Devastated by my Sept score... advice for Dec retake?

lawschool33

I prepared for the September test for 6 months and averaged about a 157 on the prep tests I took. I want a 160 at least, but I fell short of that even though I felt better about the actual test than any other prep test. I ended up with a 151, and I’ve already signed up for December. I missed 11 in both LRs and RCand I missed 7 on LG (which is good for me). I honestly don’t know where to start now because I thought I had a decent grasp on the material. I have plenty of PTs left to practice with, but does anyone have any advice on honing these skills?

acsimon

Foolproof and work on cutting down your LRs for the next month. Don't worry about RC until the last 3 weeks, since you can make up a lot of points in those sections. I would say that, round Mid-Nov. I could reasonably see you halving your LR scores and getting to ~-4 on your LGs.

Note that improving on LRs helps you on RC in certain ways.

Alex

My very general advice is to first get the basics down, for LG develop a diagramming system for the different types of games, and really work on your deductive reasoning (inference making skills), each game has a game breaking inference that you will need to make in order to finish the games quickly and do well on the section.

For assumption family questions in LR you need to be able to weed through the excess verbiage in the stimulus and identify the argument core with surgical precision, identify the conclusion first then the reasoning and figure out why the premises do not completely substantiate the conclusion (there will always be at least one reason, there has to be). If you're able to pre-phase an answer it'll make it easier for you to identify the correct answer, that said don't fall in the trap of eliminating wrong answer choices because they don't match up with the answer you pre-phased. The arguments almost always have many reasoning issues and sometimes the correct answer choice will either be one that you did not anticipate or if it is it may be worded in a different way so be cognizant of that too. Also, one important thing when eliminating wrong answer choices work from wrong to right, not vice versa. A skeptical state of mind is imperative to doing well on this test, especially when eliminating answer choices. Usually there are 1 or 2 blatantly wrong answer choices which that you can eliminate pretty quickly. Of the remaining choices, the wrong answers will often contain a quantifier/modifier like "most" that extends the scope of the argument or something, so play close attention to stuff like that, one word can make an otherwise seemingly correct answer incorrect. Come up with one reason for why an answer choice is incorrect, if you can't don't eliminate it because it could be the correct answer. If you blindly eliminate an answer choice which turns out to be the correct answer, it's going to make it that much harder for you to evaluate and address your thought process when you were answering that question.

Once you got the basics down, start PT'ing. After writing a PT do Blind review then score it. You need to meticulously go over your mistakes, if you see that there is a pattern in the types of questions that you keep fucking up on, go back to your books/course and drill again, then write another PT, etc.

That's at least some general advice that I hope helps!