How many pts until you noticed improvement from BRing?

spinosan

Hey guys,

With all these major success stories being posted (congrats to you all, you're an inspiration for the rest of us), i would love to hear from anybody a little bit further along in their LSAT/7 sage journey. My question is about how many pts with rigorous BR did it take for you to start noticing improvement?

a few details: i've finished cc. my diagnostic was 148 2 years ago and just took my first 3 pts within 2 weeks, all 158,159, and 157 (mentally struggled on this one). these were pt 40, 41, and 42 btw. each section is actually pretty even in terms of stats (-7 LR, -8 RC, -5LR, -9 LG). i am about to start fool-proofing LG in conjunction with ~2 pts/week. trying to take August 29 and planning for October 3 too, as i would like to apply this cycle.

my BR strategy is pretty intensive. i quite literally retake the entire test and reconvince myself of every answer, and on questions that are not immediately obvious I convince myself of why every other answer choice is not correct. as a result my BR score is pretty high (173, 175, 171) for where i'm at in studying. It does take me about 2 days to do this fully.

My reason for posing this question is I want to know that i'm not wasting time with the extensive BR that i'm doing. i am putting a lot into studying for this thing - it's a labor of love, really. but i only have so much time before these exams and i want to be doing the most effective strategies possible. is the extremely extensive BR strategy worth it? or should i just be devoting more time to LG foolproofing upfront instead? i don't know how long fool-proofing will take (i was a math major in college and i can solve the entire section almost flawlessly in BR) but i'm hoping it will only be a couple of weeks so i can continue to focus on BR.

Would love to hear anecdotal advice, critiques on strategy, really anything for how you guys saw your scores increase over time!

Thank you in advance!

DINOSAUR

I think doing BR thoroughly definitely helps in the long term. But under time there are so many factors that affect your performance other than your fundamentals, ex. the ability to cope with pressure and stay calm, time management, fatigue, etc. When doing BR, you also have to ask yourself what made you not able to answer this question correctly under time? What can you do to solve the problem next time? Is your thinking process efficient enough? How can you be more efficient in approaching the questions?
It usually takes me a couple of PTs to see improvement. But it really depends. And it's just so normal to hit a plateau because it takes time for your ability to grow.

spinosan

@DINOSAUR thank you! you're definitely right about analyzing the process i use during the exam, i've been trying to make myself more calm during testing because i think that's a big source of my errors (I do much better on timed sections). And thank you for the information about the couple of pts before you saw improvement - definitely relieving to know.