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3 Likes
Plataeu at 164 -- what to do?
Marco Antonio
Alum Member
Plateauing at 164, started at a 144 in June, so I'm stoked on the improvement. My goal is to get a 170+ on the June LSAT, so I want to be PTing above a 170 really really soon. I need advice on what to do. I know a lot of you who got a 170+ score probably were stuck in a plateau for a long time. I really want to know how you handled to situation and what you did to get over the hump. Obviously, the specifics will be different for each person, so I just want to know how you personally handled the situation.
Comments
What's the breakdown for your sections?
Do you notice is you are starting to only get the more difficult questions wrong? If not, then keep pressing on the fundamentals. If so, then you are on pace. When that happens for LR, focus on breaking it down as you would, at least intuitively, for the easy ones. Oftentimes even the harder questions have surprisingly similar structure and potential answers.
If you hurdle is LG, then you have it easy between now and June. Use the diagnostic tool on 7Sage, get the logic games Bible and work through the games, if any in particular, that are giving you trouble.
20pt improve is impressive, congratulations alone on that! Hope you crush the 170 goal in June
Do you have a strategy for skipping questions? I would work on that, for one thing.
Your improvement is awesome and I bet this is going to continue. Wondering if you've explored the webinars on here.
First off, nice job! going from the 140's to the 160's is astronomical! That tells me you're plenty sharp and a highly disciplined student, and that's the main thing really. You can do this! What are you BRing? You really want this to be in the upper mid 170's at least, so if that's not already there you'll want to find a way to push that higher.
You've got to start doing things differently. One problem with the 160's plateau is that many of the strategies that got you to that level are now holding you there. 160's approaches will yield out a 160's score range, and so you need to shift to 170's approaches. A lot of the 160's strategies are meant to manage lingering weaknesses, many of which you've now likely eliminated. So you need to adapt your strategy to account for the improvement in ability. Exactly what those specifics are is really hard to say because there's just so many different components that factor in to it.
One really important way you can diagnose this is to record and review footage of your timed drills/PTs. Afterwards, track your times for each question with a stopwatch and look for under confidence errors which you need to take just as seriously as over confidence errors. For every question you get right but spend more time than you really needed, figure out how you could have been more efficient. Two frequent, broad stroke answers: (1) Allow your intuition to do the work. If you understand what's going on, you don't have to articulate your reasoning to yourself. Trust your understanding and just answer the question. (2) Be more comfortable with the prospect of missing individual questions. Maybe you get a curve breaker and you've got it down to two. You're leaning towards one over the other but just can't fully justify it. Don't worry about it. Just pick your lean and move on. You can agonize over it later if there's time. If you get this situation right somewhere in the neighborhood of 65% of the time, that's likely plenty. I usually have about three of these per section in LR and I normally get two right and miss one. Fantastic.
For your errors where you're still struggling to understand, you likely need to go deeper than what you're doing currently. Getting to the 160's took a lot less insight into my errors than pushing into the 170's did. Question type (or game type/passage type) became an almost useless metric somewhere in the mid 160's for me, so if your analysis is still limited to question type, that's a problem. You likely need to be studying the grammatical and even linguistic qualities of the arguments. So things like, what is the nature of a comparative statement, and what can we really say about the objects being compared? Being able to answer this quickly and recognize comparisons fluently in real time is an essential skill that doesn't really correlate to any one question type. It's just an underlying implication of the meaning of language.
I hope this helps!
Thanks for the prompt responses. For LR it's usually -4/5 RC -5/-6 LG -3/-4. I also don't have specific skipping strategy other than just skipping when I find the questions to be too difficult
@"Cant Get Right" How would you practice getting a deeper understanding. Do I need to BR more intensely or differently? I know there's no "magic bullet" to solve the problem, but I'm not sure what else I can do on my own if that makes sense.
I find skipping most useful on LR and RC. My strategy for skipping on LR was to skip whenever it took me more than about a minute to understand the stimulus. I would usually come back to the question after the following one or two questions. I skipped a lot in my later training, like when I was scoring around mid-160s.
On my first LR section on test day, I had to skip and return to question #1 at least five times while working through questions #1-10. My brain was just not understanding it at all. I picked it up in the end. In that same section, I skipped from question #18/#19 (can't remember exactly which) to the back of the section and worked from #26 to wherever I left off in the middle. I ended up with 25/26 and that was the highest raw section score for my entire test. I was skipping all throughout this section. In my second LR section, I worked linearly, less skipping around, and went 22/25, without enough time to adequately address the last two questions.
Skipping can be really useful on LG, but it's much more systematic than LR, less fluid. LR skipping is fluid, if I could describe it in a word. You have to be comfortable with your own approach, but make sure that you give yourself enough freedom in your approach to be effective.
--
Building on what @goingfor99th laid out, I really only have a specific skipping strategy for LG. I realized that I was getting hung up on rule substitution questions. I would frequently reach the 4th game with only a few minutes so would rush and get mayyybe 1 or 2 right but that's it, and scored around -5/-6 in LG. When I actively decided to skip rule subs, I finally was able to reach the 4th game with enough time to attack it and sometimes have time left over to return to the rule subs that I had skipped. This automatically raised my LG score to the -3/-2 and occasional -1 range.
Skipping looks different for everyone, but it can really help to make sure you're not wasting minutes on 1 question and missing 3 or 4 others because of it.
I agree with all the wonderful advice above.
I was plateaued in the 162-164 range for quite some time. To break it, I took a break from PT'ing and focused solely on games for a bit. If you're leaving points on the table with LG, you should address those problems first.
There’s two plateaus that you’re currently facing down. One around the mid 160s and one around the early 170s. Given your stats, I’d really try to make gains on the LR first and foremost. Presumeably, continuously hitting the LG should, over time, put you in the -2/-0 range naturally. RC might require a bit more planning, but I think that it’s a luxury right now. You can cross that bridge when you get there.
Also, a lot of the actual advice about the section practice above is quite good. I just wanted to comment on where it seems most important to dedicate your time to get outta this plateau. Good luck!—A.c.S
@Alex what was your strategy to nail that -0 at games, i still sometimes go -3 (timed), and it pisses me off. I need that -1 -0 consistently. The issue is not in a specific kind of game though. I did BR all 1-36 PT...
Hey @Kateryna,
I started to do full sections instead of drilling them game by game like I did when I was fool proofing. This allows you to practice skipping games or questions and sort of working through the sections in a more realistic way. Then I would BR each one after I was done and evaluate what things I could have done to do the game more efficiently. I would practice writing out different "worlds" or "framing" each game that split nicely just to practice doing that should I need to in the future with a similar game. Things like that. To do this, I mostly used PTs 42-51 and 51-62. After doing those I had seen some pretty significant improvement.
Another thing that I think was super helpful was becoming very mechanical with how I did games. I just forced myself to always remain calm and stick to the same process for each game. I found myself usually doing a lot more work upfront and really nailing those "game breaking" inferences before diving into the questions.
You might not always go -0 but if you can get your LG score down to only missing 1-2 consistently, you're in good shape.
@Kateryna , I actually had a breakthrough on a recent PT and ended up going -1 on games. This is the best I have ever done on a live games section. What I did was I developed a decent skipping strategy to have some time remaining at the end. I did this because I realized I the questions I had been missing weren't necessarily all five-star questions, in fact, I was missing questions where I made careless errors; I would end with -5 or -4. The solution to this is actually not to make careless errors, rather to be better able to identify questions where you are liable to make careless errors. Going into the section, I decided that if I wasn't super confident about a question I would flag it and keep going. This really paid off
On my last PT I spent less than ~6 minutes on each game and 12 minutes on the last game because it was one of those games where you really just need to brute force your way through. This left me with about 5 minutes to review. I determined that I had been thorough enough on the last game that I probably didn't make any mistakes. I remembered that there was one question on game 1 (a 1-star game btw) that I was only 50% certain about. I went back to it and figured out my mistake in under a minute and got it correct. I then also noticed another mistake I had made on a different question in that game, so far 2:30 of extra time have been used up. I then went to game 2 and fixed an error I made which too about 2 minutes. So in 4:30 I corrected 3 questions I would have missed. If I had been really stubborn and had just tried to nail everything on the first go, I might have ended up with a -3, or -4 (the latter is probably more likely). But, by being efficient, I pushed myself up to a -1, with basically no difference in my level of knowledge about the test. I think these types of strategies are extremely useful when you're at a point where you feel like you basically mastered the section, but just can't seem to get that coveted -0
@MarcoAntonio, i can go -0 on timed section, but it just pisses me off when i go -3 (and -3 seems the most I miss in a section). I guess I really should just walk away from the questions that are time sinkers and come back to them later with clear mind, maybe that will help me improve a bit. thanks for sharing your story and congrats on that -1!
@Alex thank you. I started doing PT in full sets rather than just by type also which seems to be much more helpful for me as JY "recommended time" does not usually work for me and i made myself redo the games over and over to get it under that time recommended and turned out I can do full section with some time left (sometimes as much as 8 minutes) and go -0 while still taking longer on some games than what is recommended. I guess -3 is usually an outlier and i do mostly -0/-1 but it just pisses me off that there is still that chance i will go -3 on real thing and I need all the points I can take to compensate for RC. I am still striving for that constant -0/-1before I go into timed full PT.
Good advice here!
Your aberrant -3s are probably what amounts to your increasingly small skill deficiencies. That, or you're so damn good at this point that you get bored/distracted while working through some sections. :]
I learned it from a very helpful future Yale law grad
Someday!
(I know what you meant. :P)
I'm also plateaued and this skipping strategy has been helping me a bunch on my recent LG drilling, thanks for mentioning it Marco! Fresh eyes seems to be what I need.