@ When I started studying, RC was around -8. When I posted this, I was averaging around -5 on RC, but my scores would fluctuate anywhere from -2 to -7. Since then, my scores have now consistently jumped up to -2. Honestly I'm not sure what I did to warrant the improvement, but I did take about 2 full weeks off between taking my November test and getting the result/deciding to study again for January. I was studying A TON before November, especially focusing on RC. I think I needed the two weeks off not just to rest, but to allow myself time to process the information I had just crammed into my brain. I am not sure if this is a common experience, but distance from RC helped me see the patterns - common themes in passages, common passage structures, narrative threads, similarities to LR and LG, etc. I think what got me over the hump for RC was just doing a ton of practice truthfully.

I also think a lot of my trouble with RC was misreading, and not taking the time to really process and think about each question. I suspect this is likely because I was moving too fast. In the past, RC used to stress me out because I felt like I was racing to the finish every time. There are just so many words! Whereas LR and LG I could manage my nerves, RC always felt like a catastrophe. I would make silly mistakes because I would not really understand what the stimulus is asking. Unlike LR, you have to pay very very close attention to every single word in the stimulus. My panic also clouded my ability to retain the information in the passage. I was an English major in undergrad, and have always been a strong reader. I was perplexed why I couldn't master this section....But the truth is, with the type of reading you do in college or for pleasure, you aren't under the time constraint or the pressure. Mastering that aspect is what is challenging about RC - not the actual content. Doing a lot of practice helped me gain more confidence and realize that 35 minutes is plenty of time for this section. Once I learned how to better manage my nerves, it was like I was seeing the section for the first time.

But here's a recap of my RC journey if you're looking for a more in depth summary.

Phase 1 - Master the Passage. Don't even look at the questions at first, just focus on the actual passage. Like LR, you should try to do all of your pre-work in the passage. When you read, you want to be like trying to anticipate things the testers will ask about - more often than not, this is the author's opinion, the main point of each paragraph, what the critics think, what evidence the author uses to support their point, the structure, etc...

I would do this little exercise where after every passage before heading into the questions, I would fill out a table I made in google sheets. The columns were all of the points I listed out above. You should be able to do this by memory. Only after that exercise, would I look at the questions with the time off.

Phase 2- Once you've reached mastery on the passage, THEN you can start focusing on the passage + questions together. Depending on where you're scoring and where you hope to end up, I think it's okay to drill with the time off at first. Like I said above, if you can't get these questions right without time, you definitely won't get them right with time.

Phase 3- Full sections. Just rinse and repeat.

Anyways, hope that helps!

@ congrats on your 164! When I started my diagnostic was a 155, and it took me a very long time to break into the mid 160's. I found that drilling really got me over the hump. My strategy was to focus on the parts of the tests and the questions I knew I could get right, and making sure I get those right every single time. For me, this was mainly in the LR and LG sections... Sounds like you're on the right track! Go get that 161!

@ @ thank you for the advice! Anecdotally, I did feel like the rest I got between the November test and preparing again for the January test gave me the perspective to see how what I had learned had fit together, and take a step back to see the patterns of the test with more clarity. Thank you for talking me off my ledge, and best of luck to the January test takers!

@ yes my transcript + UGPA were the same

@ I think so, yes...Like you wisely pointed out, I think the biggest factor will be the LSAT. I was averaging a 172 before scoring my 169, so I do feel like there are a few points left on the table... I think I'm going to put down my deposit and start studying for a month to see how I feel about the test. If I do think that improvement is possible, then I might wait till the next cycle. If studying is like pulling teeth, I think I'll just take the A and attend in the fall.

I am worried, though, that this will be my fourth time taking the test. I was really impatient with how slow my improvement was and feel like I rushed taking the test to make the deadline for this cycle, which is another reason why my gut is saying to wait and try again.

I scored a 161 in August'21 (which I should have canceled, but like a moron, I didn't), a 167 in November'21 (but I lost about 5 minutes of time on a non-experimental section) and then a 169 in January'22 (again had a technical difficulty, but it was only like a minute of lost time).

@ in it for the long run! Thanks for the advice :)

@ thanks for the feedback. I definitely agree that even one extra point would make a huge difference :) Getting back to California is really important to me, and so I do feel like waiting might be the right choice!!

Same boat, but I think if you're struggling, it's your mind and body telling you to take a break. I'm taking November because I knew I'd need some down time after August and didn't want to rush into October. Good luck.

Don't give up. Most people study for about a year. I'd recommend pushing the November test to January. I started studying in January 2020, and just now broke into the 170's. Don't give up and keep pushing. you got this.

I'm 25, and I feel old sometimes (which is ridiculous)! Love hearing from all you non-traditional students. You got this!

@ I see a lot of comments advocating for no note taking. I'm a tactile learner, and have always felt like the act of reading, underlining, and physically holding the paper/pen in my hand really makes a huge difference for me. In undergrad, I took all my notes by hand. So while I don't feel like my note taking really is super helpful for me to reference back to DURING the passage, it does help provide that physical cue I would get from reading the passage on pen and paper, and helps me commit the details to memory.

I took November, and did well, but about 3 points lower than I had hoped for. I started studying again around 12/3 (when we got our scores), and have been only doing 10-15 hours a week. Now ramping up to 15-20, since I have the time. I actually noticed that my scores jumped by ~3-5 points on average just from resting. So, bottom line is that time off could be a good thing. I felt like the time off gave me a lot of clarity, and distance to really synthesize the information I had learned in the months before November into a coherent whole. Sit down and take a practice test to see where your performance is at. Good luck.

I practice taking all four sections so stamina wise, i'm ready for a four section test. In reality, it shouldn't matter which section is the experimental because on test day, you don't have control over which section it is.

Every practice test has overall the same level of difficulty (in theory) where certain sections are easier and certain sections are harder. The problem with deviating from a 4 section pre-set test (with two LR) is that the experimental section you add in could be easier or more challenging in difficulty than what that section should be like compared to the other sections in the test. That can give you false hope or false confidence.

Besides, I do think that LR is a really good section to devote extra practice to because it is so translatable to the other sections and gives you a great foundation to build off of.

I did not have technical issues, but I had a bad proctoring experience that I felt potentially impacted my score in one of my sections. Does this justify a complaint? @ and @ how did you file?

This is a straight forward sequencing game. Here's how I set up my board.

Elements: s, o, j

Board:

1 2 3 4 5 6

Rules:

May 1 = May 3 (visually represented on the board by indicating that the same piece is played).

O --> OJ

/SO (meaning if you have s, the next piece must be either an S or a J).

What specifically did you have difficulty with?

#help Q21 - answer choice b.

I'm with JY when he talks about how we for sure know that the pre 1927 sculptures captured the human form, but I'm a little confused as to how we know that the positive light portrait does that as well. Perhaps, I'm reading too far into this, but just because something is a portrait doesn't necessarily mean it's representational; for example, what if this were an abstract portrait of Fuller? The passage discusses its reflective quality, and talks about how the true form of the sculpture is invisible...In my mind, I was picturing some sort of shape made out of mirrors, which may or may not actually represent the human form (for all we know it could be a cube of mirrors). Is it enough to know that the reflection of the human form (IE the image produced by a person standing in front of the mirrored sculpture) is sufficient for 'representing the human form'? What if you're viewing the sculpture form a vantage point where it's unable to reflect your image? Then the representational quality could be lost....

Thanks this is helpful!

@ haha no worries - happy to share some advice. Here's a summary/recap of my LR journey. I started out at around -7 +- a few points.

Phase 1- learn the basics. I started using the LSAT trainer. After about 3 months of studying, I switched to 7 Sage.

Phase 2- relearn the 7 sage core curriculum. There was a lot I didn't know. To master LR you need to be completely fluent in lawgic. I'm at the point where I don't think twice about translating a sentence or doing a tricky negation. If you're not at that point yet, I'd recommend doing a deep dive again to refresh yourself.

Phase 3 - drill questions 1-15 timed. For those aiming above 170+ you should be able to finish the first fifteen questions in 15 minutes. I started out being able to finish around 20 minutes. I just slowly moved the timer down each week until I got to around the 17 minute mark. For me, I'm comfortable with this benchmark because I actually find that my brain works a little faster on the harder questions. I think this is because I benefit from a warm up.

Phase 4- drill questions 16-25 UNTIMED. These are the harder questions. Focus on getting them right at first before putting on the time. If these are the questions you're consistently missing, missing them with the time on won't do you any good to improve. Once you feel you can get at least half of them correct, then start with the timer. Depending on your time for questions 1-15, you should have a little more than half the test left for these questions, which means you get to spend almost two minutes a question.

Phase 5- drill entire sections with time. Rinse and repeat. Obviously should go without saying but blind review is super important.

For me, the thing that catapulted me from the -5 to the -2 range was actually just throwing all of the strategy and tips I learned out the window. Things like 'for weaken questions you should expect this kind of answer' or 'always chose a weakly worded answer for a necessary assumption' were what was holding me back from getting better. The moment I let go of all my question type strategies was the moment I started getting better. It's good to let the question stem guide you to a certain degree, but the most important thing is to read what's on the page in front of you and to understand what the text is saying. There's an infinite amount of diversity in the written language, and hard and fast rules won't be able to help you for the questions that stray from what JY calls 'cookie cutter'. Once I understood that test makers are testing your ability to read and to reason, rather than you ability to employ testing strategies, I was much more able to adapt to specific question types.

Additionally, I started doing all of my pre-work for the question before even looking at the answers. I try to summarize the argument in my head and then have an idea of what I'm looking for before I look at the answers. OnPredicting the right answer or describing the flaw before looking at the answers enabled me to be swayed/manipulated by what wrong answers were saying.

Anyways hope that helps.

If you watch JY review videos and he tries to fix wrong answer choices or tries to abstract out certain arguments and reduce them to lawgic, I think this is the best way to try to foolproof the LR sections - really engage with them and ask yourself provocative questions about each of the questions.

@ this is great advice - thank you!

@ thank you for the encouragement!!!

This is one of the questions that even with JY's explanation, I'm still stumped.

Answers A and C are the only ones that are at all appealing.

A- V1: JY's explanation is that this is a comparative statement that is irrelevant - so what if there are 5,000 scrolls documenting the reign of most roman emperor's and there's only 4,900 scrolls for Caligula? Interpreted in this way, I do see how it's irrelevant.

A- V2: But interpreted in another way - IE that perhaps the documentation detailing his tyranny is unrepresentative because we had to so little to begin with (say that Caligula had only 5 scrolls compared to the average 5,000), does cast some doubt on whether or not the record is a reliable data source, which ultimately strengthens the historians argument. To illustrate this point, consider the following analogy. Imagine there's a study conducted, where the data shows that x causes y. If you find out that there were only 5 data points in this study whereas most other studies use 5,000, then I think our conclusion would be that we need more data on whether or not we can determine if this study is valid. I think it's reasonable to be wary that the five data points considered COULD be outliers, or are simply not enough for a reliable trend to emerge. Answer choice A I think calls that out and says - we can't really say whether or not the record is accurate. This very weakly strengthens the argument, but I think it strengthens it nonetheless.

C - V1: JY's explanation is that this is basically lazy plagiarism on the part of the enemies - IE that they're just making up stuff, and recanting past crimes for inspiration. This strengthens it. But I also do think this requires a bit of a jump.

C- V2: A competing explanation, though, could be that maybe Caligula pulled this inspiration himself - maybe he was super evil and wanted to outdo or reenact past evils. Or maybe these atrocities were just common place amongst tyrants. To me this feels like the more reasonable interpretation of this answer than version 1.

So comparing the aspects of A and C that both strengthen the modern historian's conclusion, I can see that version 1 (JY's version) of answer choice C is a stronger than version 2 of answer choice A. But to me, this version of C seemed like more of a reach/jump than the strengthening version of A. How do you all reconcile that divide?

#help

I was also in the same boat about two months ago where I'd hover around the -2 or -3 benchmark for one section and then drop into -7 or -8 for the next. The truth is thought that if you are inconsistent, you don't have mastery yet. Luck plays a big part in the LSAT, and you are probably getting lucky on the sections where you are scoring well. Where are your blind review scores? I'd say first focus on being able to do the whole section at -0 or -1 on BR. After that start playing questions 1-15 and try to get those to be second nature. Start inching the timer back from 20 mins to 18 to 16 etc. If you're aiming for 170+ try to do questions 1-15 in 15 minutes. This will give you more time for the harder questions and will hopefully give you time to go back and check your scores.

I started at a 155 and took forever to get into the 160's. After switching to 7 sage about 3 months in, I realized that I was missing a lot of fundamentals. Depending on how you feel about conditional logic, diagramming, and logical indicators, I think it would be helpful to spend about 2 weeks going through the core curriculum and drilling and then the remaining 4 weeks practicing full sections in addition to full practice tests.

I just did some research on consultants, and I felt like Spivey was the best company I found!

I got lucky on this question, and it tripped me up originally. Here is why it is correct:

To strengthen the judge's decisions, we need to show that all of the individuals ways in which we could grant the plaintiff's request are unacceptable. Given that two defendants share a legal counsel, here are the options for granting the plaintiff's request for D1 and D2 (who share a lawyer):

- 1. D1 and D2 get new legal counsel (the judge says no to this).

- 2. The legal counsel remains present (this just isn't what the plaintiff is asking for though).

- 3. D1 and D2 are represented WITHOUT legal counsel. This is the only remaining viable option. Answer choice B basically rules this out.

Now we see that any of three options are unacceptable, so we have no choice but to arrive at the judge's conclusion.

My suggestion is to develop a skipping & timing strategy. I'm averaging -1 on games, and I never really 'learned' games. I read a few chapters from the LSAt trainer, and just got to practicing after that. This section is not conceptually challenging - but it takes a whole lot of focus to execute. I got better by playing easy games quickly to the point where I can be done with games one and two in under 12 minutes. My reco is drill the easy games and slowly move the timer down before the test. That way you'll have more time for the harder games in the back half of the section.

Moreover, there's usually one or two tougher questions in the beginning of the section. These can be 'how may possible combinations,' min max, rule switch, or some sort of misc section. Just flag those and come back if you aren't at 100% mastery yet. If you're able to move through those games at lightning speed you will have time to swing around again when you have more information & more game boards to answer these by elimination if not by inference.

To your point about splitting - I don't actually think splitting should have that big of an impact on your score/time management. The time it takes you to split can either be done up front or it can be done in each individual question. It's up to you really. Either way you'll have to spend the time somewhere. I personally don't split consistently, simply because I'd rather let the questions tell me when to split, rather than going through the motions up front. Before going into the questions, though, I play around with the game and rules in my head, so I guess that's a type of splitting, too.

Lastly, games is just about mental focus, tbh. I've noticed that when I'm drilling and I'm a little cocky or not 100% tuned in, I can slip down to -4 during a section, but when I'm in the PT mode, I'm consistently at that -0 to -2 mark. It really just is a matter of being ruthlessly focused and diligent with your habits and organization. Best of luck.