Having a Hard Time Passing 170

Cofife88

Hey all!

I’ve been studying to take the June LSAT and am currently averaging about a 170 on my PTs. I’m very happy with my score and my progress, but I was hoping to get my average up a few points to be in the upper medians of the HSY ranges and/or to counteract any test anxiety on the day of the test.

For you high scorers, I was wondering if anyone has any advice as to how to push score when within this range. For context, I am tending to score about a -3 on RC, -0 on LG, and about -3 through -5 on LR. The question types that I am missing don’t seem to have any clear patterns except that I am slightly below average on my weakening questions in LR. I seem to be missing questions primarily due to overconfidence or missing a word in the questions stem. I’ve implemented strategies to try to make up for these mistakes, but I have not seen an increase in my score.

Any advice would appreciated! Thanks everyone and good luck in your studies.

Edit: My past 5 LSAT scores were three 170s, a 172, and a 167 (I was interrupted in multiple occasions on this LSAT and do not know how representative this score is).

youbbyun

what are your blind review scores?

Cofife88

@username_hello I have scored between a 178 and 180 on every blind review since I started using 7Sage for studying in April.

Alex

Your RC and LG skills are about as solid as one can hope to achieve.

Your issue is clearly with LR. If you want to hit the 173/+ range, you're going to need to get them to -2. This is very doable!

I just gave the same advice in another thread, but you should consider a 7Sage tutor. They're all amazing and worth it when you're trying to hit those high scores.

Otherwise, make sure there's not a question type you're missing often. Sometimes it's not even a question type, but a skill like diagramming or argument type (argument by analogy/correlation&causation, for example) that is causing these misses. These are especially important for the weakening questions you mentioned you're weak on.

Return On Inference

What's your timing strategy like? An aggressive skipping/timing strategy is what made my LR sections go from -3/-4 per section to -0/-1. I like to aim to finish my first round anywhere between the 22-27 minute mark, then use the extra time to go over the hard curve-breaker questions and any other questions I'm unsure of.

Also, how many hours/week are you studying? It's counter intuitive, but I had a rather large breakthrough recently just from turning down the dial on my studying. I was doing 60-80h weeks and the burnout really affected my scores. Made a bunch of reading errors, overconfidence errors, etc.

Cofife88

What’s weird is that my LR used to be my best section. I was down to -0 to -1 until my RC and LG caught up. I just can’t seem to find what I was doing before.

@Alex That is a good point. I should go back through and see if the ones that I am missing have any other commonalities that I could brush up on in the next two weeks. Unfortunately, I don’t have the money for a tutor, so I’m just going to have to keep trying on my own.

@"Return On Inference" I have a pretty good idea of my time sink questions and I generally skip those and come back to them at the end. I do need to experiment with being a little bit more aggressive in skipping, so maybe I’ll try drilling a few sections that way. I had the same breakthrough actually. I was studying full time before and decided to cut down on studying a bit. That’s exactly when I had major breakthroughs in RC and LG. I may still be spending too much time over the weekends studying, but it’s hard to cut down with only three more weekends before the test date.

LindsMitch

I don’t have much advice for you, as I’m kind of in the same boat though your scores are a bit more solid than mine, I’ve had 169s, 170s for the past 7-10 exams and and two mid 160s ...I’m also averaging -0/1 on LG and seem to have gotten RC down to a max -4 but usually -3/2. LR is so frustrating though!! I get 3/4 wrong on one section and 5/7 wrong on the other it seems. Recently as I’ve been analyzing my tests, I’ve noticed that for a significant number of the LR questions I’ve missed, I was stuck between two answers and chose the wrong one. I know these are killing my timing too....need to be more aggressive with the skipping myself.

_oshun1_

I spent months straight just studying LR and my LR section score was really close to -0, at worst it was -3, always had a few min to double check my answers at the end. I spent a month kind of neglecting LR, I would just do a few LR sections a week, and really focused on LG and RC. Now my LG is really consistently -0 with minutes leftover, but my last couple LR sections were -5 with no time leftover to review. I totally dont have an answer to this just wanted to share that I commiserate with you and I hope someone has a really solid answer on how to juggle all the sections to consistently get over a 170.

studyingandrestudying

Just wanted to put in an endorsement for the webinars on here. They're very helpful.

ajcrowel

In the last 6 months of my prep I went from scoring in the low 170’s to the middle 170’s (174 on test day, 176 on retake).

You’re in the 1 question 1 point territory and so you’ll need to miss no more than 1-2 LR questions with consistent scores from RC and LG to get to the middle of the 170’s. I wholeheartedly second @Return on Inference

You need to get curve breaker questions. To do that you need to recognize which questions are curvebreaker and which ones aren’t. Part of the process of recognizing the above is what I call "time knowledge". You’re good enough at this now where I bet you can do a LR question in <40sec. I was the same way and used it to my advantage. On test day, if I couldn’t complete a question in approximately that amount of time or less I skipped the question. (I think I ended up skipping about 3-5 questions between 2 LR sections). As @Return on Inference said, you’ll finish the section in 26-28 minutes and then you have 7-9 minutes for the 3 or 4 really tough questions. That’s where you need to spend your time.

You might also find that when you’re scoring in the 170’s and a LR question doesn’t seem immediately “solveable” many times it’s not becuase it’s a actually a harder question (it’s not curve breaker, but because you misread the stimulus or your brain is stuck on a one-track thought process). When that happens a you can “reset” by skipping and revisiting. Practice this and see if over the course of 5-10 tests your score doesn’t climb 3—6 points.