How to Study for the LSAT

Transcript

This video is going to show you how you should approach studying for the LSAT. It’s going to give you the most general, abstract methodology that we think you should adopt, and of course this is the methodology that we adopt in our online course to guide you through this process.

So first you want to start with a General Theory, so what do I mean by "General Theory?" Well, there are things on the LSAT, for example, like logic, like conditional logic. A implies B. Do you know what that means? If not B, then not A. Stuff like that that you just absolutely have to know. If you don’t know it, then you are going to… you are just at a loss. So that’s one example. Another example would be grammar stuff like baroque embedded clauses, you know, embedded clauses within embedded clauses. Can you extract those? Can you still figure out what the predicate and subject is without getting lost? If you can’t do that, then you are going to have a very hard time reading the English that’s on the LSAT, so stuff like that. That’s what we mean by the very General Theory.

So you start with that, and once you have a solid foundation in the General Theory, we move you over to Specific Theory.

Specific Theory is stuff like, now that you learned say, conditional logic, can you use that to apply it to say, "Must be True" questions? "Must be True" questions use conditional logic.

So, now that you’ve learned this General Theory, let’s learn the "Specific Theory." How do you do a Weakening question? How do you do a Strengthening question? How do you do an In/Out Game? How does conditional logic figure into In/Out Games?

So that’s all theory. That’s all nice and stuff. It’s all theory, and once you are done with that, we take you over to the "Guided Application" stage, which is, now that you supposedly know how to do, you know, in theory at least, you know how to do an In/Out Game, can you now apply that, can you actually do an In/Out Game? And we show you how to do an In/Out Game, how to use the General Theory, and the Specific Theory in order to apply it to an In/Out Game or a "Must be True" question.

And once we do that you are on your own for Problem Sets. You can do a set of ten Weakening problems or a set of ten Strengthening problems. This is so you become familiar with the application of the Specific Theory over into actual Problem Sets. This is for you to do on your own.

You don’t want to do too many of these. I think a lot of students make the mistake of just doing a lot of those. You actually see a lot of books on sale that, say, categorize all the logical reasoning questions from Prep Test 1 through 40 or 1 through 60 to do in Problem Sets. That’s actually very detrimental to you, because on the actual LSAT, these questions aren’t given to you like five Weakening questions in a row. They are all mixed up. You have to be able to switch back and forth really quickly, and be able to manage your time.

So, doing some amount of Problem Sets is good for you, but I will advocate for doing not too many, not too many Problem Sets, just a little bit, just to get you used to it, because what you really want to do ultimately is the final stage, which is taking timed full-length practice LSATs, and those are 4 or 5 section LSATs. You should do a mix of both, 4 or 5 section LSATs.

See, Problem Sets are good for you in so far as so you remember what the Specific Theory is, how to apply it for a Weakening question and how that’s different from a Must Be True question. They’re just means. They’re not ends in and of themselves. Full-length practice LSAT Prep Tests are an ends in and of themselves. So really, you should be doing those.

Within the LSAT Complete course we give you 6 full-length LSATs for you to take, and 6 is enough for some people to reach their LSAT potential. If it’s not, there are more that you can take. If you are studying on your own, the same is true. It’s not uncommon for students to take 30 or 40 LSATs to see their true potential. It definitely varies from person to person, so you want to be doing this a lot to be able to see whether you need to take 6 or more than 6.

The way to take full-length LSATs is to take them timed using our proctor, LSAT timer and proctor, and to review them using the Blind Review Method. So once you get to this stage of your studying, it’s very iterative. You take a timed LSAT, you do your Blind Review, and then you learn your mistakes. And then you take the next LSAT, and then you do your Blind Review, you learn your mistakes. And you do it again and again and again and so on and so forth. And that’s how you improve.

So really, all of this stuff, all of this stuff up here, the General Theory, the Specific Theory, the Problem Sets, is just leading you over to taking full-length timed, proctored LSAT Prep Tests. This is the thing that really, really matters.

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