Proctors: Proctors were overall very nice. In fact I remember that on my test day there was construction happening across the street. Honestly I didn't really hear it but the proctors told us before the test specifically that they were aware of it and had even sent students across the street to ask if they could delay their work until after the test or at least keep the volume to a minimum. I thought this was incredibly nice of them and showed that they really did care about creating a quiet testing environment

Facilities: Restrooms were pretty small I remember. There's a few of them scattered throughout the various levels of the building but each has only maybe one or two stalls inside so if you have to use the restroom before the test or during a break it might take a bit as I recall there being a bit of a line. Other than that the building was nice and cool (some people needed jackets, I was fine and preferred the a/c and cool classrooms) and the classrooms were really nice as well

What kind of room: Size of a 20-25 person classroom. Mine was on the third floor in a very quiet building

How many in the room: About 10-15 students per room

Desks: Huge desks! A full table for each person!

Left-handed accommodation: N/A, you get a huge desk

Noise levels: Very quiet throughout. The building is nice and quiet and nobody seemed to be around for miles on campus on the day of the test

Parking: Parking was pretty easy, much if it is nearby the building itself. Signage was put up so not hard to find. There didn't seem to be very much parking as I recall as far as number of spaces but I got there early so it wasn't an issue.

Time elapsed from arrival to test: Arrived at around 7:45am and we went into the room by about 8:15-8:30 if I recall correctly and I want to say that the test started around 9am. Really rough times since this was so long ago now but I remember waiting in the building for probably at least 30 minutes before getting into the room

Irregularities or mishaps: None

Other comments: Pretty good location to take a test. I'm from a much larger university within an hour of redlands and didn't want to take it at my school because I've been in the ridiculously large lecture halls with their small desks and knew that wasn't going to be fun. Super glad I went to Redlands

Would you take the test here again? Definitely. From the quiet rooms and campus, the super nice proctors, and the huge desks honestly I doubt you could ask for a more perfect testing center

Date[s] of Exam[s]: October 2015

Okay so I'm pretty much at my wit's end here with the last 2 or 3 tests I've taken.

As background, I used to be incredibly consistent on the Logical Reasoning section. I would typically miss 1 or 2 per section and would never miss more than 3 overall in both sections combined. This was the case for most of the PTs I took. Then PT50 happened. I thought I was just having a bad day, and ended up missing 5 LRs that test. Then on PT51 I missed 3 (not more than usual) but then today on PT52 I missed 5 again.

Ironically, I'm at the point where I'm getting 180s on nearly every single Blind Review I do. I'm overall pretty accurate at never missing questions that I don't circle, but now I feel like just as I've gotten really good at understanding how to answer nearly any LR question and answering them all accurately and not falling for any of the tricks (untimed) I've also gotten way worse on the actual timed PT. This is hugely frustrating for me since, before this started happening, I was consistently scoring around 174-175 and was weakest in the RC section (with LG nearly always at -0). I spent a week or two and really drilled RC hard and was able to get myself down from nearly -4 or -5 to -2 or -3 each time. But now LR has gone off the rails! I feel like I can't win!

At first I thought it was my strategy for balancing time on LR. Previously, I would skip almost any question I didn't immediately feel comfortable with or thought would take a while (even if they were easy MBTs that I just didn't want to diagram out). Now, I've tried to spend more time just going through the test a bit more linearly so that I don't feel strapped on time having to go back to a bunch of skipped questions at the end of the test. I thought this would be a good strategy but it seems now like I'm missing more questions anyway.

So I'm not sure what to do. On today's test it was hugely disappointing that 2 of the LR questions I missed were incredibly trivial and had more to do with the fact that it seems like I rushed through the question because of time than that I didn't understand it, and, again, I'm able to correct every mistake in Blind Review.

Not exactly sure what to help me improve at this point. I feel too confident to review basic lessons on LR questions (again, I get nearly a perfect score in blind review, so I obviously understand the concepts, its just that something mysterious happens on the timed tests) and I don't really know what else to do other than to look back at questions that I got wrong, but seeing as they're spread pretty evenly across different question types randomly, not sure how good that would do me either. Anyone experience anything like this before?

So I'm on my 15th PT now (just took PT50) and I've been noticing that the Logic Games section in the last like 8 tests I've taken PT43 - PT50 have all been listed on 7sage's score tracker as a difficulty of only 1/5. Is it typical for LSATs in later years also to consistently have easier logic games sections and more difficult LR and RC sections? Or is it pretty random and this has just been a crazy fluke streak of really easy logic games sections?

I'm just wondering because I used to do pretty spotty on logic games and would have a lot of variability in how many I missed in that section, but by the time I fixed it and was able to get much more consistent (I've thankfully gone -0 on the games for like 7 tests in a row now) I started to notice that the game sections themselves were actually easier too. Hoping that my skills haven't only been honed for the easier games or at least that what I've been practicing so far is representative of the typical relative difficulty of the section as a whole

As I've been doing more and more practice sets and going through problems showcased in the tutorial videos, I've started to not just read things like answer options in the order that they're listed when going about answering a question. For instance, when doing some practice RC questions this morning, I would read a question and then skip down to, e.g. answer E and work my way up to A rather than to read starting from A and go down to E. I don't think I started doing this for any particular reason other than sometimes I would get frustrated by the first few options and would want to see if I could find something better lower, but then I started to think that possibly this could insulate you from the tricks that the test occasionally throws at you such as putting really tempting answer options at the beginning or right before the actual answer at the end.

I'm just wondering if this is a viable strategy (or worst case just neutral) that could be useful to do when taking the test. I can't really think of any downside seeing and the upside would be that (I assume) LSAC assumes most people read from top to bottom and would thus try to design tricks that way. I also wonder (but haven't actually tried) if this kind of strategy would apply to doing individual questions too. Problem I see with that is that it could get cumbersome time-wise to be skipping around so much or starting from the end and coming forward (especially if the questions increase in difficulty towards the end, causing you to waste time on less questions).

Anywho, just wanted some thoughts on this. It seemed kinda helpful initially but just wondering if it could be a problematic strategy or what you think.

So throughout my (definitely rocky) studying process I've made lots of gains in the various sections of the test while also hitting various hiccups (many of which I've come here to complain or ask about). However, the PTing I've done in the last week exemplifies the worries I have for the October test coming up very soon.

So up until mid last week I was in a huge slump for a while, having really hard times on LR particularly (which had always been my good section), missing way more questions than usual (peaking at like -5 or -6, up from the usual -1 or -2, which I posted here about). At the same time, however I had made some definite gains on LG (missing between 0 or 1 per test) and RC (which shocked me because I heard it was very hard to improve on and I went from consistent -4's to -1's or -2's). So I was super stressed about that and being able to improve in time. Around this time I was fluctuating pretty heavily around 171ish a low of 170 to a high of 174 (so obviously still not bad at all, but what was worrying me more was the weird distribution where I was doing so badly on a section that I had historically done really well on)

Something suddenly clicked last week though. After two particularly rough tests at the beginning of last week, I had some kind of breakthrough and scored two 178s in a row. Obviously I was ecstatic. It was the first LR that had gone back to "normal" for me while I maintained my gains in LG and RC. This week's PTs started on Monday and I got a THIRD 178 in a row (again, ecstatic) while still maintaining consistency on all three sections (missing only 1 LR question, 1 RC question, and 1 or 2 LGs).

So my worries are mainly to do with what happened on yesterday and today's PTs which were radically different from the three 178s. Yesterday I went from only -1 on the previous 6 or 7 RCs to getting a whopping -6. At the same time, I got -4 on the LG section which, though admittedly harder, was still way more than I'm used to. Today basically the same thing happened, with another huge -5 on RC and -3 on LG (which was particularly frustrating because it is supposedly only a level 2 RC and the game that basically made me run out of time was only a level 3). The good news was that I maintained my LR strength and only missed 2 on each of yesterday and today, which was fantastic and in line with what I was doing before my huge slump. So yesterday's score was a 172 (obviously not bad at all, but admittedly lower than I'm comfortable with) and today was even worse, a 170 (one of my lowest scores I've had in a long time).

Now, obviously my scores have not been bad. I'm fully aware that my scores, even my so-called bad day today of 170, are incredible scores that are approaching the high 90th percentiles. So, I'm not trying to complain about them at all. What my primary concern is is my inconsistency this close to the test day. My personal goal is to come away from the actual test with a 175. If I could score a 175 on test day I would be over the moon, so it's not like I'm aiming for a perfect 180 here or anything. But with my GPA and the school's I'm looking at, a 175 would obviously be ideal and put me in an incredibly comfortable position. And the thing is is that the three 178s (plus the fact that after every test I blind review at or near 180) I just score tell me that I am at least CAPABLE of doing really well on test day and achieving my goal, but the fact that I can vary by sometimes up to 8 points in the span of a day, and the fact that I can go nearly 10 tests with an average RC score of only -1 or -2 max and then suddenly have two full tests in a row where I go -6 scares the living hell out of me and stresses me out. Obviously every test is different, people have bad days, and even a great LSAT taker's scores are going to fluctuate test to test, but it just seems that such a drastic difference, particularly in RC these last two days, is something other than that.

Any help/advice would be greatly appreciated! Thanks so much, this forum has been a really great resource for when this test has gotten me really stressed!

Hi all,

I just wanted to see if I could get some advice about my situation because I'm starting to get really nervous about whether or not I can take the October test. Unfortunately if I don't, I'm not sure when the next feasible time will be for me to take it. I'm a rising junior, but because the December one is right around my finals when I'm sure I'll be way too stressed about schoolwork to do much LSAT studying (plus I'm on the quarter system which means during the quarter I would have little time too) and because next summer I'm going to be taking classes and writing my thesis I wanted to try and get it done this summer.

My diagnostic around early June was a 162. After that I studied using 7sage for about 6 weeks before starting to take prep tests and landed at around 169. I've been taking on average 3 tests per week and have now taken 6 tests. Unfortunately it looks like I'm sort of already plateauing at around 169-170 and my goal is to get a 175 on test day. I did have one kind of outlier, the test before last I actually scored a 178 (PT41) which got me really excited after a string of like three 169's in a row, but then today I scored only a 170 again. I was hoping I would at least have improved to like 171-172 but no dice. So it seems like thats where I've leveled off score-wise.

As far as per-section, it kind of varies wildly which concerns me. I think as far as consistency goes, LR is my best. In the last 6 tests I went -5, -3, -5, -2, -2, -6. So i had a string of a couple pretty good scores where I only missed 2-3 total in LR but then, again today to my dismay, I did super bad and missed 6 of them.

LG is definitely hugely hit or miss with me. Some tests I've missed as most as 9 or 10 (cases where I couldn't even finish all the games and got stuck, plus got some wrong), whereas today I was able to make up for my shitty LR score by missing none of them (but the games were ridiculously easy.) At the same time, in the PT where I magically scored 178, the games weren't completely trivial and yet I was able to finish them and get them all right. So lots of variability for reasons that elude me.

RC is pretty stable too, but still not where I want it to be. Last 6 tests went -4, -2, -3, -4, -1, and -5 (today). Not a horrible average but definitely not where I need it to be for test day.

I'm pretty worried about my consistency. I had a pretty bad day today (in that I improved almost none, and in fact did worse on the LRs which I'm usually much better at) and I'm super worried that I'm not going to be able to get this down in time for October while still being able to do enough PTs. I had originally scheduled myself to do another 3 or 4 PTs this week but decided I would only do 2 (at the end of the week) after taking 2 or 3 days off to really study the questions i'm missing most often hard (in LRs this is Flaws) and seeing if I can improve that way.

Overall I'm pretty lost. I'm having a really hard time making the marginal gains I need to get myself consistently above 170 and into the 175 region (except for the wonderful 178 test where everything magically went right) and my variability in scores for the individual sections (particularly LR on bad days, and LG seemingly randomly) scares the crap out of me. I'm not sure at this point what my studying should be like, how many PTs and how often I should be doing them, or what. I'd really appreciate any advice since this as I'm really not even sure if it's worth it to keep going for October at this point which is a humongous disappointment for me. Let me know if there's anymore details I can provide that would be helpful. Thanks guys!