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Some unsolicited advice from a high scorer who owes a lot to 7Sage
terrynicholasj
Free Trial Member
Hi All,
I got my February score back, and I'm nothing but ecstatic about it. I went from 160 in December to 171 in February. I owe a lot to this community. I didn't post much on here but I creeped, and I used a lot of the (free) 7sage materials. I feel like if I can help even one person get motivated and get the score they want, then this thread was worth writing. I have a description below of my LSAT experience and then some advice for anyone who wants it. Are you tired of egotistical high scorers giving advice? Then skip this thread. I was so tired of reading about ivy league wannabe's scoring 170+ whining about how bad they were doing/did that I totally feel your pain and I don't judge you for not wanting to hear about it. For the TLDR just read the itemized points and take what you want or ignore if you think it's stupid!
I applied to the Air Force 2.5 years ago, and it has been a slow process. After passing all the selection criteria, but going months of waiting and not getting called, I needed a backup in my life (I'm still waiting as of writing this post). The LSAT seemed like a good thing to put in my back pocket, and admission to some law schools wouldn't hurt if the time came. I had an older version of the Powerscore books sitting around, and I pulled them out (I didn't know what 7sage was). Starting on October 1st, I spent about 3 weeks deep in all 3 books reading them and taking notes and studying them carefully. Although I did some travelling during this time (Las Vegas and Tofino B.C.), I was spending at least 4-5 hours a day studying, with a day or two off a week. The only exam I had written prior to this was about 2 years earlier and I got about 50% of the questions right, putting me somewhere around the 30th percentile, although that's just a guess. After my power-score studying, I wrote my first exam and got a 161. I then focused on practicing from November until December just doing older practice exams. My highest PT was 167, the night before my December exam, and my lowest was a 161 (minus a weird outlier 156 where I got so frustrated in a logic game that I gave up). I wrote the December exam and it ended in tragedy. I scored a 160, below my average PT of 163, and it was the lowest practice test of ANY practice test I had done.
I became kind of bummed so I re-registered for February, and didn't start studying until January 3rd, giving me about a month to prepare. My mind was back in the cockpit of a fighter jet not in a Dean's office. What had butchered my December score was a weak logic games, so while I kept telling myself I would do full PT's and stuff, I never really did I kinda just practiced logic games over and over again until even in a super hard one I could keep my cool and minimize lost points. I sort of used the 7sage foolproof method for logic games, but less rigorously. The truth is that while I put in some good time, I wasn't a crazy aspiring lawyer, and I didn't put in insane time. I put in the work, and combined with a decent aptitude for the exam, did okay. Especially prior to my February exam, I was doing almost exclusively logic games, and spent most of my time working and in the gym. Maybe 1-3 hours a day, 3-4 days a week or something like that.
Before the February exam, I intentionally didn't look at an exam for 5 days prior to the test. I sat down and wrote on February 12th, and it went fine. I assumed I did a 165, since my highest PT hadn't got much higher (169), and I didn't really put in much extra work other than reducing variability on Logic Games. I got my score back yesterday, and I just about collapsed when I saw a 171. Now, this is a good score, but it's not like a 176 or 177 or something. I'm not an LSAT genius. I moved 11 LSAT points and 18 percentile points from my previous real sit down. Now I'll probably get into the law schools I applied to, and maybe next year just for Sh*ts and giggles I'll apply to some ivy schools and see what happens, but I'm not some crazy SJW or involved in every single issue in the world like I was in high school, so I'm not sure I'm Ivy material. So that's my story, and if you relate at all, or care about what I learned, I have some scattered advice below. Take what makes sense and leave what doesn't. This is a great community of people, and even though people who score high always sound a little bit egotistical when they talk, it really comes from a place of knowing that in the past we were sitting with lower scores, reading about other people who were doing better than us, and it's difficult to qualify why your help might be valuable to someone without first saying that you actually do well on the test.
In no particular order:
Be a killer. This exam is NOT about how many questions you get right. It's about how many questions you get right COMPARED TO THE PERSON SITTING NEXT TO YOU. This is an exam about percentiles not raw scores. If the question you're reading is easy, it's easy for the next person too. Answer the question faster and better, take every edge you possibly can at all times. Powerscore says it well, ATTACK the questions, no matter how confident you are, and move on.
Start early. This exam is in the truest sense a marathon and not a sprint. Learning the exam takes time. I'd rather do 10 practice test over 3 months than to do 20 practice tests in one. This stuff is more like taking edibles than ripping the bong, it takes a while to hit you.
Your brain gets tired. I saw CONSISTENTLY that when I took a week off from a long period of hard studying, I would come back that day and score 5 or more points higher than my previous test. The LSAT is an intelligence (intelligence about a particular way of thinking) test not a knowledge test (the MCAT is the opposite in this respect, every extra bit of stuff you can memorize helps). Every single exam has different questions, and your brain needs to be stretchy to adapt and understand the material. So, take the time to load KNOWLEDGE into your brain (LG games strategies, LR and RC question types, test strategies, etc. etc.), and then take time to give your brain a chance to soak it in so that when you hit that full length practice test, it has every ounce of INTELLIGENCE in it. You'll feel it; after a few days off all the questions seem easier. For those mechanically inclined, studying and PT'ing back to back is like filling your high performance engine with 87 octane. The engine knocks, gets less power and might blow up. But give it a few days rest and you're giving it 94 octane and the perfect tune.
Nail the logic games. The LG section is probably the only one where you can have 0 aptitude for it, but still do amazingly well. The 7sage method works well. Do a a LG games section, and then give it a day and do it again the next day, and the next, and the next until you really understand it. Once it's perfect put it on the back burner, then come back to it some time later and nail it to remember the tricks and to boost your confidence. Nailing the logic games and then guessing on the rest of the exam will give you a 140. Nailing the LG and then getting only 50% right on the other questions puts you in the 63ish percentile. The video explanations on this site are THE BOMB so use them.
Analyze your mistakes. Analyze. Your. Mistakes. Or as millennials do, Analyze (clap emoji) Your (clap emoji) Mistakes (clap emoji). I didn't use the blind review method. I'm pretty lazy, and going back and analyzing questions I'm not even sure I got wrong was tedious and annoying. I would do this: Write a Practice test and grade it. Cry about my score (I'm a 6' 250 lb dude) and have a snack so I can't remember what the right answers to the wrong questions were. For LR I would re-do all of my wrong questions. I would write down the question type/category (which helps me on harder questions so I can use systemic approaches when necessary), then I would write down why I chose the wrong answer, then select what I thought was the right answer and explain why I thought it was right. I would do this for all of them and check the answers again, and hopefully they were all right. If not, same thing again. The key is to really take time to think about WHY you got it wrong, and understand PERFECTLY why you were such an idiot for not getting it right the first time. You want to feel stupid after this process. For the RC I would start reading the passages again, then stop because RC sucks A** and I'll never get better at it. I would review the wrong questions and the right answers just to get a feel for it, which probably helped my score a little, but I spent very little time on this. For logic games, I would do them over and over again until I got it right, then use the approach above^(4.) to do it well. Honestly, the best thing I did was spend more time understanding why I got questions wrong, and less time actually writing practice exams. If you have a good work ethic unlike yours truly, using this method religiously on all the PT's is going to net you an objectively awesome score.
Put your phone in a different room when you study.
Get a job that lets you focus. I drove Uber. I like shooting the sh*t with people and driving my car (I have a 4.97 driver rating heck ya I ball hard NBD). I'd work enough to pay the bills whenever I wanted, went to the gym as much as I wanted and then pretended to study more than I actually studied for the rest of the day.
If you don't have the luxury of living at home and working part time like I did, try and change that. If you cant, spend less time doing stupid stuff that's not making your score better, but leave enough time to have fun.
Do not, under any circumstances, study for this exam if you are easily discouraged or if you're not really sure you want it.
Do NOT, under ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, listen to the stupid people here who whine about ridiculously high scores and claim that they achieved this with minimal work (i've been half guilty of both sides of this in the past and even now). These people, I've determined, are liars or extreme outliers, and much more likely to be the former than the later. Don't believe anyone who says they scored more than 165 on their first exam with no studying.
So to end, this is my unsolicited contribution to you folks at 7sage. Take it or leave it. Hopefully instead of law i'm flying mach two somewhere, but if not i'll see you guys in class. Good luck to all of you, and feel free to comment what you think of my strategy.
Comments
Great post. Just the encouragement I needed after a rough February exam. Thanks for sharing!
@terrynicholasj Thanks for taking the time to write this. And congrats on your score!
Number 1 of what you said is so overlooked!! Even though this exam isnt graded on a curve in a traditional sense, it is scaled based on the past test takers when they took that section as an experimental. If a section is hard for you, it may be hard for others so that would present an opportunity for you to beat out other people by doing thr problems more efficiently
Also I love your energy and your personality. It oozes from this post and you seem like a humble honest and fun person to be around
Thanks guys! Humble deffinitely not the first descriptor people who know me would give, but I'm glad you find my writing engaging
Lol @ the weed analogy. Super impressed at the work you put in just for a possible backup career.
Hey @westcoastbestcoast are you in Canada or the US?
Great work! Thanks for sharing your story. Is Jag Corps something you're interested in?
What you said about taking a break is really good advice. I managed to put myself in a situation where I work part-time for 4 hours a day, so I can study for around 4-6 hours. I've been doing this for a long time and it's hard to take a break when you have a goal and you want it so badly. It's funny timing because this is the week I decided to just not look at the LSAT, and take a break from it and I think it's what I needed.
That was the most inspiring, useful, brilliant post I've ever read. You ARE an LSAT genius. Thanks for giving back!
USA!
Great post! So kind of you to share your experience and advice.
Thank you for posting! I got a 158 on the December LSAT and hope I can say the same thing come June.
Awesome post. Definitely what I needed after receiving my February score.
Thanks for the encouragement man. Congrats on the score-best of luck in all your applications, LSAT and non--LSAT.
Thanks everyone! Glad I could help! @westcoastbestcoast I'm in Canada... hahah just wondering if you applied to UBC in Vancouver!
Nope! I heard that Canadian law schools for the most part are top notch.
This was incredible. I sooo needed this after February's exam. Thanks, dude! You rock!
I found this helpful and motivating. Thanks for sharing and congrats on your score!!
@westcoastbestcoast yup! So top notch that they don't accept me hahahaha I got rejected from UBC Because even though my LSAT score is 5-6 points higher than their mean accepted, they used ALL of my GPA from my 5 year degree, including my really, really rough first year where I had a 2.3GPA. So they calculated me at a 3.1 GPA even though I really graduated with a 3.4 and if you took my best 2 years it'd be something like a 3.6. Totally mediocre, but if I'd known I wanted to try out for law maybe I wouldn't have messed around taking calculus for fun and actually done some more homework.... shrug.... Just shows that your LSAT isn't everything!
I did hear that for Candian Law schools. GPA matters alot more than it does law schools in USA. And that retakes may not be used against you if you retake too many times. Why don't you apply to law schools in USA. Theres alot of splitter friendly law schools like Northwestern
A large percentage of law schools in Canada look at your last two years while some look at all of your years in undergrad. How do US schools weigh GPA? Do a lot of them look at your last 2/3 or best 2?
They look at all 4 years of undergraduate. The grades are converted in an uniform system prescribed by LSAC. The 4 year UG GPA doesn't tend to be as important as a high LSAT score.
Its tough you really need both in Canada. Because its largely government funded up here competition in the schools seems fierce. No one private really joins because tuition is 3 times higher without government help. I never realised how many people want to be lawyers until after the LSAT and doing a bunch of reading after my UBC rejectjon.
@terrynicholasj
Any updates?