Very lost at the moment. Help!!!!

Pam Beesly

Hi everyone,

A little background: I first started studying in September 2017 in order to take the exam in December of that year. I had a pretty good understanding of the logic games and they seem to be the only section that I have been consistently improving in. I decided to withdraw from the exam, however, for two reasons. First, I got caught up with school work and exams, and second, I was missing so many questions in LR and did not know how to come up with a proper technique for RC (I am a very slow reader and it takes me a couple times to go over a paragraph to be able to fully understand it, and it doesn't help that tend to get distracted easily).

I then decided to sign up for the February 2018 exam. I took my very first diagnostic in late December after I finished my finals, where I got a 143. Since then, I started studying for 12-15 hours a day from my PowerScore bibles and watching 7Sage videos. I was devoting most of my time to LR as it is my absolute worst section. I did a bunch of drills from PT 7 to 35 and was getting about 70% of them right.

A few days ago, however, I took a timed PT to see if I was making any improvements under testing conditions. I ended up getting a 142. I don't understand how I spent so much time studying only to end up with a score that was just as bad as my diagnostic. Anyway, I panicked and decided to withdraw from the February exam as it was only 2 weeks away at that point and I still was not doing well. Not even close.

So, right now I have no idea how to approach the LR and RC sections. How do I improve? I feel like no matter how many drills I do, there's no progress. Help!

cgracia12

Hmmm.. that's interesting. Do you get nervous or anxious for PT's? My best advise for LR is to just continue drilling. I do think you should also go back to reviewing some fundamentals like identifying proper premises and conclusions and lawgic.

But I find it interesting that you say you do well during drills and then not as well for PT's. What helped me was drilling different question types, and then doing a timed section.

As far as RC, it can get frustrating and that does require a lot of drilling as well. Perhaps do a couple passages without time, using the low and high resolution summaries for each paragraph, and then proceed with doing a timed passage, then a RC timed section.

I hope I was able to help, but please dont make the same mistake I did and rush to take an exam only to get a horrible LSAT score. Good luck!

Pam Beesly

@cgracia12 thank you for your advice!! I definitely get anxiety during PT's because I tend to rush to finish the section on time, but it only ends up in me not reading the stimulus carefully/not properly understanding it and just picking whatever answer that seems like it's the right one.

Alex

@FordhamHopeful

12-15 hours a day!? Whoa... That's likely way too much. Your brain needs time to absorb and store all of the information you're trying to teach it.

The first thing I would say is to stop taking PTs. Work on doing untimed drilling of LR question types. Doing tons of drills and PTs when you're having trouble with the fundamentals won't do you much good.

If you were reading the Bibles for 12 hours a day and not seeing progress, perhaps Powerscore's methods aren't clicking with you for some reason. I would go through the 7Sage lessons, take notes, re-watch lessons you don't fully understand, do the problem sets/quizzes at the end of each lesson, and watch all of the explanations for the questions you do.

For LG, I'm not sure how many you're missing, but I found 7Sage's methods/diagramming techniques far superior to the LG Bible. Go through the lessons in order and when you get to LG do the problem sets and drill tons of games until you can consistently go -2 or better on games. I'm guessing you're aiming for a mid-160s score if Fordham is your goal.

For RC, you need to make sure you have strategies for reading the passages and answering the questions. To me, RC isn't that much different from a very long LR stimulus with 5-7 questions to answer. So to do well you need to zero in on the argument structure and not all of the excess verbiage and details. I found 7Sage/The LSAT Trainer/Manhattan's RC material all very good. I'd start with 7Sage though since I find JY's approach and video lessons more helpful when you're beginning.

Without some more specifics, it's hard to give more specific advice.

What do you feel are your issues with LR/RC? Did you blind review your most recent PT?

Pam Beesly

@"Alex Divine" Thank you so much for your advice! For LG, I usually miss about 1-3 questions per game (untimed) since watching JY's videos. Not ideal, but there's room for improvement. For LR, my biggest issues are NA, SA, and MSS. For RC, I have a huge issue with trying to get a summary in 3.5 minutes because at times I have no idea what the passage is talking about and I just get super confused and then I end up getting questions wrong because I didn't get a good "low resolution" summary. I unfortunately did not BR my most recent PT, although it will definitely help with my score.