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Related Discussions
Over the 170 hump?? (LR is dragging me down...)
I started taking this course a month or two ago in preparation for the December LSAT. I finally started doing real practice tests recently. I never did an initial diagnostic, I didn't really care, I knew I was shooting for regularly hitting the mid-170s so that if I had a worst case scenario day I would be in the high 160's. I figured I was at worst at high-150s, probably in the low 160s, and at best mid 160s.
Well, except for one practice test that was my 3rd practice test of the day (believe me, I learned my lesson... no need to chide me), and one that I had done every section of many months previously and was overthinking/remembering most of my original answers, I am averaging a 168.4. I've hit 170 three times, 171, 171, and today a 170.
I have not done the RC sections of the curriculum, but have seen my total wrong in that section drop from ~7 to ~1, first to most recent (with a very strong and statistically significant negative trend line).
I feel that I have the logic games pretty much down. I was struggling until yesterday as a matter of fact, but it finally clicked for me. My most recent test was -1, and that one question was just a mindless, inexcusable error.
I am finishing both of these sections with ~5-10 minutes remaining.
But now here is my problem. I am regressing on LR - significantly. I started out with one test where I had a total of -2 between both sections. I am now struggling to get my total wrong below 10. Previously, I was finishing very quickly, with about 5, if not more time to go back and review circled questions. I was finding my biggest issue was not reading carefully or not reading all the answers, so I slowed down. Now I am struggling to finish every question (usually 23 done comfortably, 2-3 rushed), and my score in this section has dropped appreciably. What was my strength has become my weakness.
On my first 170, it was my near perfection in the LR sections that buoyed my score over 170. Now, they are the only thing holding me back from hitting it every time, and from pushing into the mid to high 170s.
Specifically within the section, according to the 7Sage Metric of Priority the questions that need the most attention are: MSS, NA, PSA, AP, and Weaken questions, and in terms of my percentage wrong relative to the average 7sage student are: PRINC, AP, Weaken, and in terms of overall percentage wrong: PRINC, AP, MBF, Para, and MSS.
So the recurring/most pressing issues are:
MSS
NA
PSA
AP
Weaken
PRINC
I am at a loss for what a common root could be, except for perhaps 1) overthinking or 2) having issues with English to 'Lawgic."
Has anyone had this problem, where studying more for your strongest section has seemingly negatively impacted your performance? Is this weird inverse correlation between sections normal for others?
Do I just need to shut the hell up and be grateful for the scores I am getting and just study LR more?
Thanks!!!
Comments
Interested in this thread as I have experienced an almost identical thing occur.
No, you don't need to shut up and be grateful for the scores; you should aim for perfection. But yes, you should study LR more, or more efficiently.
Remember, you've been studying for only 1 or two months, and the 7Sage orthodoxy is that way more time is needed to tackle this beast of a test to the best of one's ability. Are you blind reviewing? If you're doing multiple PTs a day, it doesn't sound like it. BR is really the only way to consistently improve. _
I can say from experience that working on LR can negatively impact your performance, even when it's your strongest section. For me this was because learning good habits required me to unlearn current habits. But it was those current habits (or intuitions) which were keeping my LR scores where they were. So to get better you sometimes have to get worse.
My LR weaknesses are almost the exact same as yours, funnily enough. I am drilling MSS right now, and have worked to improve my NA performance in the recent past. Based on my own experience I would recommend returning to the CC and going over the lessons again. Really try and cement the particular nuances of those questions in your mind. For example, with MSS I was being thrown off by treating them too much like an Inference/MBT question. Going over the CC again helped me reinforce the strategy I must employ with MSS, e.g. finding the AC which feels like the missing conclusion and not treating it like a MBT question where the correct answer must meet the standard for logical validity. Same with NA. Going over the CC helped me reinforce the idea that correct NA answer choices are often very weak claims. Also helped reinforce the strategy of negating answer choices to test them.
This is a great possible diagnosis. Many are good at LR based on instinct (gut feeling). That will only take a person so far. To really improve, that process must be shattered, and one must learn how to walk again. At first, it'll be slower, but once the new process becomes second nature (possibly after months of practice), you'll emerge faster and more accurate than you'd ever been.
A lot of great recommendations already in this thread.
Heres mine: I would keep a journal (or at least a piece of paper) where you write down each reason you get an LR question wrong. Its the best way to recognize patterns in your mistakes.
Take an LR section. Blind review. Then score it. Then look at the questions you got wrong and take them one by one. Try your best to think through the reasoning you got the question wrong. Get into your time-restricted head. Its in these moments of fast decision making where the LSAT is either won or lost. Write down the reason (maybe you eliminated the correct answer too quickly, maybe you missed a word in the stem). Then write down what you could do to avoid that mistake in the future.
Then take another LR section. Repeat.
After three or four LR sections, look at all of your "data" for patterns. There is likely a repetition of mistakes or a connection between different mistakes. I recognized in my own practice of doing this that a huge percentage of my incorrect answers were because of easily avoided mistakes (its not that I wasn't working hard enough to study--its that my game time mindset was off). After adjusting my mindset, my accuracy went way up from one section to the next. These are free points here.
I'm also curious: do you ever feel yourself getting panicky when youre taking LR sections? Like, increased heart rate and stress levels? I definitely have.
Physiologically, this impairs my ability to think critically, so Ive developed a more deliberate, slower style that shoots for accuracy rather than speed. I read stimuli slowly, but I only read them once (for easier questions, sometimes more for harder questions) and I try to memorize them using the RC "low-rez" summary style before hitting the answers. I also have a very firm cut off for when I decide to move on to the next question. But I try not to get anxious when ditching a question because anxiety will kill your accuracy. If you ever notice yourself repeatedly re-reading the same stimulus or answer choices again and again quickly, I would recommend trying to go slow and shooting for comprehension on the first read.
Slow, deliberate, confident.
Best of luck!
Burnout and fatigue affected me most on logical reasoning.
Try a PT like you will the real one, with a day of no LSAT prep the day before, an early wake up breakfast, a couple hour wait, and then the test. If that is back up to normal on LR then you might just be tired. Tired is good, because there is an easy solution. Rest more often especially once you get close to the real thing.
If it doesn't rebound on a well rested test or two, then you have a more serious problem.
I don’t think shattering your intuitions and rebuilding should cause you to miss more, maybe go slower, but not miss more(except as a consequence of rushing at the end).
Thanks for all the advice.
Some notes/thoughts:
1) I BR pretty much every test I take, and I take no more than 1 test per day now. As I said, lesson learned.
2) I keep track of every wrong answer and what my faulty reasoning is. Unfortunately, the pattern is not really detectible at this point. The most common issues are 1) didn't read fully/misunderstood one word/phrase 2) being overly confident in my math skills (in my head during test "oh, I am really good a math, this one is intuitive" in my head during BR "you freaking inestimable idiot."
3) I certainly need to drill. The problem is, if I see a question I have done even once it really screws me up. Before I started 7sage, I was doing my own thing. I purchased and used the Powerscore Bibles and PT42-51 and PT62-71. Thank god I didn't use all of the second. But I have precious few virgin practice tests from which to pull questions. I have found PT36 and earlier to be practically useless... I get 0-3 wrong on most of them, which is fewer than half of what I get on the more modern sections...
I believe my course of action will be to review every LR question I have gotten wrong thus far very intensely, perhaps as one giant BR - I know I got these questions wrong but without answers and without my prior answers, see if I can figure them all out.
I believe I will throttle back my practice testing somewhat, but not my total volume of work. Instead of just sitting down and slogging through practice tests, I am going to do 8-10 sections worth of work a day, 2 full LGs, 2 full RC, and a combo of LR sections and specific question drills.
Thanks for all the input people. I will continue to work as feverishly as possible to completely uproot my instinctual mistakes in this section and hopefully rebuild it in time!
PS - I know three-ish months is not enough to 'master' the test, but I am in a situation where if I do not take the test now, I will be stuck in a place where I will be practically unable to study until November of next year. I work in political elections, have always wanted to go to law school but have felt trapped, and want out NOW!!!! lol
First, if you don't feel 100% confident about premises and conclusions, tackle that. Breaking that down can help with almost any LR question. Second, if you're not doing this already, a good time-saver is to try to eliminate any answer choices you can from the first few words. JY does this all the time, so you can see how he goes about this. For example, two of the answers to question in front of me start with "clarify a dilemma" and "attack the character". As soon as I read these, I knew they were wrong. If I read through the other answers and none of them seemed right, I would have gone back and read the full answers that I dismissed before. Third, get your confidence up! Use the question bank and start with the easy questions in the topics you're struggling with. Once you master them, you will feel more ready for the difficult questions. When you feel more confident, your brain will be able to slow down a little bit and you'll avoid "stupid mistakes". Good luck!
Good, but you don't want to lose stamina. I prepped with back to back 4section PTs once or twice a week depending on my other studying which worked well and let me strain myself a couple days a week(two tests and blind reviewing will eat up your whole Saturday) so the other days could be less intensive.
This sounds like a good idea. LR is the essiest session to just sort of review questions in your spare time. I had pictures of all the questions that I had missed on my phone (each followed by a separate picture with the correct answer and its rationale) and would scroll through them when I had spare time (when I exercized, during tv commercials, on car rides where I was the passenger, when walking to classes, ect).
I didn't notice a huge shift in LR difficulty, but went through them basically in order so I could have been better when dealing with later ones so jthis could be true.
I'd also recommend taking a day or even back to back days off of studying every once in a while for the rest as you approach the test.
If you really find you are still doing worse, you can just try to take a test by instinct and only use 7sage methods when your instimcts snd intuition is shaky. That was my main strategy since I started off at -0 to -2 on LR. It just depends whether your instincts can tell when they don't know and yield so you can try to analyze the question using 7sage approaches.
Three months is not inherently too little time to maximize your score. I maximized my score in about three months of intense studying (though I wouldn't say I mastered the test). You never know how long it will take until you see a score that matches or exceeds your goal score emailed to you by LSAC.
Finally, breaks sometimes help. People sometimes score better after returning to the test after a break. So if you don't hit your goal in December, you can take a break for a while, incorporate some really light study alongside your work, maybe 1 untimed game a day when you wake up, previously missed LR questions reviewed when you have free time, and finally an old PT once every week or two.
Good luck with the midterm elections. I know you want out, but between 2018 and 2020 political elections seem likely to be exciting.
It sounds like you are under a lot of psychological pressure to perform well on the December exam--like you've only got one shot to nail it or else. And at the same time, you don't feel like you given yourself enough time to study.
This combo (of not enough time/high stakes) can really increase and exacerbate psychological pressure, and is likely increasing as we get closer to the December LSAT. I don't think your skills dealing with the test itself have changed, but your mindset about the test may have. Countless studies show that performing under pressure (even PTs) can negatively impact performance. If you're wanting to score in the mid-/upper-170s, the test really becomes about psychological mastery. My guess is that learning to mitigate psychological pressure might help you deal with your LR issue.
I'd recommend part two of this book: "Performing Under Pressure"
https://www.amazon.com/Performing-Under-Pressure-Science-Matters/dp/0804136726
If your first gut reaction to this is to think "No, I perform better under stress", then you really need to check this book out because it's not true. A lot of research shows that performing under pressure decreases performance, even for really high-performing athletes and creatives. Performing well under pressure is really about mitigating the negative impacts of pressure; nothing about pressure makes your perform above average.
All of that said: don't worry. Even if you had all of the time in the world and could study full time for years, you could still spend more time studying, so don't feel like you don't have enough time. You're going to be very prepared. And try not to think that getting a high score on this test is your only shot at "getting out". Regardless of your score, you're going to be great.
Maybe check out this 7Sage webinar called "LSAT Prep for 170+": https://7sage.com/webinar/lsat-prep-for-170-plus/
Out of curiosity @zwerrell, how did you make such a big improvement in RC? And how do you approach RC? I used to do well, but now my scores are faltering... I also wish I could offer some advice but I'm def not in that position yet lol.
A lot of good advice in here, but I really honestly think you could use a break to give your brain time to rest and recharge. You might not feel tired, but your brain might be feeling it. I had a time where I got worse in LR and wanted to pull my hair out. I took 3 days off and came back way stronger. There was a fog that I hadn't noticed that was just slowing me down.
Seriously, take like 1 or 2 full weekend days and just watch a movie, go to happy hour, don't touch the LSAT. Come back fresh and see if you're doing better.