Question about score improvement potential

Not Ralph Nader

I got a question regarding my LSAT score improvement potential and would be grateful if you guys could tell me your opinion.

My current score is 150 and I am aiming for 158-160 considering my situation (explained below) do you think, it is a realistic goal which could be achieved by June or September?

- My baseline was 148 (I gave myself one hour per section ((I know it was bad mistake)) but I took other PTs including PT 70 under time using 7sage App two months ago and got a miserable 150 which forced me to withdraw from December LSAT

- I read Power score bibles plus Kplen LSAT Prep book and two months ago I got the Ultimate+ pack (halfway through the syllabus)

- Normally I put in 9-10 hours a day 7 days a week.s

- I am a ELS student and almost always I only finish 3 RC passages, 17-19 LR question and 3 LG games .

- I read very slowly (170 wpm)

- BR scores includes those questions that I could not finish under timed condition.

I have added my 7Sage analytic below, I would be grateful if you could give me any advice.

allison.gill.sanford

Always max out LG improvement first - foolproof the games using JY's advice and Pacifico's method. Your reading pace will impact you less on the games than on other sections. After mastering games, see where you're scoring and we can hopefully provide more guidance.

Not Ralph Nader

@allison.gill.sanford thanks for the advice I am working on the games, even if I max LG I still gonna lack some points, what else should I do beside the games?

allison.gill.sanford

Well, since you're only getting to 3 out of 4 games, I think you have pretty large gains to make there. That is the easiest section to deal with given the English difficulty for you. I'm not sure if games alone could get you toward your target score, but it might get you most of the way there. So I highly encourage you to focus there for a while.
In terms of other sections, I'm not sure I can speak to your situation because you are in a tough spot with the language barrier. I would say reading dense passages in English - like the Economist - might be your best material outside of just doing as much actual RC as you can.

Not Ralph Nader

@allison.gill.sanford you are right, I got to focus on games and subscribe to economist

allison.gill.sanford

Yup - they are great. With a subscription you get more full articles, which are closer in length to an RC passage. Best of luck!

MrSamIam

As Allison stated, start with the games. Once you've got those down, work on LR question types that you're not doing exceptionally well on. That should bring you up to the 155+ range. For RC, read passages. That's really the only way to practice.

Not Ralph Nader

@MrSamIam thanks for the comment I got a lot to do, should I reuse RC passages as I finished most of 1 to 36 or it does not work like LG?

runiggyrun

I second all of the above suggestions to nail the games first. You are not that far from your target score, and the games can get you a third of the way there.
And I feel like LR should be the next big area of focus (this is just my gut feeling for your situation, please take it with a grain of salt). LR is about half of your score, and unlike RC where a 170 WPM reading speed is going to be very hard to overcome just with hard work, in LR you can benefit tremendously by developing a very solid understanding of the logical processes - so once you've read and understood the English in the stimulus you don't spend a lot of time translating into lawgic, taking apart the reasoning and finding the holes in it (most questions will have some sort of hole in the reasoning). Additionally, you might want to drill with full LR sections to develop a skipping strategy that most benefits you. Maybe for someone who has some trouble with the actual reading, it makes sense to skip those "match the reasoning" questions that are half a page long right off the bat and come back if you have time. But again, this strategy works best if you're a pro at the actual logic involved - you'll need to compensate for skipping long questions by being really good at the short ones.
For some reason the analytics are not showing for me, so I can't see your BR scores, which would help with the assessment. Even without that, looks like your timed scores are 8-10 points below your target score, so you need to answer an extra 15-18 questions. Games might get you ~6 of those, so you need ~5-6 LR questions/section, maybe less if practice also gets your RC up a couple of points. That's hard, but not impossible by September (I'm not sure about June, and they would both be in the same cycle anyway).
Good luck, I admire you for going for it!

Not Ralph Nader

@runiggyrun thanks for taking the time and helping me. My BR scores are 160 161 and 169.
Regarding LR drill, correct me if I am wrong, you suggesting I should do full section every time I practice after finishing the syllabus. On RC I answer passages with most number of questions which normally ad up to 21 questions, but I only get 14 of them correct, how do you think I should approach those 21 that I answer to increase my score?

MrSamIam

@nader.parham If you're goal is to increase efficiency in reading comp, then I can see reusing the passages as being somewhat helpful - albeit, not as helpful as using new passages. In the interest of not wasting precious PTs (36+), I would certainly reuse the older passages. Start from the beginning, chances are you've forgotten the details of the passages that you did X months ago.

Cayenne43

@nader.parham I would also suggest picking up the LSAT Trainer, I think that it goes really well with the 7sage curriculum. It offers some great strategies for RC, it really helped me stop trying to understand what I was reading and focus more on understanding the structure of the argument for each RC passage. I used to be really bad at LG. I followed Pacifico's strategy (https://7sage.com/discussion#/discussion/2737/logic-games-attack-strategy) and my score has improved so much! I highly reccomend it.

runiggyrun

Your BR scores suggest that it's not just a matter of reading speed, or speed in general. You still have substantial gains to make in understanding the material, which is normal considering you are only halfway through the curriculum.
Based on this new information, you are probably not quite at the point where you should be drilling full sections for LR, or taking full PT's, because developing skipping/timing strategies is more valuable once you have a good grasp of the material. Until that happens, it's a waste of PT's.
For the time being, focus on going through the 7Sage curriculum, doing some of the problem sets (save some for later, when you are drilling your weaknesses) and proofing games.
Couple that with reading in English in your spare time (the Economist you're subscribing to is good in that respect).
Once you're done with the curriculum, do a few more PTs with careful BR and see if you've at least improved your BR score into the 170's. The BR score should not be heavily influenced by reading speed or ESL status (assuming your English is good enough to enable you to attend law school in the US without undue hardship). But I assume that there will be a larger gap between your BR and timed scores than for native speakers, so you need to maximize your BR scores to give you that "cushion".

On a separate note, I worry that you are studying that many hours every day - that's a recipe for burnout. I know from first hand experience how draining it is to learn something in a foreign language, and I doubt you are able to assimilate everything you go over in a 9 hour study day. It's better to study fewer, higher quality hours and take several more months than to try and get to a certain score by June and burn out.

Slow and steady - you'll get there!

Not Ralph Nader

@MrSamIam you are right, I need to start over from RCs in PT 1; thank you for the comment

@DeeJayGee, I bought the LSAT Trainer; I will go through it once I finish the syllabus, thanks for the link, I am implementing the strategy but I do not have the excel file he mentioned in the post; by any chance do you have the file?

@ruanrujin thank you for the advice, you really give me hope that I can do this. You are right I need to cut back on the hours. I will focus on the curriculum and then finish LSAT Trainer to build the foundation. Should I include those section that I did not finish in my BR score?

Thank you all for being so kind, helpful and taking the time to answer my questions

runiggyrun

Yes, the BR includes the questions you didn't get to - if the BR scores you mentioned don't include those, then you might be in better shape with the fundamentals than the scores suggest. Essentially BR is supposed to tell you how well you would do if the test was untimed. Some people even BR every question of the test, but that has the disadvantage of taking a really long time. Unless you find that there are a lot of questions you were 100% sure you answered correctly but turned out to be wrong, I think it's more productive to BR just the questions you circled plus the ones you skipped or didn't get to during the timed test.

Pacifico

I would also recommend a lot of audiobooks and/or podcasts to passively help with your reading and English abilities. And Allison is on point with her Economist recommendation, which I think is generally useless for native speakers, but I always recommend that and other more challenging offerings as being of use to ESL speakers.

Not Ralph Nader

@niggyrun Thanks for answering my question about BR.
@Pacifico Thanks for your recommendation, I think its time for me to hit the library.

leeban92

Yes it is very possible, my base score was the same as yours and I saw and improvement to the 160s. In my opinion 9-10 hours a day is too much. Try scaling it down to 2 hours a day over 5 days and 5 hours one day. I experienced burnout early in the process because I overdid it. When I scaled back my studying and really paid attention to my mistakes I saw real improvement in my scores.

Not Ralph Nader

@leeban92 you really give me hope, thank you for commenting. Can I ask how long it took you to reach 160?

leeban92

@nader.parham well since I'm working full time it took me a few months, but looking back at it I could've reached 160 a lot sooner if I really thoroughly reviewed my mistakes. That's the key I would say

Not Ralph Nader

@leeban92 I hope I can reach that score and thank you for your comment

leeban92

@nader.parham its totally possible, and no problem

Grey Warden

Hey @nader.parham , I understand your situation I am also an ELS student, for me really trying to master the LG section was the key to break a 160. I followed @Pacifico 's strategy for LG and it has helped me a lot.
I also struggled with being able to finish only 3 passages on RC (that continued for like 5 whole months believe me), right now also the situation has not entirely improved but certainly has become better. I have been reading from the Economist and Scientific American and not the general current articles about politics etc, but really weird science and cultural stuff which is similar to what we get in LSAT RC. I try to read it on paper (print the article or get the magazine) instead of using a softcopy so that I can also notate. This has certainly helped and now I am atleast getting to read the 4th passage and answer a few if not all questions. You can try doing this, it may be helpful for you.
For LR I am still struggling with timing issues and I become hazy but employing some skipping strategies has helped in getting to attempt atleast 23 questions and try to get the maximum easy ones right before the time is up. You should check out https://7sage.com/webinar/skip-it if you haven't already. Some really good advice there.
Hang in there, you can do it

Not Ralph Nader

@"Grey Warden" Thank you so much for commenting, it really gives me hope that I can do it. It is such a good news for me to hear that it is possible to improve and be able to read four passages. Could you tell me how many articles approximately did you read per day or over the five months to be able to finish the all 4 passages and how heavily you notated each of those articles. I got Economist but I guess I need to get American Scientific as well. This test is going to bankrupt me )

Thank you again for sharing this, did you use any other technique to increase your reading speed?

Grey Warden

@nader.parham the improvement was a result of reading more and focusing more on the structure of the passage and main points than the small details. I read about two articles per day, one rather long one and one similar to LSAT RC length since I was working full time. If you are studying full time you could read more and the improvement may come faster for you. If I slacked some day I would read some more on other days. For notations I took a cue from @"Nicole Hopkins" 's webinar on RC, it is right here
Really good webinar, do watch it, for notation and also other RC strategies.
In addition to this I got a copy of the LSAT Trainer and the RC section in that book was also very helpful in understanding how to read for reasoning and structure. 7sage's memory method for RC has also been very helpful, while employing the memory method in real time I am trying to make sure that I am only recalling the structure of a para in relation to other paras and the main point of the para if any. I have realised that recalling more details during the memory method (which is what I used to do) can take longer unnecessarily. Also you can just print the article instead of buying the magazine, though one copy of the Economist has plenty of articles and can easily last for a month
Very importantly make sure you don't burn out and become disinterested in the test because that can lead to diminishing returns. Take breaks and give yourself atleast one day in a week when you are not studying for the LSAT at all.

Not Ralph Nader

@"Grey Warden" Thank you for the detail explanation, I will follow them and hopefully improve my RC. I got the LSAT Trainer, I need to go through it and come back to RC passages. The burn out probably got me already