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THANK YOU! [180!!!!]
ericjtannenbaum
Free Trial Member
I would kiss every person working at 7sage if I could. I can't believe my eyes I'm shaking. Thank you for all the resources! When I was completely starting out w/ no idea what to do, this was the site that I found myself on. I doubt I could have pulled it off w/o this place.
Comments
Congratulations man!!! We're so proud of you. Would you mind giving some advice for those that are yet take the exam?
Congratulations!!!
What @shan.55 said
Wow congratulations!. Im glad everything worked well and paid off.
Whoa congrats! What was your study story?
Congratulations!
Thanks everyone! As for how I studied/tips - I started pretty much blind. I literally googled "How to practice for the LSAT" back in November. I ended up here and took the Free Practice LSAT Prep Test Exam. I can't remember what I got exactly but I know it was the mid 160s. I had NO clue what I was doing on LG and had basically brute-forced my way on the practice test. Came on here and also some other sites for LG explanations. I also ordered the 3 most recent PT collections and some of those study guides like the LSAT Trainer but those didn't end up being helpful for me.
The first month or so I dedicated to mastering the games. Everything I found online said games were the most improvable, so I just tried to learn them, I trolled through forums and along the way learned some more about "how" I should be studying. Discussion threads here were very helpful! I'm rather poor so I couldn't afford to like do LSAT tutoring, and I've always been a self-studier so using the things I was learning I made a schedule for myself. So that first month was a lot of LG and a couple full PTs. Then I transitioned to doing PTs more in full, and visiting places like this for explanations when I got a question wrong.
After doing this for a while I had a solid like 12 PTs done in full and plenty of incorrect questions to analyze. I noticed some themes about which questions I was getting wrong -- especially in RC -- so I started to do focused drills on those question types. It took a lot of effort to make said drills, since again I was kind of flying blind, but the March LSAT (which I was signed up for) getting cancelled kind of relieved the time pressure. Once I did that for a while I went back to complete PTs.
Near the end I was PTing around 176 and I would occasionally get a 180. I knuckled down on the reading comp and managed to improve it after a solid month of focus. Took the Flex, felt really good about it, and now here I am!
Here's my overall study tips:
Analytics are your friend! I'm sure people mention this all the time, but its obvious that different people struggle with different things. Had I just kept doing PTs over and over again I'd have wasted a lot of time. Knowing what your weaknesses are is key to improving them.
Rigor is key. Near the end practice wasn't causing me to improve any. But it did keep me sharp. Your mind is a tool, and it's not used to having to stay focused and alert for 3+hours at a time. Practicing is like sharping the tool. Half the point of a PT is to get you in the right mindset. If I wasn't "there" mentally my score reflected it. Whatever study method you take, make it consistent and rigorous. Don't take days off because you're tired or sad. Just push through it.
On that point, don't get discouraged. Early on I wasn't improving much. The way I was doing LGs wasn't helping me. I found a different system online and boom, perfect every PT. I'm not saying that you'll always have such dramatic improvements, but there are mental blocks that can take a while to overcome, and you may not see any improvement until you DO overcome them.
I'm happy to talk more specifically about what the LSAT flex was like for me if anyone wants to but right now I'm going to order an entire cake and eat it.
Congratulations on your great score!!!
Congrats, and thank you so much for sharing this advice
Congrats!! You should be extremely proud of this accomplishment!
Congratulations! Thanks for sharing!
Congrats brother. Fair winds and a following sea
WOW. amazing.
Enjoy every minute of this accomplishment, congrats!
That's amazing! Congratulations!
Congrats!! So incredible!
This is great! Thanks for your explanation! Super helpful!!!CONGRATS!
Congratulations! If it's not too much trouble, would you mind sharing a link or direction to the different system online that led to the boom, perfect every PT' for logic games?! Sounds like it would be worth checking out!
YOOOOOO CONGRATZS
Congratulations!!
Congrats!
Ditto! @ericjtannenbaum
Wow, congrats!!!
good job!
Amazing! Hard work paid off! Congrats!
Following for this.
wo w
Congrats! That's incredible!
WOW! I am blown away by this... incredible! CONGRATULATIONS
I feel like I'm going to let some people down here because it's not that amazing of a secret
So when I started I used Mike Kim's LSAT Trainer and I was really struggling with grouping and hybrid games. My issue was I couldn't quickly do them while also tracking the groups in a way that made sense (the subscripting just wasn't working for me).
So the systems I found here and on a couple other LSAT Explanations that involved a different way (like this one from Khan Academy: https://www.khanacademy.org/test-prep/lsat/lsat-lessons/analytical-reasoning-video-lessons/v/analytical-reasoning--video--mixed-setup--lesson) which just made more sense to me, suddenly I wasn't spending 15+ minutes on Hybrid Games anymore. I sort of adapted this setup a bit but yeah that's really it. I found the LSAT Trainer alright for LR and RC but the LG just made no sense for me.
Congrats! When you get a second, can you go into a little more detail re: the RC drills you did? Did you just read the passage and only do the question types you were having trouble with? I'm in a similar position with regard to RC (i.e., I usually miss specific question types and I want to hone in on those), and I'd love any advice you might have on how to structure practice.
Hey there--congratulations, you're an amazing inspiration! Similar to the post right above mine, if you wouldn't mind, I'd love to hear more about what exactly you did to improve on your RC score.
I focused on 3 ways to improve RC:
First was breaking down the questions I was getting right and wrong frequently and "immersing" myself in explanations for the question types I got wrong often. Even if I got a particular question right, if it was of the type I got wrong often I'd go online and find 4-5 different explanations of it. I did this over and over again each time I took a section or a PT until I started to do better on those question types. It was important for me to find multiple explanations: usually several of them didn't "click" for me, I had to find the one that did. Once I did this a lot I noticed the way I thought about those question types would shift. I'd have a better idea of what to look for, what answers were going to be tricks, etc.
Second I learned to speed read. I did this a couple of ways, but the main one was using an app called "Spreeder" which I'd say sped up my reading by about 30-40%. This would usually give me a couple extra minutes on the RC, which was huge for me. At first I struggled to finish under time, but once I got faster at reading, I would usually have 4-5 minutes left to circle back on questions that gave me some issues.
Third, I did a lot of Blind Review. In my experience, Blind Review seems to be most helpful for Reading Comprehension: after all having extra time to re-read or re-scan a passage helps you uncover new things you may have missed/not understand on your first pass. Blind Reviewing RC helped me really grasp some of the mistakes I was making: For example, I would often waste a lot of time making notes on the textual, literal meaning of the words instead of say... the Author's Purpose or their tone. But when I did Blind Review I noticed I'd basically never flag those kinds of questions as "unsure" and I'd never really change my answers on questions like that. I was getting them right on my first try, and struggling on the more interpretive questions. So changing my notes was key to making sure I was using my time effectively.
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