Thoughts on starting at PT 1 & working up from there?

emmorens

hi all!

I'm getting back on the grind after my January 2021 attempt (I'm aiming to book for early summer maybe june/july). Anyways, my last PT was a 160 before I sat for the January exam and I was heavily using the recent PTs closer to my test date for obvious reasons.

I was wondering how everyone utilizes the different LSAT eras in their studying (ie 1-20, 30s/40s, 50s/60s, 70s/80s)? I have heard of many people using PTs 1-20 solely for drilling, but was thinking of starting there and doing (roughly) one PT a day. I thought this would be a good place to start to get consistent with RC & games, and then got thinking that it wouldn't hurt to dip my toes into LR as well.

I'd love to hear how others are utilizing the different PT eras for studying + what you found worked best for you - just trying to take a different approach this time around in the hopes of seeing some major improvement before the summer.

thanks & happy studying! 🤍

VerdantZephyr

I knew that I would not be studying long enough to utilize all of them, so I can't say a lot about any plan that aims to, but because they are taking the Flex content from a wide range of past practice sections or simply rewording past PT sections covering a range of PTs from at least the 60's until the most recent is a good idea. In my limited experience with the PT's I have taken the more recent PT's in the 80's seem to have a key difference in the hardest questions on LR and RC. A lot of the hardest questions on the recent ones present you with a selection of seemingly bad options and ask you to identify the one that works best. The hardest questions on the earlier tests are the opposite in my opinion. They present you with several attractive answers and ask you to figure out why you should eliminate all but one. I have not taken any PT's before 50, so cannot say about those.

yang9999

that seems about right. RC starts to get really brutal right around PT 60, but only because the questions are harder than the passages themselves, which have strangely gotten a little bit more straightforward. however, I didn't really find much change in the difficulty of LR -- though I will say, MSS type questions and principle questions have started showing up at much higher frequencies than normal (up to 4-5 per LR section in some of the PT 80-89 range tests). I've also noticed that the tentmakers have started making LG sections more tricky -- the earlier PTs seem to rely more heavily on deductions and inferences than later PTs that focus more heavily on game board splitting (especially in the PT80-89 range -- some games I couldn't do efficiently without splitting the board up into different scenarios).