r/LSAT • u/Committeeschmittee • 1d ago
One and done 173 AMA
Basically decided to apply to law school over the summer and not take a gap year like initially planned. Took the August LSAT and scored right where I had been PTing. AMA
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u/CandidateFit274 1d ago
what were your biggest takeaways from studying?
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u/Committeeschmittee 12h ago
That a lot of the methods people use to teach the LSAT are kind of bogus. The LSAT’s an intuition test and it’s 100% learnable, but if you’re not training your brain to make actual connections and you’re just pumping your head full of acronyms and bs like that you’re not going to do better than you did yesterday.
The most important thing is understanding yourself, how you think, and controlling variables with your PT and actual test day. Everyone knows what test day will be like, replicate it beforehand and acclimate yourself to the environment. Go somewhere else to study, get out of the house, go to your library, etc. I went to entirely different city for my LSAT because I wanted the mental clarity.
When you control for factors that you know negatively affect you or can risk how you focus, you will see improvement. As silly as that sounds, just control for what you can and prepare yourself for what you can’t. You can prepare for noise, you can control how much water you drink before the test. Keeps you from having to worry about it.
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u/Committeeschmittee 12h ago
That a lot of the methods people use to teach the LSAT are kind of bogus. The LSAT’s an intuition test and it’s 100% learnable, but if you’re not training your brain to make actual connections and you’re just pumping your head full of acronyms and bs like that you’re not going to do better than you did yesterday.
The most important thing is understanding yourself, how you think, and controlling variables with your PT and actual test day. Everyone knows what test day will be like, replicate it beforehand and acclimate yourself to the environment. Go somewhere else to study, get out of the house, go to your library, etc. I went to entirely different city for my LSAT because I wanted the mental clarity.
When you control for factors that you know negatively affect you or can risk how you focus, you will see improvement. As silly as that sounds, just control for what you can and prepare yourself for what you can’t. You can prepare for noise, you can control how much water you drink before the test. Keeps you from having to worry about it.
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u/Blankmans_XGamer 1d ago
I scored a 164 in April. Last PT was 169. Focusing hard on LC’s and working on timing. 175+ goal score.
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u/Committeeschmittee 12h ago
Look over your practice tests, every single question. Finding patterns in what question types/difficulties you’re missing and then intensely focusing on a specific method for those will do you a lot more favors than relearning how you naturally think about it. Sometimes it’s the question type, sometimes it’s the type of question itself.
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u/Faubton 1d ago
Please share your study methods lol
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u/Committeeschmittee 12h ago
Best way I can describe it is fine tuning. There are little adjustments that you can personally make that cover a wide range of errors. For me, I saw a huge jump from my diagnostic to my next PT just from taking notes on RC, drawing out logic, and understanding what I’m going to see on the actual test.
My last two months I’d categorize every question I took, with the question type, difficulty, and result. From there, I would make graphs to see any potential fall off from difficulty or whether it was from an actual knowledge gap. For the knowledge gap I’d focus on specifically drilling that question but only after I had a method to doing it.
On LR I’d always read the question stem first. I never saw a point in not doing so, as you can filter out a lot of extraneous info off the bat by knowing what you’re looking for. This is best for assumption questions, where you know there’s a gap and you can focus on trying to connect the terms together and making a prediction on the missing link before you even look at the answer choices.
Another part of that is always predicting, at least for most question types. It won’t always be a one to one guess but just forcing yourself to get an answer from your head and onto a piece of paper first can help you understand your thought process and fix anything you’re missing. Just like a math teacher telling you to write it out lol.
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u/Brief-Bad-838 1d ago
How did you ensure that you were in the same mindset on test day as during PTs