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To those who took their third retake and hit the 170s this December...
blah170blah
Alum Inactive ⭐
Lend me your advice! I'm planning on taking the June test after having taken the June 2014 test (basically a 6 month hiatus away from the LSAT minus some tutoring here and there). I'm trying to think about how to get back in the groove and specifically how to use practice tests.
I've been studying off and on for this test since 2013 and I really need to get a 172+ to get into my target schools (ideally, a 175+). I took my first test in February 2014, scored a 166, took it again in June 2014, score a 162 (pretty much had a panic attack during the test), and have exhausted a lot of my practice test materials (I have about ~5-7 clean PTs left). I have some practice tests I've seen once, some I've seen twice, and some I've even seen three or four times.
I know that studying for your third retake, especially after a hiatus, looks a bit different, namely that I should take my PT and BR average with a grain of salt. Any advice on how you approached your third retake successfully?
I've been studying off and on for this test since 2013 and I really need to get a 172+ to get into my target schools (ideally, a 175+). I took my first test in February 2014, scored a 166, took it again in June 2014, score a 162 (pretty much had a panic attack during the test), and have exhausted a lot of my practice test materials (I have about ~5-7 clean PTs left). I have some practice tests I've seen once, some I've seen twice, and some I've even seen three or four times.
I know that studying for your third retake, especially after a hiatus, looks a bit different, namely that I should take my PT and BR average with a grain of salt. Any advice on how you approached your third retake successfully?
Comments
I made a lot of mistakes in preparing, though.
1 -- I spent too much time trying methods that worked for others instead of sticking with what worked for me. Namely, I started reading the question before the stimulus in LR even though it hurt my concentration/gave me consistently lower LR scores. I also messed myself up a bit with BRing. For LG, I found it helpful, but for LR it didn't help me at all, so I eventually stopped bothering with it for everything except LG. For LR and RC, I found that I used my time most efficiently when I checked my answers and then quickly went over every single question while focusing on those that I missed if I missed any. Basically, while I think it's important to try different methods, I think it's best to quickly abandon those that don't work for you and to stick with what does work even if it's unpopular.
2 -- At first, I was too sensitive. While PTing if a section was easy, I would feel happy. If it weren't, I'd be worried. I had to work on being completely calm and not letting any question, easy or hard, affect my mood at all. I found this to be surprisingly important.
If I were you, assuming you have 7 fresh PTs, I would save at least 5 of them for 2 to 4 weeks before the exam. But before worrying about that, I would look at what I was missing and try to figure out why. I would devote a lot of time to figuring out why and coming up a plan to address my particular issues. Other than that, I suppose I would just do more retakes.
Good luck.
In my case, the single most important thing was my mindset during the test. Leading up to Dec, I was in awful shape, and on test day I was incredibly tilted. I just knew I was going to bomb: I didn't get more than 10 minutes of sleep the night before because of indigestion, and woke up with a fever and migraine. My mind was full of awful thoughts like just giving up on law school, not even showing up and cancelling before the test even starts, etc. I walked into the test center with the intention of registering for a September retake as soon as I left that test center.
But this is what I did, and what I think you might need to do as well: the moment the test starts, you need to forget about it. It doesn't matter that you didn't complete every little piece of prep material you planned on doing. It doesn't matter that you feel like crap. You need to be in the moment, and force yourself to buckle down and give it everything you've got--in Dec, I think I came very close to reaching the limit of what I could've done given the circumstances).
If you can wake up test day feeling amazing, sun shining above with rainbows and butterflies, then this advice might be useless. But for me, something about test day and some bad luck just brought out all this negativity and self-doubt. I believe how I handled that was the single most important factor in my score--I very well could have scored a 160 that day.
Regarding general approach to prepping for a retake:
Don't just devour material for the sake of being able to tell yourself that you studied X hours and took X more preptests. Rather, use your time to improve how well you think: diligently doing easy questions quickly and accurately so that you become more efficient is good, struggling with hard questions is good because you're going to have to face them come test day. Understanding why the correct answer is correct, why the attractive but wrong 2nd choice is wrong, and discovering for yourself a "good" approach to each question (barring maybe 1 weird one every four PTs or so) is a must.
Hope this helps, and feel free to hit me up with questions if you've got any.
Short answer: Fundamentals first, then PTs.
Now, I don't know if you suffer from this, but I had this insane grand plan to do EVERYTHING leading up to my retake. I told myself I was going to do the Cambridge drills for PT 1-38, redo them as full PTs, then do PT 39-76 twice over as full PTs. I planned to do ~200 sudoku puzzles, read Economist and Scientific American, and picked out about 20 dense books to read in my free time. Now here's what I actually did, most of which you should not:
I procrastinated until 3 weeks before test day, and started with the Cambridge packet drills for PT 1-38, reviewed LR pretty thoroughly, and then really rushed review on LG and RC. I spent time reviewing tough/iffy Logical Reasoning questions (this is the section that benefits by far the most from review imo), and found it immensely helpful to circle questions I was less than 100% certain about, and making sure I came back to understand what tripped me up. By the time I finished the Cambridge drills, I was less than a week away from test day. Over that period of time, I went through PTs 66-76, and reviewed poorly. I did do the June PT, PT A, and PT 60, but didn't have time to see anything else. I probably put in some 20-hour days, and because I waited so long, I was definitely feeling burnt out leading up to test day.
Out of that dumpster fire, I found the following helpful:
Make sure your fundamentals are solid. The easiest way to do this is by using the old PTs for drills. Once you have that down, and know that you can tackle just about any kind of question if you had sufficient time, move onto full length PTs.
Make sure you have a really good handle on LR. I think this is the core of the test, and fundamentals are what make you consistent here. For LG and RC, try to develop a personalized technique that feels rock-solid to you. This really boosted my confidence, and allowed me to feel comfortable even on killer games or passages.
Another reason for making sure your fundamentals are rock solid before moving onto PTs: over the course of doing a bunch of each type of question/game/passage, I started to realize the subtleties that made easy questions extremely fast, and hard questions very doable and for the most part painless. There are a lot of subtle things that show up again and again, and it's easiest to see this when doing drills. PTs are an excellent opportunity to put everything together once your fundamentals are solid.
Let me know if you have any more questions, and sorry for writing so much!
EDIT: Just looked back at my very next PT, and it was a 161...
So simple, yet so profound! Lol
how were you able to do like 14 PTs (66-76, A, B, june pt) in the week before the test, and how were your scores on these?
Then, I'd set out a basic timeline like: do simple linear and relative ordering by this day, basic grouping by this one, etc. I started with LG because I enjoyed it a lot. I ran through these pretty quickly, stopping on games and questions that gave me trouble to review the underlying processes and figure out a "good" solution. I always tried to figure out a solution myself, and really only looked at someone else's answer as a last resort. My thinking was that there was some value to taking time and struggling to figure out stuff on my own, but if you ever find yourself completely lost it's probably fine to look up solutions (though don't do this too much..)
Around the time I got to basic grouping games, I started to do some LR. I think Cambridge's order is pretty nice, though I did change it a bit to something more like 7Sage's order, which I felt made more sense to me: that is, I started with Main Conclusion as a sort of warmup, but moved MBT and MSS earlier as they felt more "fundamental" to how I approached LR. It is crucial to review any LR questions that you are at all uncertain about (it doesn't matter if it's in the stimulus or one of the answer choices, if there is a single thing in the question that confused you, stop and think on it). For some really tough questions, there was some subtle assumption or point made, and oftentimes this is combined with a highly attractive but wrong answer choice. Taking the time to wrap my head around these questions was probably one of the main things that bumped me up from low 170s to high 170s on PTs.
Finally, when I got pretty sick of LR and had pretty much finished LG, I started doing RC passages, though for these I don't think it matters whether you print out and do the actual whole sections or drill as Cambridge has them (it's like 4 big packets). For these, I sort of approached them like LG: Just as I made sure to understand the underlying "process" in each game, I made sure to understand the underlying process of reasoning made in the passage: what's the main point, and, depending on the passage, where do we go from there or how do we get there? Even if there's no argument, there's always a fundamental process at work, and seeing that makes understanding everything else pretty simple. Reviewing questions was far less valuable for me, as most of the time my mistake was not in how I approached the question, but in my understanding of the passage.
However, I will say this: making sure you confidently eliminated each answer choice and confidently confirmed the right one is a really, really big deal. If you can't consistently do this, then you need to spend as much time and effort as you need to get to the point that you can. There is no time for dillydallying on the test, and if you ever find yourself doing this on RC, make sure you fix it in practice so you won't get wrecked on the real thing.
On the recent PTs leading up the test, I started out with low to high 160s on the first few, then jumped to a consistent 178-180, then dropped down to a 163 the night before the test (likely due to burn out). I was able to do 14 PTs in the week before the test because I was foolish. I can't think of this ever being a good idea for anyone, ever. Please don't do this.