Cold diagnostic vs first official prep test score change

caleighkulzer

Just curious about people’s experience with score improvement between a cold diagnostic and their first practice test. I took an essentially cold diagnostic after completing only the foundations section of the curriculum. Did people who have done that see any score improvement on their first practice test right after completing the dedicated RC and LR curriculum sections? If so how much?

Or will improvement only come with practice tests and drilling? Any info is great just curious what others experiences were.

evan.matzel

I originally took a practice LSAT with zero studying prior on a whim and got a 168, though I did have a background in philosophy which helped a lot. After my initial exam, I started going through 7sage and Mike Kim's book and started taking exams about 2-3 weeks later. To my surprise, my scores in the following exams were all in the 160-162 range. Turns out that intuition brought me a long way in the start, but beginning to actual take the exam in the manner you are "supposed" to brought down my score as I began taking longer on each question and thinking about them in a new way. Even after I completed the book and a good portion of 7sage curriculum, my score didn't hardly raise.

After couple months of studying past the curriculum, primarily doing practice questions and taking (almost) weekly exams, my score has risen significantly even from my original score. I think a large part of what you gain from the curriculum is an understanding of the best tried-and-true practices but the only thing that will allow you to actual see real raises in your score (past the basic understandings of how logic works both systematically and grammatically) is a large amount of practice problems to actually solidify those understandings.

The other thing that helped me improve was to start wrong-answer journaling (I primarily focused not on what made the right answer right as this is usually pretty self evident after the fact if you have the basics down, but on what habit brought me to my wrong answer so that I could weed out that habit in the future).

Either way, I hope that helps provide some context (and relief if your score actually goes down after your original practice test(s)). Good luck out there.