Plateauing? Consider a break, seriously.

nmeghrounibrown

Hey everyone,

Just wanted to share my experience in case it's helpful to some of you. I took the October LSAT-Flex and am also registered for November. I was getting seriously stressed and semi-burnt out before the October test - studying really hard didn't seem to help much on LR/RC and I would often second guess myself or change correct answers to incorrect ones when reviewing at the end of a section. I was getting pretty frustrated with myself, wasn't feeling like I was getting results despite putting in a ton of work, and reading into traps that weren't there.

I took almost two weeks off from anything related to the LSAT after the October test and it helped immensely - it feels like I can actually learn from my mistakes now instead of just getting pissed about getting yet another weakening/SA/NA question wrong. I just took my first PT since the October test and LR/RC felt great - I could move through questions quickly, trust my intuition, and not read too far into irrelevant details that would trip me up previously. I got kinda bodied by LG due to lack of practice, but still managed to score in the mid-170's after plateauing hard in the mid-160's on previous PTs. My LR went from -8 average to -1. Night and day.

All this to say - if you're feeling discouraged, burnt-out, stressed etc., pounding the pavement harder might be counterproductive. I'd highly recommend taking a week or two to unwind, do something else (apps?), and not even think about the LSAT. Give yourself some time to break out of counterproductive thought processes and habits and come back with some fresh eyes and motivation - you might be really surprised what you can do.

Good luck to y'all on this last leg of preparation before November - we got this!

chaplin___

That's amazing!! Thanks for the reminder. I totally agree that taking breaks is essential. I had an almost three week long migraine and forced myself to take time off studying so I learned it the hard way. I haven't taken a lot of timed PTs (3 sections) with a high of 166 and a low of 160 using 7Sage's score converter. My LR is currently hovering around -8 with a BR of -2 to -5, but I can't seem to bring it down to the -1 to -3 range. What helped you with your breakthrough besides taking a break from anything LSAT related?

nmeghrounibrown

Congrats on your progress! I'd highly recommend taking advantage of 7Sage's Analytics tool if you have access to it. It'll neatly summarize which question types gave you the most difficulty so you can tailor your studying to specific areas. Probably will be most useful after you've taken more PTs just so there's more data points, but it wouldn't hurt to take a look now.

I'd also recommend putting it in a separate spreadsheet and keeping track of some additional info - why did you miss (misread stimulus, misread answer choice, time pressure etc) and what is the average difficulty of the questions you've missed in that category. If you've missed like 3 MBTs but they're all level 5 difficulty super time-consuming questions, that might be lower priority than missing 5 strengthening questions with an average difficulty of 3.5 for example. Keeping track of difficulty might let you see clearly where you need to shore up your skills vs. just missing hard questions because they're hard.

Once I identified a couple areas for improvement, I went back to the core curriculum, watched some of JY's explanations, and then drilled the harder problem sets in that category with very thorough BR (aka write out conclusion/premise, write out exactly why each answer choice is correct/incorrect). Ended up helping guide my intuition a lot later on after I gave this some time to sink in. Hope this helps!