Order of taking PTs

DumbHollywoodActor

Tomorrow, I’m entering the next phase of LSAT development:taking PTs under testing conditions. (Woohoo!) I’m wondering if there’s benefit to mixing up the order rather than taking them in sequential order. Given the recent posts about PTs getting harder in 50s and 60s, I figured it’d be better to get to that difficulty sooner rather than later and suffer a crisis of confidence. Any thoughts?

alexroark5

GENERALLY, you want to work your way from older to newer. However, that being said it is a good idea to mix in some newer ones far enough before test day so that you can begin to familiarize yourself with the subtle differences.

DumbHollywoodActor

Thanks @alexroark5 ! I have a follow-up question. GENERALLY, why is that? I’m not saying that to be difficult, honest. I know it just seems like conventional wisdom, but what does one actually gain by completing them in sequential order?

alexroark5

@DumbHollywoodActor Generally, meaning take a few older ones, then take a newer one, take a few older ones, then a new one. I think you misinterpreted the way I meant generally. This way, you are not wasting all the new ones as you are continuing to improve in the begining.

DumbHollywoodActor

Gotcha. Yeah, I totally misunderstood. Cool, that’s my plan. Thanks!

nicole.hopkins

@DumbHollywoodActor I've tended to jump around quite a bit; I've still got 64-74 100% untouched but due to using LSAT Trainer schedules for one period and 7sage schedules for another, I've ended up taking tests from all of the eras at various points. One benefit of having taken newer (50's thru 60's) tests very early in my study is that now that I'm retaking those newer tests, I don't remember anything from them. They're pretty fresh. Granted, I didn't BR the hell out of them (or really at all ); I dig on reserving the most recent tests for purposes to determining whether you're truly ready to sit for a given test date, but speaking much more broadly, I don't think there's necessarily harm in deviating from the oldest-to-newest approach.

TL;DR try to go in order-ish, don't sweat it if you skip around. For instance, if you were to take a later test so as to participate in a n awesome BR group ... Just sayin' ... benefits outweigh :-D

emli1000

You would want to save the newest PTs to take some time before the actual LSAT since they'll be a strong indicator of how you will perform on the actual LSAT. But with that being said I don't think it makes much of a difference what order you decide to do as long as you save some PTS in the 60s-70s to take before the actual lsat.