I agree with crazy Crowe, but wanted to add that you should try to save a good chunk of the pts numbered in the 80s and 90s for when you’re nearing the end of your prep and getting ready to take the exam. Those tests are the ones that most closely resemble the modern test and are invaluable as a way to determine what kind of score to expect when you sit for the actual lsat.

Unless you’re many years out from when you graduated undergrad (non trad), I think law schools typically prefer academic letters. If a school allows you to submit more than the required amount then you could submit an additional one from an attorney or other supervisor if you feel your application would benefit from it.

Typically for professors it's courteous to ask for letters about 3 months in advance of when you need them, so for the law school application cycle I asked in June. I think May (this month) is probably a good time to ask as well because in my experience professors can be fairly slow to respond. It also gives you plenty of time to ask someone else if you need to and still apply early.

Hi Yuzhou, I’ll try to let the poll mostly speak for itself but I wanted to add that many people may underestimate how hard it can actually be to stay at the very top of your law school class. In curved courses professors only have so many A-grades to give, and you may very well end up being just below the cutoff even if your work is still of excellent quality overall. It is true that being at the top of your class at Hastings will likely help with landing a job in biglaw (if that is your goal), but my .02 is that the additional stress of retaking and reapplying now to get into a school which has better big law placement and more flexibility in terms of acceptable class rank, is considerably smaller than the stress you will face if you attend a school that requires you to remain at the top of your class if you want to work at a biglaw firm.

Hi Alon, I was actually in this exact situation and I totally understanding how frustrating can be, given that a high score feels so close but yet so far. On average I was missing 2 or 3 points in LG, and then around 5 or 6 total between RC and LR. On good days I would miss a few less and break 170+, but if not I’d get 169 or 170.

From searching on the boards I found that a common piece of advice was to train yourself to consistently be able to go -1 or -0 on one section. This allows you to deal with variability in the difficulty of the other sections while still comfortably getting above 170 on a consistent basis. That’s not to say it’s the only way to break 170, it’s just anecdotally the best way to do it consistently. For most people the section they chose to “perfect” seems to be logic games, because it’s the most learnable and arguably the least variable, save for the occasional misc game. This may not help you if you’re already consistently killing a section, though.

Some other things that helped me to break from the low 170’s into the high 170’s were a couple of tricks I picked up on RC and LR to save time. For LR the main one was for the parallel reasoning questions, which have very long but highly similar answer choices designed to confuse you. They were a huge time sink for me, but some videos online showed me that you don’t actually have to closely read every answer, and can eliminate some right off the bat because they alter key terms in the argument (I.e. change “some people” to “most people”, change “should” to “may”, etc.). For RC the main one was to read each passage closely once, and then take the time to quickly skim the main points right afterward. It may not seem like much, but I found that it materially improved my ability to recall details and often stopped me from having to waste time going back to the passage for easier questions, which left more time for the harder ones. That being said, I still personally feel like there’s a lot of luck involved in getting scores in the high 170s. I got a 177 on test day, but the score band reported for my exam was all the way from 173 to 180.

Let me know if you’d like more clarification on something I said. I can’t guarantee that my advice will be useful to you, it’s just what I did and saw results from. Regardless, your scores are already great, and I’m sure you’ll do fantastic on test day!

It’s probably going to depend on the schools you’re applying to. Some say they only consider the highest score, others say they consider all scores and would like an explanation if there’s a significant “disparity” between them. There are also some that say they don’t want to be sent addendums about score increases. The JD program FAQ is a good place to look for a school’s policy, it’s also sometimes included in the application instructions.

My advice would be to write a very brief addendum and then send it in if you see something indicating that a school would like an explanation.

I think it’s a good idea, personally. Having finished applying last week it seemed like a number of schools wanted to know what I was doing currently. Adding this position would probably be a good way to establish that.

Seems like the sept-nov galleries game was on an experimental section of the international test a couple years ago. I’ve seen some posts on Reddit from people with one LG claiming to have had that section, but there’s also been people who’ve said they had the buildings section. There might be some confusion due to multiple games featuring buildings/galleries. We’ll probably have a better idea of what was scored tomorrow when powerscore puts out their recap podcast.

Have you taken a diagnostic? That would let you see what section you struggle most in. If there's one section you scored particularly low at you could then focus on the part of the curriculum that deals with that section in the hopes of making the greatest "return" on your studying. I finished the LG portion in about a month.

Other than that just take practice tests, but try to save some of the newer ones for a possible retake.