete it all at a breakneck pace—it's like a marathon for your brain! So the test conditions themselves are an obstacle to overcome if you want to do well, and the longer you train your brain for that marathon under those exact conditions, the better you'll be able to perform on test day. Particularly since...

• You need to pinpoint your weaknesses on the test if you want to address them effectively. 7Sage's Test Analytics tool is more useful to you the more data you can feed it, and it pulls that data exclusively from your completed PTs: it will analyze what types of material you tend to get wrong across your PTs in order to recommend where you should focus on improvement, and it even tracks the time you spend per question if you consult the Question Table. Maybe it'll show that you need to shore up a few specific question types on LR, or maybe a certain game type takes you a lot longer than others, but this is all useful info to know so you can start hammering away at those weak spots in time for your test!

The reason I recommend starting with 70+—or even 60+—before jumping to the 80s is to first acclimate yourself to the LSAT's conditions on material that (aside from LG) generally tends to be a little less complex compared to the most modern versions of it, while still being close enough to be very useful to PT compared to even older tests. Additionally, the 70s are where you'll find a lot of miscellaneous games, which can be a big curveball—experiencing those will help you figure out how to manage yourself if you see something that isn't familiar to what you've learned to handle so far. And if you decide you're unsatisfied with your April score (though fingers crossed you'll get a great score and never have to think about the LSAT again), you'll also have a bigger bank of those most recent tests still untouched for those future studies.

I know that's a lot of info to take in all at once—the way you study can be just as strategic as the test itself! If you ever find yourself in need of more help getting to your goal score, you can always schedule a free consultation with one of our expert tutors here. Best of luck on the April LSAT!

Considering that this is the last test you can do this cycle, the February test is only a few weeks away, you're planning to apply in the fall, and you're still testing several points below your goal at the moment, I would strongly recommend holding off. While the improvement you're looking for isn't impossible, you'd be putting immense pressure on yourself to turn in that performance, and getting better scores tends to be harder in the 160s compared to the 150s. The LSAT is the kind of test where you get much better results with consistency than with cramming! Especially considering how far off the next cycle still is, unless you have some extraordinary circumstance at play, I can't imagine you would regret giving yourself plenty of time to achieve your best score.

And for what it's worth, you can get a job and still study for the LSAT, and even testing in June gives you an early start on applications compared to most of your peers! If you'd ever like to discuss how best to build out your schedule, whether you're optimizing for full-time studies or balancing LSAT prep with work, you can always schedule a free consultation with one of our expert tutors and talk it over: https://calendly.com/7sage-tutoring/7sage-tutoring-free-consultation?utm_source=FCA_A

Edited: Apologies, I misinterpreted this question due to the order of you mentioning blind review—you say you got the correct answer in BR, but aren't sure why? C is a weaker "right" answer (which for an except question, right answers are not what we're looking for) since it's a more general statement of beetles, but it still provides an alternative food source to sustain the beetles before plants recolonized the area. With E, the age of beetle species overall is irrelevant, as we are dealing with plant and beetle species that were already alive at the same time, so this does not provide an explanation for the discrepancy in the fossil record!

Hey there! So from what you describe, I don't think there's anything wrong with your Wrong Answer Journal thoroughness if you're able to explain and recognize the problem outside of time pressure. It does take time to sink in, but also I would say it's worth taking some time at this point to try and puzzle out how these consistent wrong answers are relating to your overall test approach, rather than each question in isolation. Look at the questions you've gotten wrong multiple times; do they have certain things in common? Maybe you dismiss right answers too quickly, or maybe you aren't taking a moment to check your logic when picking the wrong answers. Maybe it's certain question types that you need to pay a little extra attention on, or maybe it's certain subjects that throw you off. And maybe it's the time pressure itself, and you may need to think of approaches that will help you ease some of that pressure and focus on the problems!

I know that's a pretty generalized response, but with a question like this the best advice I can give really is to take some time to sit down and puzzle out what's going on with you to figure out the way forward. If you'd like a little help getting there, you can always schedule a free consultation with one of our expert tutors to look over your analytics and get an idea of where your approach is falling short!

You've already gotten a lot of great ideas here, but since you mentioned that you're having difficulties with time anxiety and freezing up, and it sounds like you can get the right answer pretty quickly on BR, I'd suggest stopwatch testing! The way this works is that you take the LR part of a practice test untimed and with the clock hidden, but still try to do it as quickly as possible without missing anything, and keep a stopwatch going to track your time somewhere out of eyesight/reach. Answer each question on the first pass through an LR section (if you're stuck on a question, pick your best guess and move on once you notice you're spending a long time on it), then check your stopwatch and make a note of how long it took you to work through the section. If you haven't hit 35 minutes on your stopwatch, do another pass and write down the final time for that as well. If you have hit 35 minutes, move on to the next section and take that one as usual. I started having a much easier time with the clock pressure when I realized that I actually could answer everything effectively in close to the time I had on each section when I wasn't paying attention to the clock.

Best of luck! If you're doing this well on BR, you can absolutely find ways to close the gap under timed conditions. And if you find you're still having a hard time and need more ideas to combat the time pressure, you can always schedule a free consultation with one of our tutors for a little extra advice!

Hey there! RC is generally a difficult section to improve on for many people, but you're doing the right thing by reading outside of your studies as well as the test material. As you get more comfortable with RC, I suggest you start doing sections with limited time—maybe 1.5x the default time, so you have more time with the material but are still getting used to working through a section under time pressure. As you get used to taking timed RC sections, give yourself progressively less extra time on them until you hit the default time of 35 minutes. You'll still want to do as much as possible pulling info out of the passages and questions untimed in blind review, but this way you can also get a sense of how to use your time effectively under pressure on RC.

Once you're in blind review, try to really pull apart and analyze each passage, question, and answers. Keep track of what viewpoints come up where: not just the author, but people, organizations, groups, documents, etc. Think about not only how to summarize each paragraph, but also its role in the passage as a whole: is it arguing a position, providing context, laying out evidence, addressing an alternate perspective, etc. Also, when you look at questions and answer choices, take note of whether they're telling you to look for something said directly in the passage (explicit) or hinted at/plausible based on the passage (implicit), and whether the scope of the question/answer is about the entire passage or one piece of it.

Above all, though, be patient! Improvement in Reading Comprehension is a gradual process, and you've given yourself plenty of time so long as you work at it steadily. If you're interested in a personalized game plan for your studies or looking for more help with testing strategies, you can schedule a free consultation and talk it over with one of our expert tutors here: https://calendly.com/7sage-tutoring/7sage-tutoring-free-consultation?utm_source=FCA_A

Hi there! So if you've already been through all PTs 80 and up, the ones in the 60s and 70s should still be useful to practice on before you have to resort to retesting. If you're not blind reviewing, try incorporating BR on future PTs to get more out of each one!

You can also go back to tests 80+ and review your wrong answers from those tests to gain insight into why you got them wrong and how to recognize the right answer on future tests. I highly suggest keeping a wrong answer journal, where you note the right answer, the answer you chose, why the right answer is correct, and what drew you to pick your answer—this can really give a lot of insight as to where there may be gaps in your logic that you can fill. It's time consuming, but it gives you a lot to work with!

As for drills, I am assuming you are referring to the ones available in the core curriculum. Now that you've used up all the ones 7Sage made for you, you can start building your own! We have a custom drill builder available here—I'd suggest using the advanced drill builder instead of the auto-builder, as the advanced builder will allow you to pick which tests you want to draw from and thus avoid burning material from newer PTs, and it will also show you if you've seen a question before. I suggest sticking to PTs 1-35 in the Core Curriculum tab first, then moving to PTs 36-58 in the Newer tab if you've used up most of the oldest material.

The other great thing about custom drills is that you'll be able to design drills for a specific purpose. If you're having trouble working through questions quickly, one example of a drill you can make is answering the first 15 questions of an LR section in a 15 minute time limit to force yourself to choose how to prioritize and move on from question to question; or if you spend too much time going back to consult the passage on RC questions, another example you can try is a memory drill, where you read the passage, make a good low-res summary, and then don't return to the passage at all as you answer the questions. Making drills that suit your own personal needs gives you a lot of ways to focus on the areas of the test that are most effective for you to study.

And if you still find you're having trouble deciding where to go from here or aren't sure what kind of drills will help take your LSAT score to the next level, our expert tutors can help you figure out how to structure your studies! You can always schedule a free consultation via this link to discuss further. Best of luck with your continuing LSAT studies!

I believe the drilling pool should be PTs 1-35 rather than 36-45, but regardless, you can definitely feel free to skip ahead! I'd generally suggest starting in the 50s or 60s, to ease in a bit with PTing and get used to the test format before you get to the more modern tests, which are best saved for taking closer to test day. If you are really tight on time, you can maybe jump to the 70s, but if you have a while before you plan to test then I'd suggest taking that time to ease into practicing the LSAT!

In general, I think the study schedule is meant more to be a helpful guide to give you a sense of how to pace yourself than something you must follow to the letter—no one method or schedule is going to be equally effective for everyone! If you ever need help with building out a study plan tailored to your needs, feel free to schedule a free consultation with one of our expert tutors to talk it over!

Hi there! So the questions you should be skipping (if you're having timing trouble) are ones that will take you a longer time to answer than a normal question would—with LG/RC specifically this tends to be a few specific types of questions that are often more difficult to think through quickly, such as rule substitution questions in LG or analogy questions in RC. If you see the question type, you should save it for the end of the question set, or guess and come back to it after finishing the rest of the section!

But your question seems to be leaning towards not knowing what the group of questions as a whole will look like, in which case you may get more value out of deciding to skip the game/passage when you first see it and return to it after completing the others. If you're going to skip that way, I think it should actually be done before you ever look at the questions! What's going to hog up most of your time is not games/passages with a certain quantity or type of questions, but ones where the stimulus is difficult for you to understand and work with, and that's something you should be able to tell fairly early into starting a board or summary.

If you're not sure what kinds of questions or games or passages are taking up more time for you, keep practice testing and pay attention to where something trips you up. If you'd like help looking over your analytics and figuring out what sorts of material you struggle with or take a long time on, you can always schedule a free consultation with one of our expert tutors here!

Hey there! Generally, yes, blind review and debriefing with the answer explanations afterwards is going to take much longer than the basic test would. It's slow, but it pulls a lot of value on each test. However, if you find that routine is wearing on you or difficult to balance with the demands of your job, you can pull back on some tests—not all—to only blind reviewing flagged questions, or a particular section you'd like to focus on. You can also build drills to take in between tests and vary your studying routine, which can give you a lot more flexibility when balancing LSAT studies with work! And if you'd like advice on how to make more effective use of your free time on the LSAT, you can always schedule a free consultation with one of our tutors here: https://calendly.com/7sage-tutoring/7sage-tutoring-free-consultation?utm_source=FCA_A