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Revamped study methods and took my PTs from161 to173 !!

sberg2014sberg2014 Alum Member
in General 63 karma

I just want to celebrate with y'all. I'm writing the July LSAT, and the last few weeks have been bleak. I hit a high of 169 two weeks ago. My next 8 PTs dropped as low as 161, and my average went even lower than it was before I hit the 169. Finally, after changing up my study methods, I finally hit a 169 again on Thursday. So I waited to see if this was a fluke or if I could sustain my progress. My practice test from last night hit my all time high of a 173 under testing conditions. Of course I'll be focusing on my average test score, but I'm incredibly excited to hit (and exceed) my goal of 170 on a PT for the first time.

I've benefited so much from what others have shared. I figured I would take a moment to share the things that I have found the most helpful since I've recently seen a lot of people posting about being in the same situation.

1) Like so many others have said, you can't just take PT after PT after PT if your score isn't improving. When I was trying to take as many PTs as I could in a week, my score didn't improve. Only when I cut back on PTs and instituted other ways of practice and review did I start seeing improvements.

2) I was bombing RC because I wasn't spending enough time on the front end. After I started spending 3 or 3:30 on the passage instead of 2:30 or 3, the questions flew by and with better accuracy because I was so much more familiar with the passage.

3) My attention span was horrible, especially during LR and RC. So, I started meditating and using my phone less. I'm the kind of person who checks their phone every 5 minutes, and by cutting back on that I trained my attention span to be much longer than before which improved my comprehension SO much. I even made sure that when I was doing something like watching a movie or eating, I wasn't constantly getting distracted by my phone or laptop.

4) I read the economist to feel more comfortable with science, technology, and economics passages that I'm not familiar with. (The plight of the liberal arts major, am I right?) I practiced making low resolution summaries, figuring out the authors point of view, predicting the course of the article, and analyzing the relationships between paragraphs. It seems like people have mixed feelings about this strategy, but I found that my RC got SO much better when I do this regularly.

5) For LR I cut out 7 practice tests worth of questions and put the answers on the back. I then sorted them by question type to drill as flashcards with immediate feedback. LR went from -11 to as low as -4 (total) when I did this.

Just thought I'd share. Good luck to everyone else getting ready to take the July test!

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