How to Improve on Harder Questions?

jhl4599

I took my first PT after going through the curriculum and was able to increase my score by 6 points from my diagnostic. While promising, I noticed that 18/24 questions that I had missed were considered level 4 or 5 difficulty questions and I had gotten the lower difficulty questions correct on blind review, leaving me without a necessary "weak" question type. My initial takeaway seems to be that I have a decent baseline understanding of the question types and lawgic and can intuitively get to the right answer for the easier questions, but I struggle with breaking down the harder ones. Is there a way to effectively overcome this hump? Thanks for any advice.

ahnendc-1

First of all, huge congratulations in order for your 6 point jump! That really is huge!

First, one test is probably not enough to tell you if you have any weak areas in terms of specific question types so definitely hold off on that until you have a couple of more tests under your belt. For example, most PTs only have 1 MBF question so if you got 1/1 incorrect then it doesn't SEEM like that is a weak area but if that happens in multiple successive tests then maybe that is a weak area? Just a thought.

My other thought is how did you take the test? This is where analyzing the timing per question. Assuming you took the test on the 7sage website, have you spent time looking at how you spent time within each question? There are a lot of great podcasts on the 7Sage podcast that talk about the importance of timing and skipping strategies. How long are you taking on the 'easier' 1 and 2 star questions. Did you mark any for review? Did you go back to review the right questions?

Also, try to really reflect on what happened when you missed this questions? Did you KNOW that these were hard questions or did you totally fall into a trap?

Hopefully this helps you break down the test further. Best of luck!

danielbrowning208

Harder questions are typically very similar to cookie-cutter or "easy" questions, except they have an extra wrinkle or complexity (or a few for the hardest questions). If you just finished the CC, you really just need more practice and drilling. The LSAT, for most people, takes time to learn. So I don't think you should necessarily adopt any specific strategies at this point for harder questions. If the trouble persists over a few months, however, then that is the time to reach out again.