179!! Thanks 7Sage

cormacr

I'm beyond excited. It feels so surreal. I'm positive I couldn't have gotten this score without 7sage, especially on Logic Games. I'm gonna miss J.Y.'s voice!

jk3997

Congratulations! Do you mind elaborating on your study schedule and what factors helped you the most?

yeasm22s

Congrats!! Please share any study/test suggestions!!

Coeurpourtoi

Congratulations! Could you share your suggestions for studying LSAT? Thanks!

T14plssss

Same score as Elle Woods!!!!

J.Y. Ping

@cormacr Congratulations!

cormacr

@jk3997 said:
Congratulations! Do you mind elaborating on your study schedule and what factors helped you the most?

Yes of course! Anything to put off having to work on my apps! I wrote something similar on a Reddit so it's partially copy/pasted. So I feel like as a disclaimer I should say that I think the way I studied is not for everyone, but it worked for me. I had a relatively high diagnostic ~160. I did well on LR and RC, but got like 9/25 on LG, so I knew that was my main focus. In that sense I was very lucky, as they are so much easier to improve than the other sections. Firstly, I did all of the 7sage games curriculum. I didn't quite do the 7sage fool-proof method, but I would do like 8 games a day, and if I missed any questions I would retake that game within a few days until I got all the inferences. I went from getting -13 to -2 in a few weeks. Initially I would diagram all the possible worlds and write out all the rules and contra-positives, but as I got more comfortable I started being able to make some of the inferences without having to draw them. It was at this point I became truly confident with LG and went from running out of time on sections to finishing with 5-10 minutes left, which let me go back and check answers. I think the only way to get this comfortable is to do tons of logic games. I have probably done like 60% of all available games, many of them 3 or more times. I noticed when I started LG I was really dogmatic about diagramming the proper way using proper notation, but as I got better I could kinda make up my own diagrams on the fly and I didn't have to worry as much if it was the "proper" diagram for a grouping game or whatever. This helped me be more flexible on harder games. Sometimes (often) it helps to draw all possible worlds, but sometimes it's not required to answer the questions and just takes up time. I truly believe most people can consistently get -2 or better on LG if they put in the focused practice.

I also did some of the LR curriculum and found it helpful. Weirdly (bc i think it's easy for many people) I was helped a lot by the main point/conclusion lessons, which also help in RC. I also learned a ton from the Introduction to Logic section of the LR curriculum.Contra-positives in particular are invaluable for many questions. If i had more time, I would have finished all of the LR lessons, but I was studying starting mid june for the august test so I kind of rushed it.

My other main focus was taking a ton of PTs. If I'm being honest, I enjoyed taking them and I really didn't like "studying" very much. I bought the loophole book but for some reason was unable to make myself study so I only got like 15% of the way in, as I would always rather just take a PT. While it's probably not for everyone, I think taking tons of PTs was effective for me. Firstly, it gets you used to the test. Mainly I would take them under actual test conditions (no music, no breaks, etc). Always timed. I think there are benefits of taking untimed for many people but for me it felt like a crutch and I didn't want to train my brain under 1 set of conditions and then try and retrain it later. My biased opinion that if you are already 165+ and you want a 170+ you are best served by never going untimed. My goal was to make the actual LSAT just feel like another PT as I didn't want to suffer an anxiety drop in my score during test day. I also think I just learned a lot of the tricks the test makers use by taking so many. You get to see the patterns subconsciously, and while I can't always elucidate the flaws I would see it really helped me quickly eliminate answer choices. I couldn't always explain it like J.Y. could for example, but I often could just tell right away that an answer was wrong. It kinda gives you a sixth sense from seeing so many different questions. I think this only comes from grinding, honestly. I took many in (like 30) in 7sage but near the end I took them in lawhub and then would enter my answers for the 7sage analytics. This helped just to have the exact format for the test so their were no surprises come test day.

My last thing that I worked on was my test mentality. I'm a non-traditional student that has been out of undergrad for a long time, and my brain struggled to get back into study/school mode. I also would often struggle to focus (one of the downsides of taking so many PTs so often, I think). For the focusing, I would do some breathing exercises. Anytime I realized I was struggling to understand a passage, or if I was freaking out about time, I would force myself to close my eyes, take 5 deep breaths, and try and banish all thoughts from my mind. At first this would happen like every single RC passage, as I would just lose focus and do the thing where you read the words mechanically without understanding them. This is probably the area I improved the most on (other than LG): being able to force myself to refocus. At first I sucked at it and by the end of 3 months I was consistently able to banish non-lsat thoughts during tests. I also got way better at test strategy when I stopped obsessing on hard questions. If one questions was stumping me, I would skip it and go to the next. This really helped on LR in particular. It became way easier to build momentum this way, and every question is the worth the same points, so it doesn't behoove you to spend 5 minutes on one question if that causes you to run out for time for the 4 last questions. If you have time, go back and look with fresh eyes. Near the end, I would flag or leave unmarked like 5 LR every section instead of going in strict order, and I almost always had like 7+ minutes to go back and check on them at the end, when I previously would always run up against the time limit.

Anyway, I hope this helps, and I'm more than happy to get more specific or clarify anything!

legal.eagle

Congratulations! I see you are a nontraditional applicant, as am I. I am curious how many hours per week you dedicated to studying for the 3 months it took you and if you were also working full/part-time while studying? I work 40 hours per week and my biggest challenge has been finding the time and energy to put in the hours of study needed to score well.

cormacr

@"legal.eagle" said:
Congratulations! I see you are a nontraditional applicant, as am I. I am curious how many hours per week you dedicated to studying for the 3 months it took you and if you were also working full/part-time while studying? I work 40 hours per week and my biggest challenge has been finding the time and energy to put in the hours of study needed to score well.

Thanks! So I actually have been in an ideal studying (less than ideal financial!) situation in that I was furloughed due to Covid-19 issues, so I had all day to study. I;m not sure exactly how much I would study per day. Initially it would be like 5+ hours a day, but I did feel some burn-out and it probably got more to like 1-2 hours a day later in my studies where I was doing more fine-tuning. I often would warm-up with a LG game, take a PT and then be done for the day.

Working while studying is definitely way harder and I know I would have struggled to study as much as I did if I was still doing my job. While I don't have a great solution for you, I would recommend a medium amount of quality studying as opposed to a great deal of sleepy studying. If you can't focus that day, don't burn through PTs or finish sections in the curriculum if you can't give them the focus they deserve. Good Luck!

cormacr

@"J.Y. Ping" said:
@cormacr Congratulations!

Thanks!!!!!

learn2skipQs

congrats on the hard work
thats a huge motivator as well starting with such a strong diagnostic.
My diagnostic was 135 lol

Ellegoals

You're awesome. Good luck in law school!

Hopeful9812

Congratulations!!

cormacr

@Ellegoals said:
You're awesome. Good luck in law school!

Thank you!

cormacr

@"MBT-Lsatissoon" said:
congrats on the hard work
thats a huge motivator as well starting with such a strong diagnostic.
My diagnostic was 135 lol

Yeah, it definitely helps starting higher, but I've heard stories of people starting at like 140 and ending up 170+. It's not easy, but people have made some pretty crazy jumps on this test. It's learnable in many ways. Good Luck!

BadReasoning2022

nice job!

goforbroke

Yes of course! Anything to put off having to work on my apps!

Hahaha! I think I know how you feel. Also I'm totally with you in that I don't like to "study" per se, I like getting on with actual questions and PTs. Glad I'm not the only one!

You did great, congrats! And good luck with law schools apps.