There really are two fundamental skills to doing well in LR - argumentation and inference. To understand argumentation, you have to be really good at isolating the conclusion and evidence in arguments. When most folks miss in LR it's because they've misunderstood conclusion and evidence. The more you focus on conclusion and evidence, the more you can see patterns in the way they can be presented. For instance, you'll see arguments by analogy, contrast, direct evidence, etc. You'll also see the different types of arguments that exist out there - those that attempt to prove causation, those that attempt to explain phenomena, those that attempt to predict future events, and those that make a subjective judgement about situations/events. Predictable types yield predictable weaknesses, which can predictably be identified, made better, or made worse.

Inference is the ability to select something that is most likely to be true based only on a specific set of information. The usual struggle in inference is with oneself - you'll easily substitute yourself where there should only be the LSAT. Look at your misses and see if you find yourself drifting into using your own knowledge/common sense instead of sticking solely with what's on the page.

Yes, it can be so tempting to think that success in LR is all about mastering that long list of question types and the strategies attached, and that is important, to be sure. But a sure sign of someone who is excellent at LR is how little they care about the specific question type. They know that once they've nailed the argument they can do anything the test asks them to do.

Few implies at least one. If we need to contemplate zero, they will say something like few or none.

sufficient assumption questions all have if in them. Necessary assumption questions will have words like required, depends, or relies.

Sounds to me like you're really close to pulling it all together. I'd keep grinding in LR for sure trying to strike the ideal balance between care and speed. I don't think you meant that you're struggling with PSA/SA anymore, but if you are, those should be easily conquered for someone of your obvious strength.

No reason not to expect an improvement considering that the 161 looks like the bottom of your ability range.

to negate a conditional allow the sufficient condition but deny the necessary. So the statement above is ~intended-->~pleasure; negate by allowing ~intended --->pleasure then see what happens.

@ how far are are away from your target score? What have you done so thus far to prepare?

Wow. Let me get this out of the way, and please forgive me. Setting that tight of a timeframe for an initial LSAT study will all but guarantee you score below your true ability. The only exception to that is if you're one of the few true LSAT savants out there who need only look at a couple of past tests to bang out a 177. Those savants cold practice test (like they've literally never seen the LSAT before) somewhere north of 160. If that's not you, you're not going to reach your potential by only studying for two months. Does that mean don't take the test? NO! If you have a super-high natural ceiling, you could very well land in an acceptable range in two months. Only you know what's acceptable to you.

Now, on short timeframe you have to start with your cold diagnostic. See how your misses are concentrated. If you are missing a ton in LG that's better than missing a ton in LR/RC because LG can be learned and mastered more quickly. My honest advice is to take that cold diagnostic and hire a tutor on the 7sage approved tutor page, plan for 3x/week sessions and get to work. Alternatively, set yourself a goal of working through the Core Curriculum on here in no more than 2 weeks, and then expect to max out on drilling/practice tests between now and test day.

Best of luck!

I don't see any harm in including a couple of activities you participated in, particularly if you held some sort of leadership role. Be discerning, though, and don't overload. My instincts tell me that service activities are a bit more impressive than social ones, but certainly if you held a leadership position in a sorority/fraternity that's a thing to include.

@ said:

Moreover, a 159 is a score that some people fight for. Don't disregard that. Best of luck!

LOVE this!!

I think it's impossible to really answer this question without knowing what you did during your eight months of study and what you're going to do differently during these next two months. If you spent your eight months totally on your own, perhaps depending piecemeal on 7sage and a smattering of other resources and only studied a couple of times a week, then there's greater reason for optimism than if you maxed your resources and efforts over eight months.

I will say that the climb from 150 to 160 is still more about mechanics than the more subtle things you need to master to move within and beyond the 160s. It's entirely possible that you have glaring gaps in your knowledge/strategies that working with the right person/people could help you resolve quickly.

I really like what @ said. At some point, you do have to move on with your life. Part of that is leveling with yourself about your legal career. Do you aspire to sit on the Supreme Court, work as a US Attorney, or be a partner at a Big Law firm? If the answer to that is "no", then beating yourself into a pulp to get some higher LSAT score is not the right move (full disclosure: I am a full-time LSAT tutor, so it's definitely not in my best interest to discourage further studying). You mentioned UNC and Texas, which is surprising to me. I'd only go to either if I was planning on practicing law in either North Carolina or Texas. Law school outside of the top-14/15, whatever (or to be completely honest outside of YHS), is really a regional game. Here in Georgia, most of the people I encounter practicing law on a daily basis went to UGA or Georgia State, and Georgia State has a 158 LSAT median. Is someone making a horrific decision by going to Georgia State? Not if they want to practice in Atlanta and are comfortable with the sorts of legal jobs a median performance at Georgia State will open to them. If you're going to take your 159 and see what comes from it, start with the basic question: where do you want to practice law?

I don't know where you live or want to practice, but 3.4/159 opens a whole slew of flagship state university law schools to you. Law is prestige-obsessed and that inculcates in those who aspire to enter it a type of absolutist thinking that is not that helpful. You want to be a lawyer, and you can definitely be one with your current stats.

All that being said, if you want to keep pushing on this LSAT, then more power to you. Before you take another step in this direction, you've got to take a step back and assess. It is highly unusual for you to test in the 170s in practice but then not break 160 in reality. If those 170s were faithful (timing is everything), then you might have a serious issue with test anxiety. Meditation and therapy can help with this and perhaps bring your actual performance into line with what is your demonstrated ability.

Please remember this if nothing else...the only wrong choice you could make at this stage would be giving up altogether!

Congratulations, and thank you for encouraging all of us URM/BIPOC folks who are in this struggle. Good luck in your cycle.

I'm a tutor, so I really hope that this advice is not self-serving, but the answer to your question is that yes, it's time to do something different. It's hard to study completely on your own, even with a resource as deep and useful as 7sage. If you're not moving significantly after four months of study, it's time to change programs or bring in a tutor. Tutoring dollar for dollar is probably the most effective way to move your score...you can find skilled tutors who can help you move without completely breaking the bank. The first step to doing that is to try to find a tutor who excels in teaching, not just one who can flash a 179 or 180 at you.

I'd go back to PowerScore ViewSTAMP, try to get that down as well as possible and ride that into this test. It's too late in the game to learn any big new strategies. By the way, as a fellow tutor myself, I was shocked to read about this don't read the passage RC strategy, and I am not at all surprised to learn that it is faulty. In my experience there are no shortcuts to doing well in RC. It's just a situation where you have to be willing to learn some basic ideas and then grind until you get better. Please don't feel like an idiot. We in the test prep community compete on the brilliance of our strategies, so we are prone to push hard on things that seem unique, not paying attention to how much they are idiosyncratic versus broadly applicable.

Please do yourself a favor and write the "why x" statement, particularly if you're applying to places like Penn, UVA, Berkeley, and Michigan. You'll want to make sure you convince them that you're actually interested in attending law school there as opposed to notching acceptances in your belt and/or having a fall-back option that's suitable to you. The best case of course is that you do have a compelling reason for wanting to attend law school there (you're from there, you've already done things law-relevant in their region, they have a certain program/emphasis that suits your career goals). Failing that, at least make sure that you've done some deeper research into the school...know a few of their leading professors, mention some of their ground-breaking clinical work, see if they publish a journal in a field that is of particular interest to you.

There aren't any magic bullets in this whole thing. What works for one person may not work for another. The one thing to be cautious about though is hopping around with resources when you aren't getting instant results. LSAT mastery is won over time and really through you learning and mastering a comprehensive method and applying it repeatedly to real LSAT content. If you don't take the time to master 7sage, or Powerscore, or Loophole, or who/whatever, you'll just find yourself hopping around to something new again.

Logician really hit all the relevant points excellently, so I won't recapitulate just to put my own English on it, but I will offer this: the only, and I mean THE ONLY, meaningful output of any of this LSAT prep stuff is right answers for you on the test. So, if your method of thinking about SA is working for you, meaning you're getting a high frequency of questions right across a number of different tests, then you should not force yourself to learn some other method just because an expert tells you to.

If your method isn't giving you the results you need, then by all means it's time to refine your approach to SA. I'd start with your conditional logic skills. Most people I work with struggle with conditional logic primarily because they do not know when to use it. Have you nailed down your indicator words for sufficient/necessary? If not, that's a great place to start.

Definitely agree with the advice here to not include a GPA addendum. Grades pretty much speak for themselves. It is always better to show that your grades are not necessarily indicative of your academic potential or seriousness by showing how successful your business has been or how much you've achieved in the workplace since you've been out of school. In your PS, I'd frame things positively. Be excited about who you are now. Don't feel overly compelled to explain who you were three-seven years ago.

Well, you asked a lot here. Let me try to answer some of it. First, you should take your first PrepTest right now so that you can establish a baseline for your performance and also get enough initial exposure to give more context to the things you'll learn in whatever curriculum (7sage/PowerScore, etc.) you choose to use. I think you'll find many different approaches for how to mix and match materials, but the essential truth is that every successful study path involves two stages: learning the test and then mastering the test. Learning the test requires guidance (usually some "professional" source, but not always), but mastering the test is all about you in intensive self-study over a substantial period of time. It's important to realize that the only meaningful outcome with LSAT studying is getting enough answers correct that you get your goal score. So, to your question of should you switch, the answer is simple--are you getting, or are you on track to get, enough answers to hit your goal score? If the answer to that is no over a significant period, then it's time to change it up.

I don't think there's a rule as to how many notes you should be taking, since notes serve two purposes: they provide an easily-referenced distillation of concepts and they help with memory, so you should take as many notes on the material as you need to in order to understand and memorize the material so that you can use it on the test.

Totally want to join in the chorus here. If you can only take a few practice tests, make the most recent ones the ones you take, and reserve the most recent released PT for the last PT you take before you take the real one. Also, just in general, taking every single practice test is probably not necessary for anyone in order to be well-prepared, particularly because committing to such a thing seems a perfect scenario in which to burn out.

You should see your biggest improvement between your first cold diagnostic and the first PT you take after you've completed some LSAT preparation regime (7sage CC, etc.). That usually is six to eight weeks. Score moves of between 10 and 20 points are fairly common at that stage. Growth from there takes more time because the means of getting there are driven largely by where you're specifically struggling.

The cold diagnostic is (obviously) the best gauge of your native LSAT ability. As a rule of thumb, I'd expect anyone who cold tests in the 150s to move more quickly up the score ladder in general than someone who scores in the 140s. Please note, however, that where you start does NOT determine where you end up. Plenty of people arrive in the high 160s/lower 170s after starting in the 140s.

But, of course, there's a caveat here. If you missed a ton of AR questions on your cold diagnostic expect your score to move faster than someone who missed a ton of LR/RC questions. That phenomenon has everything to do with games being totally foreign to most test takers and severe struggles in RC/LR having to do with reading/critical thinking skills as much as any specific test strategies.

You will definitely not lose anything by waiting another year. More time (assuming you use it wisely) can only benefit you in the form of a higher LSAT score, better admissions results, and (yes this matters too) another year of interesting life experience not stuck in a classroom or textbook. You're fine.

PT slippage is a strong sign of burnout. As counter-intuitive as it is, this is probably the time to take two days completely off from the LSAT and then jump back in with a section, not an entire PT, slowly building back up to a PT. Remember that your goal is to be cresting right at your test date, not on the downslope.

I don't see how it couldn't mean a great deal. By being able to hit that score in a PT you've shown that your capable score range right now includes a ridiculously high score. That should give you great confidence. I suggest continuing doing what you've been doing, throwing in a much more recent (in the 80s) PT to see if there's variance and how much, and continuing to grind.

Good luck!