Hey guys,

I've been on 7Sage for quite some time now but I don't post that often. Here's my background: I started studying for the LSAT in the summer of 2014 with a Blueprint classroom course. It was not helpful for me and I continued to study after the course but not consistently. I found 7Sage in fall of 2015 and went through the curriculum. It was helpful but I still didn't feel ready to take the exam. Between April 2016 until now I have been studying consistently. I even took a 6 week leave from work to study full time prior to yesterday's test. I have a 3.9 GPA from a great school. My goal score was 165+ for yesterday's test. I have been PTing in the mid-160s and BRing in the 170s.

Yesterday started off great. I felt good about the first three sections (LR-RC-LR). However, like many others on here, I had some serious issues with LG yesterday. LG was my 4th section. I completely choked on games 3 and 4 and unfortunately carried that anxiety and stress into my last LR section which has turned out not to be experimental. Needless to say it was extremely hard to focus in that last section and I had to guess on more questions than I normally would need to. I am seriously considering canceling my score. I know most schools take the highest score, but I can't stand the thought of having a low score on my record. I am completely devastated.

What should I do? I am not even sure how to study moving forward now that these oddball games are becoming the new "norm".

Before the test was handed out, the lady to the right of me was sneezing. The lady to the left of me had some tissue and was reaching over me to hand to her. I simply took it from her and gave it to the lady to the right of me and the next thing you know a proctor comes up to me saying"There can be no communication between test takers. This is your final warning. If it happens again, you will be dismissed." I told her that I didn't say anything and just gave her tissue. Then she asks,"Do you want to be dismissed?" I didn't respond and the test was handed out. My nerves from that incident were wracking during the first section and I believe i totally bombed section one. Anyways, as the test progressed I began to calm down and believe that I did well for the remaning 4 sections. Still, I believed I significantly underperformed for section one. I will be retesting I February and wanted tips for best controlling nerves. I normally don't get anxiety on standardized test but something different happened today.

I mean, I guess I get it. But I've had a terrible time trying to get an accurate gauge of where I fall on the application spectrum. I've even found that current law school students and those recently graduated from law schools are disinclined to share their number. Is it just super tacky for me to ask? I've never shied away from sharing my score on the Dec 2015 test and I doubt I'll be hesitant to share my score from this one if I'm asked. Just wondering how others feel about giving out the actual number.

Hey guys so I just took the DEC LSAT and my goal was to hit 165+. I didn't get sleep the night before at all (I don't really know why this happened...) so i went in today thinking I'm pretty screwed... But it ended up being not so bad apart from losing a bit of concentration during Section 3, which may have very well been the experimental section, and the last game. I felt like the test went good enough to where i might have hit my goal. However, since i won't know if thats the case or not, i was planning on completing my law schools apps by the time the scores get released and then deciding whether or not i want to keep studying for a FEB retake. Now, my question is, is this a good idea? Or is taking off 3 weeks to wait for the results and work on my apps too long of a break from the LSAT in case I would have to retake?

If not, would anyone like to start one here? :)

Especially considering the recent pattern with the logic games section, it would be nice to practice unique games to keep us on our toes

This is my second sitting for the LSAT.... i have been killing myself for 5-6 months now averaging -3 on LG -5 to -4 on LR and well RC -9 -13 ... I wasn't prepared my first time around completely underestimated the test...but i couldn't sleep the night before.. and scored very bad.... second time coming now and again i couldn't sleep last night tossing turning from 10 to 3 am then maybe got 2 hours of shut eye ... and went to the test like i was so disoriented and sleep deprived that i could hardly figure the word adjacent on the second LG .... I'm in a nightmare ... this is not what was supposed to happen ...

Hey y'all! So I'm retaking in September of 2017. The last time I took in December 2015. I've been studying since Augustus of 2016. Back then, I really should not have tested as I was weak in all three sections. Now, LG I want to take slowly as I master them. However, I really think I'm getting a bit too far behind since I been doing and redoing the LG intro lessons again and again for like two to three weeks now. I was wondering if it would be ok if I moved on in the curriculum for the LR and RC sections and just kept coming back to the lg lessons, basically moving a lot slower on just LG? Or is there intention in the way the curriculum was scheduled and I should just stick to it no matter how long it takes for me to get LG? I know that the fundamental concepts behind each section is the same so I should really be alright no matter which way I go, but I'm also a full time teacher so it's getting harder and harder to schedule time to study and I don't want to fall so behind that I don't even get to the other LR types and RC practices.

Also fir what it's worth from advice on this board I went ahead and purchased the lsat trainer! I'm hoping to start working through that to complement 7Sage soon!

Thanks in advance!

This is long, rambly story of going from about a -14 on RC to -4 on RC because I stopped being stubborn.

So a couple of days ago I had a substantial RC meltdown. Basically a whole bunch of events transpired that more or less showed me what I needed to do to help my RC. Here are the events that kind of resulted in me learning how to do RC more efficiently.

Until about four days ago, out of the practice tests I have completed, I had maybe gotten 2/4 passages completed on RC (Averaging about 12-15 minutes per passage – no joke). Even when I tried to do J.Y.’s memory method I would just sit there thinking “I just can’t do it, J.Y.! I’m just not smart enough!” (if you don’t think J.Y. is omniscient, you’re doing the course wrong).

Then, I did one passage and got ¾ passages done on a prep-test with one sneaky line reference question completed in the last passage. I heralded as a huge success thinking, okay. This means I’m getting faster at reading.

Correlation vs. Causation anyone?

After doing some R.C. drills (at my same obnoxiously slow pace), this was quickly disproved.

Then I just started experiencing dread at the myth that people can’t get higher on RC easily (or even at all, as some will tell you). And here I was, doing my drills, sometimes spending up to ten minutes just reading the darn thing.

Then things just spiraled out of control; I freaked out and asked the Internet.

In doing so, I found this article, https://lsathacks.com/email-course/reading-comprehension/. I took the reading speed test the article tells you to and I read it at the same speed I’d been reading LSAT questions. Basically the thing just confirmed I was like dial-up internet when it came to reading speed (although of course, my comprehension was super high because I was reading so darn slow).

The speed test told me I was in the "insufficient" category of readers. I thought, “Insufficient? Screw you online reading test! Your website is insufficient. I read Derrida. My Master’s thesis has 250 references -- I had to read all of those. My whole job revolves around editing and making recommendations on doctoral dissertations and master’s theses. There’s no way I’m an insufficient reader… Is there?”

But there was no way I could think to RRE this apparent paradox.

So I resigned myself to believing I had an irretrievably FMOR and gave in to crippling self-doubt, tabbed back to the article, mortified, thinking “save me from this death.” The article said I was probably “subvocalizing” (a word for pronouncing each word as you’re reading) as I was subvocalizing – super meta. It said smart people didn’t do that.

Mortified at the thought that I had been doing this very thing basically most of my life, the article said I should use Spreeder (basically an app that flashes words across the screen at a certain number of WPM and you can use it to increase your number of WPM and so that you can learn not to subvocalize).

So, I loaded some pretty dense material on Spreeder. For ten minutes I spreeded (hmmm… spred? sprud?) at different speeds. After my ten minutes were up, and before I continued with my spreeding like a time-wasting buffoon, I figured I should look in the LSAT forums and see what other people said about Spreeder.

Lo and behold, J.Y. had already chimed in on it (he’s omniscient, remember?):

If you're running out of time on RC, it's not because you can't read the passage fast enough. It's because you're waffling b/t answers. You do that because you don't read well - be it the passage, the question stem, or the answers. Focus on reading well. Focus on reading for structure. Advice on how to read faster targets casual reading. If you've done any RC at all you'll know all too well that the speed limit is not set by how quickly your eyes can move across the page, how many words your eyes can snap in one shot, or whether you're subvocalizing. Rather, the speed limit is set by lack of subject-matter familiarity and the dense grammatical structure.

I thought, “So magic doesn’t exist. Great. I still can’t read well so basically I’m just screwed.”

Then I tentatively tried to look up LSAT RC reading structures (look them up in the forums – there are some really interesting ones). They gave me some insight, but no cheat sheet in the world was going to help with my problem.

Crestfallen, I returned to my RC drills. I tried to use the highlighter method posted up here earlier by @kylereinhard, hoping that the effervescent yellow stain would incite some inner RC warrior like it had for him. Long story short, I took 8 minutes on the stimulus and 4 minutes on the questions. And I got three wrong. Well, a girl can dream. (Not bashing his method. Try this -- maybe it'll work for you).

Crushed, I tried to look for happy stories in the Webinar section of people who did awesome things after being not so awesome. I found Allison Gill Sanford’s webinar https://classic.7sage.com/webinar/lsat-prep-for-170-plus/ and jumped to the part where she talked about RC. In the webinar, she said, “I would spend way too much time up front on the easy passages…” Which was exactly how I felt. Then (and I’m pretty sure it was her who said this, or maybe it was something I saw in the Trainer, which I looked in after listening to her webinar), which basically said we should try to keep our reading rate more or less constant over our different stimuli and then also replicate this in the practice test (obviously with allowances for harder passages).

So I figured, ok. If I am going to succeed at RC maybe I should just try to read at a speed that will just get me there on time. So, there are maybe 440 words per RC section. If you read in 2 minutes, that means 220 words per minute. If you read in three minutes, that’s 146 words per minute. I knew what it felt like to read at both of those speeds because I had spreeded earlier that day – which showed me that I could read, comfortably, at both of those rates.

So, I decided: I’m going to ‘spreed’ the stimuli (not in the Spreeder app, just on the page but at the same rate as I would read had they been in the spreeder set to 220), using J.Y.’s memory method, for one RC section. I grabbed my analog watch and set it to zero, and-ahem-spreeded the passage until 3:30. Then did a 30 second review of structure. Then answered the question until the full 8 minutes was up. Then went onto the next one. And so on.

Results of the first try:

-4 (And this time, not -4 thanks to guesses!) -- obviously a significant difference for me.

And since I was actually able to focus on the problems (which I’ve since noticed, thanks to BRs and this method, are more so with the questions than with the actual passage itself), I’m improving on RC now just as if it was LR!

Moral:

If you’re like me and you’re doing RC like a sloth because you basically misunderstand everything everyone says because you are some sort of backwards and self-destructive over-achiever (and/or you’re just inherently defiant to omniscient authorities even when they are one hundred percent correct), then maybe just run over quickly to Spreedster, prove to yourself you can read faster than you are right now, come back, and ‘spreed’ it.

I’m not saying skim it. Just read it at a faster rate. For 3:30 or 4 minutes or less. As J.Y. pointed out earlier, don’t worry about subvocalizing or anything like that right now either. You can become a non-subvocalizing speed reader at a different time if that’s really your passion, but I’m not so sure the RC section is the time for it unless you have like ten years to prepare or something.

Anyways. I hope this is helpful to somebody so that they don’t go through the whole ridiculous situation I just went through.

Keep calm and carry on!

*P.s. Don’t mean to insinuate that the article mentioned above can’t be helpful to some folks! Maybe it is the secret way to victory and I'll just never really know.

deleted

Please note that the information below will change to reflect the information we get! Contribute if you can via the official December 2016 LSAT discussion (linked at the bottom of this thread) without going into too much detail. If you think something is wrong or should be added, please post in the thread and let me know.

Real Sections:

LG:

-Corporations Trading with Eachother / Building Trading

-Paintings on a Wall / Watercolors & Oils

-Mystery Clues / Chapters in a Book

-Students on a Research Team / Green/Red Teams

RC:

-Great Migration of African Americans from North to South

-Rawls Theory of Justice Differs from Utilitarianism

-Insider Trading

-Brain Scans

LR:

-Poison Ivy & Evolution

-Caterpillars

-Wolves Eating Moose

-Bugs Eating Things That Make Them Taste Bad

-Volunteers Showing up for an Event

-Television Station with Popular / Highly Watched Program

-Alexander the Great's Tomb

-T-Rex

-French Biology

-Winter/Summer Trout

-Water Fee on Roads Rather than Dams / Tax Dollars

-Cat Food

-Iguanas on an Island

-Birds and Their Nests

-18th-Century Church Organ

-Politician

-Leopard Magpie

-Puzzles

-Teenage Morning Driving Accidents / School Start Times

-Those Who Desire to be Kind

-Devaluing Companies

Experimental Sections:

LG:

-Pianist/Violinists Playing Duets

-Doctors Scheduling Days to Work

-Coal Mining Company

RC:

-How Humans Changed as Cooking Progresses

-Fukuyama

LR:

-Smokers, Low Body Weight, Health

-Blaming a Company for Pollution until there was Algae

-Doctors and Handwriting

UNCONFIRMED:

If you can confirm that these are real / experimental, please do so by PMing me or posting in the main thread.

LR:

-Touching Something Blue and Red

-What Year a Book was Written based on it Asking Where He Was

RC:

LG:

This thread is closed for discussion. Official post December LSAT discussion here:

https://classic.7sage.com/discussion/#/discussion/9665/official-december-lsat-discussion-thread

Hello!

Would love to get a chat going for Asia test takers to figure out what the experimental sections are after the test tomorrow! I'm planning on signing on right after taking and would be psyched if others join.

Hope everyone has a great night tonight and day tomorrow! Here are my plans:

Tonight:

1. Watch a Harry Potter movie

2. Take a bath

3. Have a half glass of wine (sorry JY, I'm not full giving up my wine)

4. Read Harry Potter

5. Go to bed at 9:30PM

Tomorrow:

1. Get up at 5AM

2. Exercise (but not so much that I need to drink a lot of water)

3. Take a shower/shave/get ready like usual

4. Cook a hearty breakfast of eggs, toast, and greens

5. Have one cup of coffee

6. Warm up with 2 easy LG and half of a LR section

7. Drive to the test center

8. Listen to ABBA's "Dancing Queen" in the parking lot

9. Slay the test

10. Go to my BFF's and pop a bottle of champagne

11. Listen to more ABBA

Good luck everyone! We got this! Or if we don't, then I guess we'll be seeing more of each other at least until Feb ;)

Sorry if this has been asked before, but is there a way to completely wipe out my 7sage analytics for a "fresh start"? I know you can do it one by one but I'm just so lazy, lol.

I'm thinking about retaking some of the 70s pts. Has anyone done retakes? If so how helpful is it and how do you get the most out of it?

Anyone interested?

I took the LSAT twice: 174 and more recently 178

I have done almost every PT twice, and most of the logic games multipe times

Admin edit: Please refer to the 7Sage forum rules

https://classic.7sage.com/discussion/#/discussion/15/forum-rules

I know that there are 5 35 minute sections plus the writing sample but isn't there a break in between there ?

Hi, edited title and re-use it since it seems we can only post two threads:

My new question is...

What do you wear on the test day?

Would it be too warm in the test center due to the heater?

I'm thinking to wear something casual...like, really casual...

Anyone doing similar or will you wear formal such as suits etc.?

Original post:

It means we need to arrive at the test center by 8:30am right?

Or should we arrive at the test center at 30 min earlier to do those procedures?

Thanks

Hey y'all,

So, I have a silly question about the test booklet. What "type" of paper does the LSAC use on their official tests? Is it the same paper used for the PTs?

The reason I ask is because I would like to use #3 pencils for the LG section (#2 to bubble). However, #3 pencils tend to be somewhat difficult to read on recycled or thin paper. Tried using a #3 pencil on a PT that was provided to me by another prep company, and I couldn't even see what I was writing, lol.

Feel really stressful...

They chat in the living room and I cannot sleep well.

She does not let me know in advance even though I asked her so many times.

How should I tell her?

After she invite a frined A then she invited a friend B...and it's a male this time. He has already been here for a week and before that he stayed on Friday. Sat. Sun...

Is this normal???

I told her I'm studying for LSAT but...

Sorry not related to lSAT question :(

Dear Jeff (Creasey),

Each question stem will present a job for you to do. Simply do that job, nothing more, and nothing less. Do not do what it is not asking you to do. Stick to the scope of the arguments, be methodical in your approach, and trust your intuitions. You spent a great deal of time fine-tuning your fundamentals and mechanically answering questions. Trust this, trust JY (Belichick), stay focused, and be a beast.

Love,

Yourself

Is there a way to reset my login and take redo everything? Wondering if I can choose the option to extend it or if there is a fee I can pay to wipe it clean so I can start from the beginning but every time I want to choose the continue option it takes me to where I ultimately left off before.

A friend reminded me of this classic Chevy Chase clip. I thought 7Sagers taking the test tomorrow would appreciate the laugh!!

Hi guys,

I'm writing the LSAT on the 6th instead of tomorrow because of my accommodations. I was wondering if we get the same test or a different one?

Thanks!

It's with a heavy heart that I've decided to postpone this whole cycle, I'm going forego writing the December 2016 LSAT in favour of writing the September 2017 LSAT. I'm scoring in my current target range of the mid to high 150s, which would comfortably get me admission into the Canadian schools I wanna go to, but my GPA is so high (3.94) that I feel it would be an injustice to get an LSAT that low. Therefore, I've decided I want to go to Harvard, or Yale, and my GPA is at those standards, but I want to get an LSAT of a similar calibre to that of my GPA.

I've decided to take a little bit of time off, and then start fresh in a few weeks and write in September 2017. I'm going to upgrade to Ultimate + and extend all the way until September 2017.

Inspiration came from Alex Divine's post a while back, HLS, here we come.

I was wondering if anyone else was having issues accessing the question bank problems for PT79?

I get the error "The video could not be loaded, either because the server or network failed or because the format is not supported" I've tried both Safari and Chrome, no luck.

Thank you!