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Help crack 160
ClaudioD21
Member
Hello everyone. So for context, I’m not looking to go to a T14 so a 160 is pretty much what I need to get into my picks for law schools. Even a 161/162 would be amazing for me. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to crack this magic number. I usually score in the high 150s with few outliers but have never made it past 159 despite always scoring in the 160s upon BR and in the very high 160s nearing 170 as of more recently.
I’ll admit I don’t have LG down to -0. I’ll usually score around -5 or -8 due to timing but then get -0 on BR. LR and RC is where the gamble comes in. I’ll always either do like -6 or -7 on RC but then -10 on LR or I’ll go -6 on LR but -11 on RC. LG is about the same every single PT. The most frustrating part for me is my inconsistency on LR. Like I could do a drill on just weakening questions and do well but then on my most recent PT, 3 out of the 9 questions I got wrong were all weakening questions. It’s seriously frustrating knowing that had I gotten those 3 weakening questions correct my score would have gone from a 159 to a 162. 🥲
No matter what I do I can’t seem to crack that magical 160 (maybe not so magical for others lol). With only days left until my October LSAT, should I just fully focus on LG at this point to hopefully get it below -5?
Comments
With only days left, you’re probably locked in. Last minute breakthroughs are really dangerous to bank on. This is a classic time management problem with ready-made solutions, and if you had weeks instead of days, you may could get there. With only days left though, it’s more likely than not you’ll do more harm than good by adopting a major strategic overhaul so late in the game.
i mean if your heart is set on a t14 school, you prolly want to do a little higher than a 160 anyway. focusing LG is definitely the most productive thing you can do to get score up
@"Cant Get Right" Let us assume a hypothetical scenario where ClaudioD21 had 2 more months to prepare for his test. How would he fix his classic time management problem with ready-made solutions?
from their post: "Hello everyone. So for context, I’m not looking to go to a T14 so a 160 is pretty much what I need to get into my picks for law schools."
Same q as Pip, @"Cant Get Right"
So what does it mean to have a BR score 10+ points higher than our timed score? It means our potential is far greater than what we’re actually scoring. If we were to perfectly execute sound strategies, our timed score would be the same as our BR score. Strategy does not increase our potential, so it will never help us go beyond our BR, but it can get us all the way there. Closing that gap all the way is one of my proudest LSAT achievements. On my final test day, my timed average and my BR average were the same number.
So, the question here is not how to get better, generally. The question is what, specifically, needs to get better. With a BR score nearly 10 points above the target score, OP (and any student similarly positioned) needs to learn to bet on himself/herself. OP doesn’t need to win every bet because his wins will pay for his losses with interest. Enough interest to consistently put him over the top.
There’s a lot of different drills addressing this which cut to various degrees of precision and nuance. But a pretty blunt instrument would likely do here. This calls for a big rock or sturdy piece of wood, not a scalpel.
So I’d say start with an untimed drill. Untimed drills are critical for addressing timing problems, but no one ever seems to think that makes any sense. The point of this drill is to just read the section through without doing any work. Read slowly and carefully. If we understand the stimulus, read the answers. If we think we know the answer, select it. And be aggressive here. We should commit to any answer we’re 75% confident on or better. We do not confirm, we do not prove out, we do not solve. We simply commit, we bet on ourselves. If we aren’t 75% or better on any answer, we move to the next question and we do so immediately. We are not doing work here. It’s intuition or nothing.
While we’re doing this, we will also be doing a 3 group grouping game on our scratch paper. Group One is for questions we didn’t get but we think we can get both right and fast. Group Two is for questions we think we can get right but not fast. Group Three is for questions we aren’t sure we can get at all. Even though we’re reading carefully and at a comfortable pace, we should finish the section in about 20-25 minutes since we’re not slowing down to do any work.
Once we finish this first run, we circle back to all the Group One questions and work them out. Though we can do a little work here, we are still not looking to prove out our answers. We are just looking to cross the 75% threshold. We do not do any work that takes us beyond that point. If we find we are unable to do that quickly, we may need to move the question to Group Two or Three.
When we finish Group One, which should not take long, we seek to tackle Group Two. Again, we’re looking for 75%.
And when we finish that we try out Group Three. For Group Three, we lower the threshold from 75% to 60%.
And that’s the drill. Far less elegant than many others, but effective as all hell. Don’t even BR it. BR is for fundamentals, and folks like OP should not care about fundamentals at all. OP’s fundamentals are already far better than they really need to be. The goal is merely to get more points for the fundamentals we already have.
To follow up on this exercise, repeat the drill. Depending on how each attempt goes, we may raise or lower the 75% threshold. If we seem to be underperforming on those questions, raise the bar to 80% and see if that brings things into range. If we overperform, great! I wouldn’t normally drop it lower than 75%, but particularly under confident people may need to try out 70%. Keep tweaking until you find the sweet spot. Once that’s settled, lock it in and get in a few more good reps. If done correctly, it should not take much longer than 35 minutes. It is just so much faster to get to the 75/80% confidence range than it is to get to 100%. By foregoing that final bit of certainty, we eliminate all of the least productive time investments we make. To be clear, it will absolutely cost us some points we would otherwise have gotten. But the gains will far outpace the losses.
Once this can be done smoothly as an untimed drill, simply do the same thing as a timed drill. Don’t rush, read carefully. If you don’t finish all three groups, the things you don’t get to are the things you’re most likely to miss anyway, so no big deal. On my final official LSAT, I didn’t get to the last question in my group three on my first section of LR. That shook me a little until I reminded myself that all this was by design and if there was any one question I wasn’t going to get to I’d’ve wanted it to be that one. And I did miss it (tests were disclosed in those days, so I was able to check), and I could not have cared less. And y’all shouldn’t care either. Position yourselves to turn missed questions from failures into the mere products of a deliberate process you are in control of. I still miss questions all the time. But I never, EVER make a timing error. A missed question is an expected part of any test. We can’t control for every factor that goes into that. But a timing error—a strategic or procedural mistake—is the result of our decision making processes over which we have total control. So don’t make timing errors. And that’s what this exercise works towards.
@"Cant Get Right" thank your for your detailed response, it was definitely worth a read for me.
This was a great response and I’m very appreciative of it. Some very good points!
Claudio, take the October LSAT and cancel it if you do not like the score. You have the option to see how much you got and cancel it before they release the score (beware though that you have to pay a fee for this and this is only allowed for the first time you take the test). I would say if you get a score between 158-162 then you will probably get into your pick law schools. If you desire to take it again because your score was lower than that, make sure you only apply to take the LSAT once you are confident you can take a 160+.
Take all this with a grain of sound, you know your situation better than I do.