@ I actually just took PT 57 today and found it pretty difficult compared to others I have taken recently (both old and newer). The LG section was brutal, the dinosaur game took me like 13 mins! I also found both LR sections really difficult after around question 20, and was scrambling a bit toward the end of both. RC felt normal relative to other tests. First two passages were pretty easy and the second two were medium ish difficulty in my opinion. Anyway, congrats on the score and I don't think it was a fluke! I am now off to intensely BR PT 57, hopefully I will crack that dino game. Good luck on your next PTs!
Thinking about the author as someone who is speaking to you and trying to convince you of their main point has been very helpful to me. I used to read LR questions and always feel that they were so convincing, which makes it so much harder to evaluate the argument when you read it as you normally would any trusted news source. I got some advice to think about arguments in the LSAT as being told to you by someone you really don't trust or a political figure you really disagree with, so you enter the reading already skeptical and looking for possible flaws.
@.hopkins thanks, that sounds great! I will message you now!
@.hopkins Thank you for the extremely articulate response! I fully agree that RC is a completely different game and that any experience with textual analysis is not necessarily helpful. I'm glad I am not the only one with this problem though, I was definitely feeling a little hopeless after my last RC drill. I think it is time to go back to the Trainer/7sage RC basics, which I did not engage with fully the first time around. Thanks, LSAT, for shattering my confidence on a weekly basis!
This is me exactly. I finished the core course a few weeks ago and have gotten exactly 171 on every PT since. While this is a significant jump from my pre-7sgae scores of 160-166 it makes me feel like I have somehow reached my limit. I consistently get one of the parallel flaw questions wrong (but only one!), a few NAs (and then get them right on BR) and a few MSS (also can usually get them right on BR). I have been meaning to drill these specific question types before my next PT, but have not had time. Will see if that causes any improvements. I think I need to start doing intensely timed NA and MSS questions.
Also this is kind of weird but when I first started doing LSAT prep I was really intuitively good at RC (english major may explain it), I even went -0 on my diagnostic. However, as I study and improve LG and LR my RC intuition has been decreasing pretty horrifically. I have no idea why or how to fix this! Lately I consistently do better on LR than RC, which I never expected. I also can usually catch my mistakes for LR on blind review, but this has not been the case for RC. Just wondering if this has happened to anyone!
Hey y'all, is anyone in Philly looking to study together/create a study group? I'm planning on taking the June 2015 exam, I've been studying for about 3 months with the LSAT Trainer and just started the 7sage program. I am happy to share the Trainer and compare methods. Let me know if you are in the area and want to meet up and study/review/discuss either the test in general or specific questions and PTs. Good luck to everyone!
@ I totally understand your reasoning and did something similar for the LG section. When I first started LSAT prep I could barely finish the first 3 games in 35 minutes. It just felt completely demoralizing to do LG drills in 35 minutes because from the outset I knew I wouldn't be able to finish and inadvertently started focusing on trying to only finish 3 games really well, which was actually making me slower. So I started drilling older LG sections with 40 minutes and tried to stick to under 10 minutes per game. After doing many drills with 40 minutes, and as I began to feel more comfortable with the games in general, I began lowering the time. On actual timed preptests I have always only given myself 35 minutes, however, as to not waste the newer preptests. In the past months, I have definitely improved my time on LG the most (this is the hardest section for me) and can now usually just barely finish all 4 games at the 35 minute mark on my actual timed preptests. Anyway, like most people above, I would not recommend giving yourself 40 minutes when taking your actual preptests, but drilling older sections with 40 minutes helped me with my LG time for sure.