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Related Discussions
143 After 5 Months of Prep
CC12342023
Member
Hi all,
I have been studying 7sage for 5 months - started with Khan Academy, etc. I just took my first PT since December (140 score) and scored a 143 today (PT 83 Dec 2017).
I was hoping to see ..much.. more improvement within this timeframe, and feel concerned.. all the time and money I have invested into the course. Accountability is due - my syllabus has 24 of 219 hours fulfilled. How is this even possible?
Did I make a mistake by focusing only on curriculum these past months? I used to take weekly PT's and felt similarly discouraged not seeing my scores rise. I feel like I am missing stamina and key ideas such as "Flawed pattern questions" and "Substitute constraints".
LR1 8 of 25
LR2 15 of 26 (How did I manage to double my score from first LR portion?)
RC 10 of 27
LG 11 of 23 (Guessed last game, didn't have time)
Comments
Start over.
Make sure you understand the stimulus in LR and then the task.
Essentially, make sure you understand and can explain to yourself what you read in the stimulus before you go to the answer choices in LR.
Make sure you understand the game set up and all the rules in LG.
And in RC make sure you understand the passage.
You are doing things wrong if your score has not improved.
Do not focus on time. You have no business finishing any section if you can't get at least 20 right. I know it sounds counter intuitive, but you have to go slow to make sure you understand what you read. Once you understand what you read, the speed will pick up. You are basically fighting yourself and you won't win if you don't slow down and make sure you understand it.
Everything in the LSAT makes sense and fits together.
It may be time for a more honest assessment. If your numbers are correct, 24 hours over 5 months is not very much. Additionally, that's around 11% of just the curriculum. The 7sage format is you learn the theory and do some practice in the curriculum stage, and at 24 hours I'm pretty sure you're still in the intro to logic section. Those key ideas you're asking about will show up later in curriculum. So basically, you're still at the beginning of learning about LR, and haven't even touched AR or RC.
I know it's discouraging, but you still have so much more to learn, so honestly that 3 points isn't too shabby. Keep going, make it a part of almost everyday, at least a little bit and your score will go up. But maybe save some PT's for after you've done a good chunk of the curriculum.
If the only thing you have done in 5 months is 24 hours of 7sage curriculum, the result makes sense. 24 hours over five months works out to roughly one hour per week!
Most people study 1-4 hours per day, or 7-28 hours per week. Additionally, covering curriculum and understanding concepts won’t translate to a score increase unless you are (1) actively changing how you approach questions and (2) you have practiced this change enough so that you do it during your practice test.
Please look at your analytics. They will tell you what question types you are getting wrong. If you are missing flawed pattern questions, you should focus on developing a new system for doing flawed pattern questions. For example, I am consistently -1/ 0 on LR and when I do flawed pattern questions my system is this:
(1) read question to identify what they are asking me to do
(2) read paragraph, sometimes twice
(3) identify conclusion
(4) summarize to myself what mistake they made (e.g. “correlation isn’t causation”)
(5) go through answer choices and eliminate all obvious wrong choices
(6) if I am stuck between two, flag it and come back.
You are naturally good at some question types and not as good at others. Focus only on what you are missing, and then do untimed practice problems until you master these question types.
LSAT is hard. Unless you devote hundreds (thousands, very likely) hours, it's difficult to make any progress. There's no magic pills.
You are now possibly not understanding the whole LSAT thing. Don't worry. Spend your time learning every single course in Core Curriculum, and reflect, review and revisit whenever necessary, make sure you understand (almost) every bit of every video you watch and every post you read.
Another thing is, if you are using English as second language or foreign language (like me), you might have to focus on learning the English language itself before trying to learn LSAT, for obviously most students taking LSAT are native speakers, and LSAT assumes that you have a high-level mastery of the language.
Thank you all for your reminders that I have room for improvement. I am an English as a second language student so that is also a barrier I am facing - thank you for the statistics on my studying as well. That was eye opening and reinforces that I need to be more accountable.
I am going to start slowing down and not even focusing on time - I need to start studying 1-4 hours a day as well.
Thank you all, for taking the time to reply.
Should I wait until completing core curriculum before continuing to PT?
Honestly, what finally got my score up from a 142 was going through all the core curriculum. Even if it seemed tedious, I would start with logical reasoning and work from there. I've been studying for the past year, and it finally clicked. For me, part of the reason why I struggled so much initially was that I didn't understand the basics. When I was making my own practice sets by difficulty and doing practice tests; I was just doing the problems without knowing the steps to get from point A to point B. I tend to liken it to math; you can't do calc without knowing basic addition/subtraction/multiplication/division.
I'd spend more time on the core curriculum and really nail down those basics. What also helped me was filtering the comments by likes on the course videos. Sometimes their explanations can help fill gaps for what you might not be getting from the video.
One of my friends suggested that one may face difficulty in learning LSAT without achieving 27+/30 in TOEFL Reading.
Definitely. You need to understand the basics of LSAT, learn how to tackle different types of questions, and train on by-type problem sets to master them. Only then will moving on to PTs to apply what you have learned helpful.
I've had 7Sage for 4 weeks and I have 50 hours into the curriculum and 25 hours into the prep tests. Sounds like you aren't studying enough.
Big advice that helped me was to study until you felt like you were ready to take the real test of a practice exam. Before going into the practice exams, you should have a pretty good grasp on how to handle the array of questions, games, and passages that you'll see on the real exam. I got through the entire core curriculum before going heavy into practice tests. Everyone's situation is different but I do suggest you go through the curriculum then move forward and start doing practice tests and blind reviewing questions you felt uncertain about. The true familiarity with the test and its questions is through the blind review process.