Howdy folks,

Anyone studying for the December test?

These forums can be encouraging but at the same time disheartening. Supposedly only 2% of people score a 170+ but it seems like everyone on here is angry if they don't get a 174. There's stories on here of people score a 170 on their first exam... I've been studying almost full time for a little over a month, and managed to get my first 163 two weeks ago, and scored 2 more since, but haven't been able to improve AT ALL since. I changed from old tests to new tests (prep test 69 just finished) in preparation for December, but I'm not sure if I'm going to take it. I was getting ROCKED in the old lsat (early/mid 1990's) logic games, so I worked really hard on those and now I only get -4 to -6 wrong on those, but now my logic reasoning has dropped from a -3/-5 to about a -6ish. Does this seem to be the trend on the newer tests v.s. the older ones?

I have until November 18th I guess to decide if I'm going to write or wait until February. I've applied to Western and University of Toronto here up north, and then I will apply to UBC as well. I know I need a 165 at LEAST even for just Western and UBC, especially since my undergrad GPA was only a 3.48. I never thought I would apply for postgraduate school. If I can't get a 170, U of T is out of the question, and it might be anyways even if I got a 180.

Anyways, what do you guys think, is 2.5 weeks going to get me to a 170? hahah I doubt it. If I apply in February, I probably need to score even higher since it's a rolling admission and that's close to the end. Anyone have thoughts? Advice? I'm feeling drained.

Hi all,

I got accepted to the University of British Columbia up in Canada. Pretty funny story, I actually 'argued' my way in. I was originally rejected and waaaayyyy down on the wait list. However, I sent them a lengthy e-mail arguing that their evaluation of my GPA was somewhat unfair (I did well on the LSAT though, their median is 164-166 or something and I was 171). After a lengthy back and forth and getting some information from old professors, they actually re-evaluated it and it worked out quite well. The major problem was that my school doesn't give out A+'s and so my GPA was like a full 3-4% lower than what it was supposed to be. Anyways, sometimes it's actually worth speaking out... the director also said the really enjoyed my Personal Statement and said that it's a lie that the admissions offices don't read them because she specifically remembered mine, which was really nice to hear. I was also offered a spot at Western, and they evaluated my cGPA as 3.03 hahahahahah and then probably they looked more closely at my last two years and maybe gave me like a 3.3 or 3.4. University of Toronto rejected me though outright, not even the courtesy of a waitlist lol. I get a chuckle about lawyering my way into lawschool.

Anyways. UBC actually has a pretty cool J.D./MBA program. Have any of you guys done these or looked at them? The issue is that my work experience is that of a long haul truck driver, a highway construction crew foreman and as a storefront counter worker, and despite the fact that economics and statistics are my favorite subjects and that I would be using my law degree mostly to try and get a leg up in the business world, I'm not sure if the MBA program is a good idea. Do you guys have any thoughts on this? Is it different doing a J.D./MBA as opposed to a pure MBA? I know you're supposed to have some industry work experience. Plus it's dammmmnnn expensive. But I did a cold take on a GRE and I managed to score above their 'recommended competitive requirements' for that exam (half of it is like the LSAT, but the math part I was AWEFUL at hahahaha).

Thanks folks. I hope you all have your fingers crossed if you're on the wait lists, or that you're celebrating an acceptance!

Hi All,

I got my February score back, and I'm nothing but ecstatic about it. I went from 160 in December to 171 in February. I owe a lot to this community. I didn't post much on here but I creeped, and I used a lot of the (free) 7sage materials. I feel like if I can help even one person get motivated and get the score they want, then this thread was worth writing. I have a description below of my LSAT experience and then some advice for anyone who wants it. Are you tired of egotistical high scorers giving advice? Then skip this thread. I was so tired of reading about ivy league wannabe's scoring 170+ whining about how bad they were doing/did that I totally feel your pain and I don't judge you for not wanting to hear about it. For the TLDR just read the itemized points and take what you want or ignore if you think it's stupid!

I applied to the Air Force 2.5 years ago, and it has been a slow process. After passing all the selection criteria, but going months of waiting and not getting called, I needed a backup in my life (I'm still waiting as of writing this post). The LSAT seemed like a good thing to put in my back pocket, and admission to some law schools wouldn't hurt if the time came. I had an older version of the Powerscore books sitting around, and I pulled them out (I didn't know what 7sage was). Starting on October 1st, I spent about 3 weeks deep in all 3 books reading them and taking notes and studying them carefully. Although I did some travelling during this time (Las Vegas and Tofino B.C.), I was spending at least 4-5 hours a day studying, with a day or two off a week. The only exam I had written prior to this was about 2 years earlier and I got about 50% of the questions right, putting me somewhere around the 30th percentile, although that's just a guess. After my power-score studying, I wrote my first exam and got a 161. I then focused on practicing from November until December just doing older practice exams. My highest PT was 167, the night before my December exam, and my lowest was a 161 (minus a weird outlier 156 where I got so frustrated in a logic game that I gave up). I wrote the December exam and it ended in tragedy. I scored a 160, below my average PT of 163, and it was the lowest practice test of ANY practice test I had done.

I became kind of bummed so I re-registered for February, and didn't start studying until January 3rd, giving me about a month to prepare. My mind was back in the cockpit of a fighter jet not in a Dean's office. What had butchered my December score was a weak logic games, so while I kept telling myself I would do full PT's and stuff, I never really did I kinda just practiced logic games over and over again until even in a super hard one I could keep my cool and minimize lost points. I sort of used the 7sage foolproof method for logic games, but less rigorously. The truth is that while I put in some good time, I wasn't a crazy aspiring lawyer, and I didn't put in insane time. I put in the work, and combined with a decent aptitude for the exam, did okay. Especially prior to my February exam, I was doing almost exclusively logic games, and spent most of my time working and in the gym. Maybe 1-3 hours a day, 3-4 days a week or something like that.

Before the February exam, I intentionally didn't look at an exam for 5 days prior to the test. I sat down and wrote on February 12th, and it went fine. I assumed I did a 165, since my highest PT hadn't got much higher (169), and I didn't really put in much extra work other than reducing variability on Logic Games. I got my score back yesterday, and I just about collapsed when I saw a 171. Now, this is a good score, but it's not like a 176 or 177 or something. I'm not an LSAT genius. I moved 11 LSAT points and 18 percentile points from my previous real sit down. Now I'll probably get into the law schools I applied to, and maybe next year just for Sh*ts and giggles I'll apply to some ivy schools and see what happens, but I'm not some crazy SJW or involved in every single issue in the world like I was in high school, so I'm not sure I'm Ivy material. So that's my story, and if you relate at all, or care about what I learned, I have some scattered advice below. Take what makes sense and leave what doesn't. This is a great community of people, and even though people who score high always sound a little bit egotistical when they talk, it really comes from a place of knowing that in the past we were sitting with lower scores, reading about other people who were doing better than us, and it's difficult to qualify why your help might be valuable to someone without first saying that you actually do well on the test.

In no particular order:

Be a killer. This exam is NOT about how many questions you get right. It's about how many questions you get right COMPARED TO THE PERSON SITTING NEXT TO YOU. This is an exam about percentiles not raw scores. If the question you're reading is easy, it's easy for the next person too. Answer the question faster and better, take every edge you possibly can at all times. Powerscore says it well, ATTACK the questions, no matter how confident you are, and move on.

Start early. This exam is in the truest sense a marathon and not a sprint. Learning the exam takes time. I'd rather do 10 practice test over 3 months than to do 20 practice tests in one. This stuff is more like taking edibles than ripping the bong, it takes a while to hit you.

Your brain gets tired. I saw CONSISTENTLY that when I took a week off from a long period of hard studying, I would come back that day and score 5 or more points higher than my previous test. The LSAT is an intelligence (intelligence about a particular way of thinking) test not a knowledge test (the MCAT is the opposite in this respect, every extra bit of stuff you can memorize helps). Every single exam has different questions, and your brain needs to be stretchy to adapt and understand the material. So, take the time to load KNOWLEDGE into your brain (LG games strategies, LR and RC question types, test strategies, etc. etc.), and then take time to give your brain a chance to soak it in so that when you hit that full length practice test, it has every ounce of INTELLIGENCE in it. You'll feel it; after a few days off all the questions seem easier. For those mechanically inclined, studying and PT'ing back to back is like filling your high performance engine with 87 octane. The engine knocks, gets less power and might blow up. But give it a few days rest and you're giving it 94 octane and the perfect tune.

Nail the logic games. The LG section is probably the only one where you can have 0 aptitude for it, but still do amazingly well. The 7sage method works well. Do a a LG games section, and then give it a day and do it again the next day, and the next, and the next until you really understand it. Once it's perfect put it on the back burner, then come back to it some time later and nail it to remember the tricks and to boost your confidence. Nailing the logic games and then guessing on the rest of the exam will give you a 140. Nailing the LG and then getting only 50% right on the other questions puts you in the 63ish percentile. The video explanations on this site are THE BOMB so use them.

Analyze your mistakes. Analyze. Your. Mistakes. Or as millennials do, Analyze (clap emoji) Your (clap emoji) Mistakes (clap emoji). I didn't use the blind review method. I'm pretty lazy, and going back and analyzing questions I'm not even sure I got wrong was tedious and annoying. I would do this: Write a Practice test and grade it. Cry about my score (I'm a 6' 250 lb dude) and have a snack so I can't remember what the right answers to the wrong questions were. For LR I would re-do all of my wrong questions. I would write down the question type/category (which helps me on harder questions so I can use systemic approaches when necessary), then I would write down why I chose the wrong answer, then select what I thought was the right answer and explain why I thought it was right. I would do this for all of them and check the answers again, and hopefully they were all right. If not, same thing again. The key is to really take time to think about WHY you got it wrong, and understand PERFECTLY why you were such an idiot for not getting it right the first time. You want to feel stupid after this process. For the RC I would start reading the passages again, then stop because RC sucks A** and I'll never get better at it. I would review the wrong questions and the right answers just to get a feel for it, which probably helped my score a little, but I spent very little time on this. For logic games, I would do them over and over again until I got it right, then use the approach above^(4.) to do it well. Honestly, the best thing I did was spend more time understanding why I got questions wrong, and less time actually writing practice exams. If you have a good work ethic unlike yours truly, using this method religiously on all the PT's is going to net you an objectively awesome score.

Put your phone in a different room when you study.

Get a job that lets you focus. I drove Uber. I like shooting the sh*t with people and driving my car (I have a 4.97 driver rating heck ya I ball hard NBD). I'd work enough to pay the bills whenever I wanted, went to the gym as much as I wanted and then pretended to study more than I actually studied for the rest of the day.

If you don't have the luxury of living at home and working part time like I did, try and change that. If you cant, spend less time doing stupid stuff that's not making your score better, but leave enough time to have fun.

Do not, under any circumstances, study for this exam if you are easily discouraged or if you're not really sure you want it.

Do NOT, under ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, listen to the stupid people here who whine about ridiculously high scores and claim that they achieved this with minimal work (i've been half guilty of both sides of this in the past and even now). These people, I've determined, are liars or extreme outliers, and much more likely to be the former than the later. Don't believe anyone who says they scored more than 165 on their first exam with no studying.

So to end, this is my unsolicited contribution to you folks at 7sage. Take it or leave it. Hopefully instead of law i'm flying mach two somewhere, but if not i'll see you guys in class. Good luck to all of you, and feel free to comment what you think of my strategy.

Hello Folks,

I posted this in the powerscore forum as well, but it looks a little dead over there. I was hoping I might be able to pick someone's brain about a particular question.

Hello everyone,

I'm working on conditional reasoning. Overall, I find using my intuition works 80% of the time, but sometimes I'm going to need to use the techniques discuss in Powerscore Logical Reasoning Bible Chapter 6 in order to maximize my score.

So, my question stems from question 2 of chapter 6 on page 171. The question is:

Admin Edit: Please don't post LSAT materials. LSAC owns a copyright on this and posting is a violation of the copyright. For reference, I believe this is from PT 31 Section 3 Number 22.

So, when I use my intuition, I get answer E. But I am practicing my conditional reasoning, and I am not able to get that answer.

I managed to get the following:

NEOR: Nucleomorph is the remains of an engulfed organism's nucleus

SVG: Single version of the gene

(I use slashed /// in order to designate "not")

/NEOR ------> SVG

and the contrapositive

/SVG -------> NEOR

Which, in the book is generally correct. However, the book then suggests that because:

Premise 1: /NEOR --------> SVG (I understand this as noted above)

Premise 2: /SVG

Conclusion: NEOR

And then somehow, to my bafflment, they come up with the statement that:

SVG ------> /NEOR (This is neither the contrapositive or the replication of the original conditional reasoning as it appears in the last sentence. In fact, it simply looks like a Mistaken Reveral to me.)

I am NOT understanding how they build this conditional reasoning argument. Indeed, my only clue is that maybe a premise=sufficient condition and that a conclusion=necessary condition that maybe this is how they ended up doing it? But my searches online don't show this to be true.

Additionally, answer choice E does not have any conditional indicators, making it difficult to decide what is the necessary and sufficient condition for choosing your answer. Are there any resources out there that help with doing this? Could I ask anyone for a little help? Thanks a tonne!!!