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Score Decreasing! Help
So after finishing through the CC I took my a practice test about a week ago and was very pleased with a score of 171. Since then I took three more practice tests and have seen steady decreases in each PT. 168, 167, and most recently a 164. When I do BR I can regularly get in the high 170's. Sometimes I feel really confident and am ready to answer any question the LSAT gives me no matter how hard it is but I don't know why my score has been decreasing and it has been kind of demoralizing lmao.
When I do the BR I can easily see my mistakes are just really dumb but I keep making those mistakes on the next practice tests. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
Comments
Since you’re making “stupid mistakes” maybe your brain is just a bit tired. I would try taking a couple of days off, refresh your mind, then review some of those “stupid mistakes” to make sure you don’t do them again, and then do a practice test the following day.
Thank you! Appreciate your advice. How long of a break do you think I should take?
I wouldn't read too much into it. Focus on the average, and assume the 171 and 164 are outliers. If that average drops from 167 down to 165, then dive in and see what specific scores are trending downards. Maybe it was just a single tough game or a single tough passage that pulled scores down.
Also worth considering - were these tests (the 171 and the 164) fairly close to each other numerically? I know I had a big downward bump in my score when I first moved into the 160's.
Yeah, my first thought is burn out. Did you say your first post-cc PT was a week ago and you have done 3 more since then? That is way too many full PTs in my opinion. General consensus around here is that 1 PT per week is enough, 2 should be max. PTs are really just a way to check in on how you are doing, like a benchmark. The real work happens in drilling and reviewing.
If you haven't checked out this webinar yet, you should watch it: https://7sage.com/webinar/post-core-curriculum-study-strategies/
That will give you a lot of good ideas on how to pace your practice, when to move on from certain phases, different types of drills to do.
In the meantime, I think you should take minimum 3-4 days off to rest your brain for a bit. When you come back, I recommend doing drills and timed sections only for the majority of your studying. For me that looked like, 1 timed section, BR it, then analyze why I got questions wrong, look for patterns in my mistakes, reference the CC again if needed. Maybe 1 or 2 LGs afterward too. And that would take up a full evening after work typically. So I would suggest more evenings like that, and only doing 1 or max 2 PTs per week. Full tests should really just be used for gauging your progress and building stamina.
I think more than we like to admit, confidence can have a big impact on our scores. So it's not out of the ordinary that people feel demoralized when they don't score what they expected to. I believe you expected at least a 171 or a higher. When your expectations don't match reality, you can start losing confidence and it can be a downward spiral.
A very wise person once pointed out to me that the focus of anything you are trying to accomplish should be learning. So there happened to be 3 more questions you got wrong the second time. That means that they are 3 more learning opportunities -that's all. So although scores give us an important clue about our progress, having a certain expectation and not meeting it can actually do a lot of damage.
As @"Leah M B" pointed out, that's too many tests per week. The gains in these scores at 170 level are actually pretty difficult to get and it requires diligence and making sure you learned everything you possibly could from each tests. This requires going beyond blind review. It requires watching footage and evaluating it, drawing parallel arguments, re-doing certain core-curriculum lessons etc. All of this is very time consuming. But gains in points from tests come from what you do before taking the tests.
The answer to this really does vary with each person. So it becomes that much more important for you to ask yourself what lead you to miss it as you have more knowledge about the exact nature of what you missed. Formulate a hypothesis about the cause and try to formulate a solution to get over that weakness. Your next practice tests will tell you if your hypothesis and solution was correct. Also, watching your footage or having someone watch it as well can be really helpful in this regard.
@Tonyk215 I would take a couple of days off. Like two full days of not thinking about the test and maybe going outside for walks, working out, cooking - whatever lets your head relax. You got this.
Agree with everything Leah and Sami said.
Also, if you've only taken 4 PTs, you haven't done enough to have a strong benchmark of your abilities and weaknesses. 171 could be the outlier.
Many people have to focus on fundamentals following the cc, but since you're scoring in the upper 160's, you may consider analyzing your test-taking processes such as first round vs second round in LR, general time management, etc.
Agreed with everything @"Leah M B" and @Sami said. I hit that point like you when I was studying, and it can be really demoralized. Walk away, take a break. I swear, it'll help you more than burning yourself out will. I did the same, and after walking away I really felt better and started improving again!
I'd take a day or two off for some wellness and know that your high BR is indicative of your high level analysis. The question when you hop back into it is what steps you should follow to get closer to that score. My hunch would be that you might want to be skipping more as to leave more time at the end for the questions that you got right during BR but wrong timed.
Agree with everyone else, take a couple of days or a week off. It may seem counterproductive but it's going to be so beneficial. It seems like a knee jerk reaction to take multiple tests or sections when you get a score you're disappointed with. I've done the same thing before and had to stop myself from doing that last week. But as cliché as it sounds, a score doesn't define you. Taking multiple tests to 'prove' that a certain test isn't reflective of your score is just gonna burn you out and demoralize you.