Starting to plateau and getting nervous about October

xander787

Hi all,

I just wanted to see if I could get some advice about my situation because I'm starting to get really nervous about whether or not I can take the October test. Unfortunately if I don't, I'm not sure when the next feasible time will be for me to take it. I'm a rising junior, but because the December one is right around my finals when I'm sure I'll be way too stressed about schoolwork to do much LSAT studying (plus I'm on the quarter system which means during the quarter I would have little time too) and because next summer I'm going to be taking classes and writing my thesis I wanted to try and get it done this summer.

My diagnostic around early June was a 162. After that I studied using 7sage for about 6 weeks before starting to take prep tests and landed at around 169. I've been taking on average 3 tests per week and have now taken 6 tests. Unfortunately it looks like I'm sort of already plateauing at around 169-170 and my goal is to get a 175 on test day. I did have one kind of outlier, the test before last I actually scored a 178 (PT41) which got me really excited after a string of like three 169's in a row, but then today I scored only a 170 again. I was hoping I would at least have improved to like 171-172 but no dice. So it seems like thats where I've leveled off score-wise.

As far as per-section, it kind of varies wildly which concerns me. I think as far as consistency goes, LR is my best. In the last 6 tests I went -5, -3, -5, -2, -2, -6. So i had a string of a couple pretty good scores where I only missed 2-3 total in LR but then, again today to my dismay, I did super bad and missed 6 of them.

LG is definitely hugely hit or miss with me. Some tests I've missed as most as 9 or 10 (cases where I couldn't even finish all the games and got stuck, plus got some wrong), whereas today I was able to make up for my shitty LR score by missing none of them (but the games were ridiculously easy.) At the same time, in the PT where I magically scored 178, the games weren't completely trivial and yet I was able to finish them and get them all right. So lots of variability for reasons that elude me.

RC is pretty stable too, but still not where I want it to be. Last 6 tests went -4, -2, -3, -4, -1, and -5 (today). Not a horrible average but definitely not where I need it to be for test day.

I'm pretty worried about my consistency. I had a pretty bad day today (in that I improved almost none, and in fact did worse on the LRs which I'm usually much better at) and I'm super worried that I'm not going to be able to get this down in time for October while still being able to do enough PTs. I had originally scheduled myself to do another 3 or 4 PTs this week but decided I would only do 2 (at the end of the week) after taking 2 or 3 days off to really study the questions i'm missing most often hard (in LRs this is Flaws) and seeing if I can improve that way.

Overall I'm pretty lost. I'm having a really hard time making the marginal gains I need to get myself consistently above 170 and into the 175 region (except for the wonderful 178 test where everything magically went right) and my variability in scores for the individual sections (particularly LR on bad days, and LG seemingly randomly) scares the crap out of me. I'm not sure at this point what my studying should be like, how many PTs and how often I should be doing them, or what. I'd really appreciate any advice since this as I'm really not even sure if it's worth it to keep going for October at this point which is a humongous disappointment for me. Let me know if there's anymore details I can provide that would be helpful. Thanks guys!

lsatblitz

@xander787 said:
Overall I'm pretty lost.

You need to have more confidence in yourself. Many would love to be PTing where you are right now.

You didn't mention anything about blind reviewing your PTs. I'm not sure if you are or not, but the consensus around here is that BR = gains

Pacifico

Chill out... 6 PTs is nothin... You're way ahead of the game in many respects... Take no more than 2 PTs a week, do an excellent BR for each PT on the following day...relax... take 1 day a week to really crank out some LG practice... And then take the other two days off... And chill out because you sound like you're burning out and haven't even taken 10 PTs...

c.janson35

The 170 plateau is definitely real, but you just have to keep taking more tests to progress through it. There's 50+ days until October which is still a lot of time, so try to relax. If you want to score in the upper 170s, you need to max out your LG score, so I would keep drilling those in between PT. In any case, you've only taken 6 tests! If there was a week until October you may be justified in freaking out, but there isn't and you're not.

I tend to disagree about the amount of PTs that you should do (I think as many as possible without burning out). For me, doing 3 a week isn't overwhelming at all--especially if all you are doing is taking PTs and BRing them (don't skip this step). But the amount you can handle without burning out is really personal, so make sure you listen to whatever your brain/body is telling you.

xander787

Thanks for the comments guys, really helpful. I definitely realize I'm not in a bad position by any means (I was actually really happy when I got my first 169!!) So definitely not trying to boo-hoo. My main concern is definitely just how to make those marginal improvements, because I'm at the point where I'm at high score, but its still not at my goal, and the difference between a 170 and 175 is just a few questions more correct. I just got freaked out since I had nearly 5 tests in a row (with the exception of the 178 outlier) which showed pretty constant performance and little improvement. Maybe i'm expecting too much too quickly.

Like I said, I'm trying to spend more time in between my PTs this week (previously I was doing a PT every other day to fit in 3-4 per week but I noticed it didn't really leave me enough time to drill on problem questions or really do in-depth reviews of issue sections like LG (but I'm trying to overcome the LG problems now and spending an entire day on reviewing some of my most troubled game types like in/out and grouping before my next PT). I'm hoping this will be a good strategy, although I do worry about its sustainability, because previously, in order to even fit in all of the PTs that the 7sage study schedule/syllabus had scheduled for me to do by October, I would have to start taking something like 5 PTs a week starting next week or week after next. So I'm worried about the balance between having time to study between PTs and also being able to complete enough PTs before test day

What's a reasonable expectation of when/how long it should take to creep up in terms of performance? Obviously that's going to be really subjective and case by case, but my main concern is that I don't want to spend the entire summer using up all my practice materials and not reaching my desired score and then not having any materials left for whenever the next time would be to take the exam.

Pacifico

It's different for everyone... quit worrying about it and just put in the work and it will pay off.... do 2-3 PTs a week and you'll still have stuff left over in case October is batshit crazy... Stop worrying about drilling LR/RC with those scores and just get your LG locked up and just make sure your BRs are 175+ and you'll be fine...

c.janson35

The only thing I would be drilling is logic games; at this this point, I think drilling LR/RC isn't as beneficial as taking full practice tests. Once you can consistently get your games score to -0, your overall score should start to see that upward creep to the 173-175 area. Anything higher than that is largely random IMO, depending on the number of questions each particular test has that personally don't sit well with you. Don't get me wrong, you can always improve your skills, but there's no amount of preparation that you can do that will be sufficient to getting a 180 (which I know you didn't mention, but it's just a helpful perspective about the randomness of 99.99% scores).

I would recommend another week or 2 of really solid PT/BR and then re-evaluate. You should be able to get 5 or 6 tests in during this time without overdoing it, and then you'll have a better idea of where you're at.

xander787

Shoot, also I forgot. Generally I am blind reviewing my PTs the day of a few hours after I take the test. I usually take a PT in the morning, around 9am until noon. Have a lunch break for an hour or two, and then I go through and blind review only the circled questions. Typically on blind review I get my score up to about 176-178. It seems like it's pretty rare for me to miss a question that I didn't circle on the exam (although it happens here and there) but I don't always perfectly fix everything that I circled for blind review either (except for the PT where I scored 178 in which case I fixed I think all errors but 1) and every now and again I will correct an answer that I actually got right initially (although the incidence of this has gone way down since my first PT).

At the same time, even though I do catch things in blind review I'm not sure if I'm doing it right or learning enough from it. Usually BR only takes me 2-2.5 hours and consists of me just going through each question I circled, rereading everything closely and verifying that either my answer was right or if I screwed up somehow and fixing it. I definitely have picked out certain patterns in my errors that I've been able to cut down on because of BR (things like not reading the precise wordings of the answer options and the stimulus in parallel reasoning questions, or simply choosing an answer option that was a distractor too quickly) and while I think I follow all the steps pretty closely (including forcing the people around me listen to me explain these horrid questions to them) I'm not sure if I really feel like BR has given me a groundbreaking new insight on anything or directly caused improvement. One thing that annoys me is the fact that I seem to circle too many questions on the test. I really take the circling anything below 100% certainty to heart and, sometimes it seems like I circle questions based on a bias against that question type (for instance, I used to hate PSAs, but I've only ever missed 1 I think on all the PTs I've taken, yet I still circle them all the time). I'm trying to get away from that as I'm sure it's probably detrimental.

Okay sorry for rambling.

xander787

Thanks to you both, I'll definitely keep PTing and focus more on logic games as I've been trying to do the last few days. Yesterday's PT was just really weird for me (PT43) because the logic games section was abnormally easy (I never even knew that was possible to have so many easy level ones in one test) so it didn't really tell me much about the progress that I've made on them.

Also, I have a question on improving on LG. Right now I have two huge stacks of papers. A binder filled with games that were either the online examples or the problem sets that I didn't get 100% the first time and thus printed 10 copies of (basically, old games I've seen) and then a really large binder of 4 copies of each of the games from 1-35 (based on the method you posted, Pacifico), excluding the games that I've already seen that are in my other pile of old games.

What is better to do? Drill on brand new games, thus using them up, or drilling on old games, or a mix of both? Up until about a week ago I was doing exclusively drilling old games (particularly the hardest ones, and removing the ones I was getting right each time) but I felt like that could only help me so much because a lot of the inferences I already had memorized (and a big issue of mine is finding the inferences) and I knew how to solve them by rote already. Just trying to make sure I'm getting the most out of the drilling of these LGs. I'm already pretty familiar with all the logical techniques, the game board types and typical setups, and typical strategies from the online videos, for me it just comes down to being able to do them (quick enough!!!) on the actual exams


Thanks again for the help and insight, both of you. I really appreciate it and it really helped me a lot!!

Pacifico

Dude... your scores are in the 98+ percentile and your BR is in the top of the 99th percentile... you're not going to score a 200... you're doing everything right except for the worrying/stressing part... there's nothing groundbreaking happening at that level, you know the stuff, it's just a matter of performing... Also, once you get to this level, you need to cut out the 100% certainty stuff, that's just for the beginning stages and people under 160... 90+% certainty should be getting you through without many confidence errors... I know that's violating the gospel, but it's true... Just shoot for less circled on every test and fewer confidence errors and you'll be good... I was able to take mine from 10 circled per section to ~5 or fewer while raising my timed and BR scores into the 98th percentile so it's possible...

nicole.hopkins

@Pacifico said:
It's different for everyone... quit worrying about it and just put in the work and it will pay off.... do 2-3 PTs a week and you'll still have stuff left over in case October is batshit crazy...

Yes.

@c.janson35 said:
The only thing I would be drilling is logic games

Word.

@Pacifico said:
there's nothing groundbreaking happening at that level, you know the stuff, it's just a matter of performing

Yes as well.

@xander787 said:
Drill on brand new games, thus using them up, or drilling on old games, or a mix of both?

If the old games were real doozies for you, drill 'em. Don't just drill to check boxes or to feel like you're doing something. If there's still something you need to learn on a game, then work on it. If you just got a little silly, then that's lower priority. Otherwise cycle in new games and just chill out.