I was hitting 165-168 on PT1-20 when I first started 7sage and found the CC to be repetitive at my level of preparation. I only used parts of the CC to supplement my weaknesses during PT while PT+BR and problem set drills took up most of my study time. If you look skim through the CC and feel comfortable with most of the material or if you're already doing well on your BR, then going straight into PT + BR and supplementing that with the unfamiliar parts of the CC and doing drills should be a solid plan. However, if you have little to no mastery of the CC, going straight into PT won't help very much. Purpose of BR is to give you sufficient time to think each question over, and if you're not familiar with LSAT concepts, extra time won't suddenly enlighten you.

I'm an international student from Asia as well (attending US college though). From what I've heard from some of my friends who have made it to, or are preparing for US law schools, and from what I've seen on online forums, I would aim for slightly higher than the median. 170+ should be the mindset you have going into prep - 171, 172 will probably give you a very good chance. It seems to be the consensus that T6 do care about whether you have that "superior" as your GPA so you might look to "make up" for that with a higher LSAT if you're interested. My friend with a GPA of "superior" was aiming for a 173 for Columbia, if that helps as a reference point at all.

Unfortunately, he actually gave up after his first LSAT and applied to a domestic law school.

You're probably not getting worse. PTs vary in difficulty, and your weakness in certain types of questions or sections can be more exposed when difficult PTs target such areas. My advice to you would depend on your target score. But as a general rule, I would start by improving LG simply by drilling the LG sections in PT 1-35. Learn the types of inferences you should be making every single time you do an LG section. If your goal is to hit a 170+, you'll obviously have work to improve both LR and RC. But I found the jump in PT score after mastering LG to be a good confidence booster.

While a fluctuation between 172 and 159 might feel alarming, try to shake off the times that your scores dips. Fluctuations are normal and there are factors outside of your control that might accentuate those fluctuations a bit.

For example, if your weaknesses in general are RC and LR, they may fluctuate more due to the variance of difficulty in LSAT sections. If your strength is in LG, you will probably get a -0/-1 regardless of the difficulty. Hence, you might thrive when you get a PT that has a hard LG section and a relatively easy LR and RC, whereas an easy LG section is no more of a benefit to you and a relatively harder LR and RC will punish you. Small things like the order of the sections may affect your performance as well.

Also, if you're practicing the PT in Flex mode, make sure you take the fourth section on your own time to gauge the actual difficulty of the PT. If the section you're missing out on is an outlier in difficulty in comparison to the other three section, the curve accounts for that. This means that your score will be abnormally high if the section you didn't take is the hardest section, or it will be abnormally low if the section you didn't take is the easiest.

If there are any questions (like parallel flaw and reasoning) for which I picked the first answer choice I found attractive and moved on, I go back to eliminate other answer choices there.

Also, I found that going through just my answer choices, either from the start or the end, remembering my reasoning, and looking for red flag words such as 'never' or 'always' to be pretty helpful.

The biggest gap between BR and the actual score happens due to time management. Set up a clear time strategy that works for you. I usually aim for first 12 under 10 min but first 14 under 15 min is my worst case scenario as it leaves just enough time.

For most questions, I read the stem and the prompt, and I know what answer choice I'm looking for so a quick skim is good enough. If time is very tight, I don't eliminate other answer choices once I find the answer I'm looking for and flag the question.

If your goal is to improve from 158 to 165, don't restrict yourself to just drilling. What you've been doing the past 3-4 weeks sounds like a good plan. However, I don't recommend using any of the newer PTs (70+) for drills; save them for actual test prep. If finding drill material is the problem, don't hesitate to drill with PTs you've already taken, especially LG. Redoing games might feel boring but it's a good way of making inferences a habit.

If you PT 1-35 AFTER the CC, then there's going to be an overlap of question's you've already done. Naturally, your score will be higher on those PTs. Aside from that though, I do think that PTs in the 40s were mostly very bland and also saw a few points drop after hitting 60+. There are some changes in wording over the years, as well as the adoption of the comparative passage in RC and the discontinuing of double question passage in LR.

My advice to you would depend on your target score and the amount of time you're willing to invest. If you're looking for 170+ and have time on your hands to do most if not all the PTs, grind LG on 1-35 until you can do all the questions under time. If you are not improving, don't start more PTs. This is because you ideally want to reach your target score before using up all the PTs as you might have to leave some for the potential second or third exam. If 161-166 is your target range or if you are on a tighter schedule, I think it should be fine to use up more PTs in a shorter period of time to gain test experience while also grinding LG sections that you've already done.

Also, evaluate how you handled the PT. Not just talking about BR. Ask yourself, did I manage my time correctly, or was there a time sink? Did I make all the necessary inferences for that game?

What methods have you employed in studying for the last three months? It's best to experiment and figure out what works for you.

Considering there is only a month until the January exam, I'll just talk about what methods worked for me. For LG, I drilled for about a week with the games from PT1-35 until I got all the questions right under the target time. I think this is where the most drastic change in score happened for me. For LR, time management was my biggest problem so I practiced LR sections with strict timing goals (i.e. finish first 10 questions in 10 minutes) to prevent excessive time sink. Practicing LR in 33:20 rather 35:00 helped as well. Learning when to skip questions and being able to manage time were the most beneficial for me. As for RC, I didn't have a specific method in prepping and my fundamental approach is pretty much the same.

Also, before taking a PT, I found it beneficial to take a few minutes to clear my mind and remind myself of the lessons I found useful.

LG: when stuck, revisit the rules; misc. game I don't know how to approach -> skip then come back; don't sink too much time on first two games

LR: first 10 questions in 10 min, skip and come back to wordy parallel question, flag and move on when stuck between two answer choices

If you had multiple tabs up on your browser, get rid of them. Turn off any unnecessary programs.

First time takers can also sign in early by going to ProctorU, go to sign in, put in email, use forget password to create a new password, and then logging in. This works because LSAC creates the ProctorU account for you before they send them out. I do not think they intended for you to do this, however, although this has been allowed for some reason for a while. I'm testing in Asia and decided not to take advantage of signing up early after seeing that most of the time slots were still open.

Did they send out an email for Jan Flex Asia time slots already? I got an email saying they send an email 12 noon Eastern Time Jan 7th.

This largely depends on several factors: your target score, your current PT range, and how much time you would be willing to put in for that score. If you are looking for a 5 point increase from 160 to 165, 20 PTs might be plenty and you shouldn't really waste too much time on the older ones at that point. If you are looking to push your score to as high as possible and are willing to study for the LSAT in the long term, save the newer PTs and start by drilling the CC, especially in the section you are weak at.

I took around 50 PTs over 5 months, starting with PTs 30+ and then drilling LG from PT1-35. There is a noticeable difference in the earlier PTs and the newer PTs; even PTs 40-50s felt different from newer PTs. I ended up with a 20 point improvement on my actual test since my diagnostic.

Oh, I see what you are talking about. That's a good catch. It really all comes down to whether you interpret "Only three-bedroom apartments have balconies" as "Only three-bedroom apartments have multiple balconies" or as "Only three-bedroom apartments, as a collective, have balconies (in total, regardless of the distribution)". I believe due to the ambiguity, it's possible to interpret it as either - I do feel that at a colloquial level, latter is more common. In the latter interpretation, the contrapositive would hold, whereas in the former it would not. It would help to resolve the ambiguity if it is the nature of a balcony such that there typically is only one per apartment. Phrases like "These people have families" or "People with high IQs" imply one IQ per person and, for most cultures, one family per person. But technically, I think there is an ambiguity here that allows it to be interpreted as having "Only three-bedroom apartments have multiple balconies".

Any apartment that has more than two bedrooms is not above the fourth floor (contrapositive). Hence, any three-bedroom apartment is not above the fourth floor. Only three-bedroom apartments have balconies. Hence, the only apartments with balconies is not above the fourth floor.

Could you clarify which part you found there to be a mismatch in singular and plural?

Accept the fact that there may be games where you don't get every question correct. If you come across a difficult game that might cause you to sink time, skip it and come back later. Don't let that one game ruin the rest of the section. Especially if it's a game you've never seen before and you're not sure how to approach it.

I usually need a perfect LG section to hit my target score, but I tell myself that a particularly difficult LG section will mean at least one of the other sections will be relatively easy or the curve will be more generous to calm my nerves.

I take the simulate Flex version, and take the second LR section in Problem Sets after a 15 minute break. I use both the Flex score and the 4 section score as a loose marker of where I am at.