Thank you, 7Sage + All my Advice

My LSAT journey has been more or less a year and a half long, and I just wanted to write a very long post that will hopefully be useful to this community, which has given so much to me. I took the June exam and underperformed (plus I don't know if I ever could have figured out that last game in time) with a 165, and then got a 170 on the July exam. I never took a diagnostic, but I think if I did it would have been pretty bad, because I didn't even know you were supposed to draw diagrams for LG and couldn't really finish an RC or LR section. This was pretty shocking to me, because I had done well on the GRE and consider myself pretty "smart," and I don't think I've even come remotely as close to this long in studying for any other exam. So before I go deeper into some obstacles and my tips for conquering them, I wanted to give a huge thanks to @"Cant Get Right" for our few tutoring sessions (cannot recommend him highly enough) and the vast repository of material he has on 7Sage, @"Logic Gainz" and @"Lucas Carter" for moments of support during some dark times of feeling like I would never reach my goal. And, of course, JY Ping sensei for teaching me everything I know.

Logical Reasoning
Wow where do I even begin with LR. It started off as an atrocious section, and then at the end of my prep became my absolute favorite. I think my journey with LR is the longest, and could probably write an entire post about this alone. But here's an attempt to be succinct:

1. When you're BRing pretty high, you may be wondering why LR isn't improving, or why it's so inconsistent. The reason is that each section tests you on different distributions of LR questions, that cover different flaws, or use different tricks. One game-changing aspect of my BR was drawing connections to previous LR questions. "Where have I seen this flaw before?" "What was another question where they also wrote the stimulus this particular way?" This, coupled with having more time to just drill section and after section (and in particular retake sections) helped me familiarize myself with the patterns. When you do so many timed sections, and especially retakes, it's impossible for you not to notice the easiest of questions (e.g. ad hominem, sufficiency/necessity confusion, etc.) and also how the harder questions are actually kind of similar.

2. Once you do a deeper dive into BR, a big thing is timing and when you skip. I've probably written on this before, but Josh's many resources on this were key, and actually the only way for the timing strategies to work is if you have what I wrote above absolutely mastered. But basically, you have to keep your momentum, and get to the end so you can come back and work on questions that didn't quite click for you the first time around. Or, you need to learn to skip when you see something that's just not going to be worth the time. At first, adjusting to a new timing strategy feels weird, because you're thinking about whether to skip or not, but eventually it becomes second nature:

https://7sage.com/discussion/#/discussion/13346/confidence-drills
https://7sage.com/webinar/post-core-curriculum-study-strategies/
https://7sage.com/webinar/timing-and-levels-of-certainty/

1. Lastly, I think I figured this out for myself, but I've heard Ellen's book on LR talks a lot about it (from what I've skimmed: https://www.amazon.com/Loophole-LSAT-Logical-Reasoning/dp/1732749000/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=LSAT+logical+reasoning&qid=1566495792&s=books&sr=1-3)

Basically, same with what I write about RC and LG below, but LR becomes a lot easier when you're not freaking out about time and you just read and try to really understand what the hell the stimulus is telling you. Once you understand what it's saying, and breakdown the components, it's a lot easier to answer the questions. I think earlier in my prep I just ran through the stimulus and tried to engage more with the answers, when the opposite is definitely more important. Practice pre-phrasing and interacting with the stimulus more by covering the answer choices, or writing out answers in BR.

Reading Comprehension
I started doing some of the early RCs and thought things might be fine, but eventually this section killed me. There were several distinct stages for me in terms of coming to understand RC and how to tackle it, and I'm not sure if this is universally applicable, but some of you might resonate with this:

1. One stage I went through was obviously applying the "memory method" with summaries and low res snapshots. I also wrote out breakdowns of each paragraph and main points in my BR. I feel like this was a learning phase in terms of gaining familiarity with the question types and passage structures which is crucial.

2. I read this book (https://www.amazon.com/LSAT-Reading-Comprehension-Ultimate-Improvement-ebook/dp/B013KNZ6FM/ref=sr_1_13?keywords=lsat+reading+comprehension&qid=1566494648&s=books&sr=1-13) which emphasizes the importance of understanding how terms of connected, the various author viewpoints, and how the specific subjects don't matter -- you'll often get terms but you don't actually need to understand them so much as just understand when referential phrasing is being used, and who is talking about what.

For this stage, the issue was that I started to annotate way too much, and hold onto way too much information. At the expense of focusing deeply on referential phrasing and breaking down every last aspect of each paragraph (thinking I was "simplifying" it) I ended up missing out on the larger picture (and losing time). Like stage 1, I still think of this as a learning process, but it didn't produce immediate gains.

1. Ultimately, I think doing the earlier RC passages helped, as well as learning to kind of "let go" and be more relaxed. This is hard to explain, but on the June exam I was so worried about running out of time and returning to the passage when I didn't understand, or slowing down that I often compromised a lot of comprehension. This may sound stupid, but you just have to read in a pretty relaxed state. Do you understand what's going on so far? Yes? Then just keep going -- don't try to think about referential phrasing or breakdown an easy paragraph. Sometimes the intro paragraph is just "There's this argument and I disagree so we're going to talk about this perspective." There's nothing more to understand, just keep going. What kept me from getting to this pretty intuitive phase was fear. I was really afraid of missing a detail, or I wanted to memorize the names, or was just freaking out about time. You just need to chill, engage with the passage, trust when you understand something, and move on.

A corollary to this is that you definitely have time to return to the passage and find key details. It may help to do untimed sections, where you go back to the passage and find where things are mentioned or pointed to before going to the questions (if you don't remember). A lot of RC comes from knowing what the question stem is asking of you (e.g. "What weakens so and so's claim?" -- well, what IS that claim? Where is it? How does it fit into the passage?).

The last thing is that it's okay to go beyond the 8:45 min time for passages. For the July exam I just said I'm going to take as much time as I need, and deal with the consequences at the end. The way it works, if you have enough faith, is that the section is designed to be uneven and finishable -- so you may only have 7 min at the end, but the last passage might be super easy.

Logic Games
This was actually one of my worst sections (or at least very inconsistent) when it came to fresh sections. I fool-proofed almost every game, and definitely all of the ones from PTs 1-35 multiple times, but when it came to new sections I would run out of time, freak out, or just make careless mistakes. I think my biggest advice for this section is that though fool-proofing definitely works, there are a few things that I overlooked while fool-proofing for the longest time:

1. Don't go into robot mode. Always stop and think upfront and play with the rules -- JY always says this but when you're foolproofing for so long and kind of memorized the games, then you tend to not execute this in practice, and then under the time constraints and pressure on a PT or real exam, you might tend to say "Forget it, I see some 'if' questions, I'm just gonna dive in." So practicing this step while foolproofing is crucial.

2. You will need to learn how to identify a "rule-driven game" and also know when it's worth playing with the rules even if you don't find any inferences. The latter can feel like a waste of time, but you become more fluent in the rules and then might spot some inferences faster later.

3. I started a Word document to myself where I would reflect on games and how they're similar to one another, what common mistakes I tend to make, and how the games are basically built. If I ask you, when do you make a chart? You should have a concrete answer for that. This kind of goes with point 1 above, but basically, in the "upfront" time, you need to figure out what you're looking for, and what questions need to be answered. If the distribution of pieces is open ended (typically A must have more members than B or something like that) then you should be asking what the maximum and minimum pieces should be. If the repeatability of pieces is open ended, you need to ask yourself, "Who can/can't repeat?" etc. Deep diving into games like this was crucial, because for the longest time I thought I just needed to keep doing them, and that just doesn't give you the extra mastery you need to conquer totally new games under timed conditions.

Overall Mindset
The theme across all of these sections is that I had a lot of trouble with the timing aspect and pressure of the exam. Focus on mastery, and time will come -- a common mantra, but one that is really, really, hard to believe. You may think you've already reached mastery, or that time will never come naturally, but it really will. And once you reach this point, the next stage is really mentally gearing yourself up for test day. You have to tell yourself that you got this, that you won't lose your cool, and that you have seen everything they can throw at you. What JY says about closing your eyes and taking a few deep breaths does wonders, and a big battle in the LSAT is not just with the questions, but with yourself.

I think this is enough for now, but I will be around on the forums as I work on apps (and maybe think about retaking but probably won't) -- feel free to DM me any questions about anything above, and I will do my best to help you out!