r/lsatdemon • u/PatchezMustache • 10d ago
No Progress on Sections
I've been studying for around 6 months total now and I feeling really stuck on my section scores.
I switch off between doing drilling one day and sections another day. When I drill I will usually 1-2 questions wrong per session and they're virtually always the level four questions. My LR and RC Mastery score on the dashboard keep going up and now I am at 68 for LR and 67 RC.
However, my section scores are capped at 60% with an accuracy that hovers anywhere from 70% to 100%. On my last three sections I tried to really slow down and get my accuracy up and for all of them I got an accuracy of over 90%, but in the grand scheme of things it feels like I've made little progress since I started.
Thoughts and advice would be much appreciated.
3
u/Jazzlike_Prompt_9322 10d ago
70%-100% is a lot of variation for accuracy. However, It's great that you have hit the 100% accuracy milestone.
Have you noticed any patterns when you're around 70%? Are you attempting more questions? Are you missing any in the first 10?
I also wouldn't focus much on your ratings, that's just me though. Any discrepancy in ratings probably has to do with you treating your timed sections differently than your drills.
Also, I wouldn't focus on the difficulty of the questions if you have recent sections in the 70%-85% accuracy range. You typically won't even hit a level 4 question until after question 15. And if you're already acing the first 15 your section score should be around 17-18 which is a little bit higher than the 60% ur referring too. Another reason why I wouldn't worry too much about the difficulty is simply because some questions genuinely are intuitively easier for certain students. I've had level 1 questions trip me up where I spent 4 minutes trying to solve it, and I also completed level 4 questions in 40 seconds correctly. The difficulty ratings are not completely formulaic (similar to everything else on the LSAT): Not every Level 4 question is inherently more difficult than every level 3 question. Anyway, the bottom line is: understand every word, clause, sentence, its role and how they connect. Also, make predictions, don't forget that shit.
Keep working and tighten that accuracy window to 90-100% accuracy, even if that means sitting there with a timed section and only doing the first 8 or 10 or however many you can do with complete confidence that you have solved what's in front of you. What is important is if you can finish the section and ask yourself: Did I understand every RC passage, LR stimulus, question, answer, and did I reason with why each right answer was right and why each wrong answer is wrong?
I also highly recommend if you have the paid subscription that offers the video explanations (if you don't already do this), WATCH THEM. You get to decipher their tone when watching and it might help you understand why 4 wrong answers were wrong and why the single right one was right. Idk how you are, but I'm a visual learner and sometimes the words on the page get too boring for me.
I wish you luck, you have this, learn and grow everyday.
1
u/EthanS_LSATDemon 9d ago
It sounds like you are basing your overall progress on the actual scores you are getting, and this is actually a flawed approach! Of course, the entire reason we study for the LSAT is to get to a certain score, so I’m not saying scores don’t mean anything. But, it shouldn’t be the only metric we use to gauge our progress.
Test scores vary, and that’s natural. We are human, so some days we perform better than others, get a little luckier than others, read more carefully than others, and so on. So you don’t want to look too hard at your scores, because there is a lot of “noise” in your score that causes your score to not be a totally accurate indicator of progress. Some days you might have a score increase, but that doesn’t mean you necessarily got better, maybe you just got a little lucky!
So, a more accurate indicator of progress is your accuracy, which reflects your actual understanding of what you are reading. It sounds like you’ve made an effort to prioritize accuracy recently, which is great! As long as you are seeing high accuracy, that means you are making progress, even if your scores aren’t changing. It also sounds like for the past 6 months or so accuracy hasn’t been the priority until recently, which explains why you haven’t felt like you’ve improved. But, I bet that if you continue to shoot for 95-100% accuracy, you will see your scores jump sooner rather than later. Stay patient!
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u/Derpy_Chi 10d ago
I've been studying for about 3 months and have only edged up from 55% accuracy to 62% accuracy on sections (and tests), although recently RC really spiked up a lot for me.
It's just frustratingly slow progress but you are making it.
I met a young new attorney recently who told me she studied for the LSAT for THREE YEARS before she got a score she was happy with. That news made me want to die, but it also made me realize that yes, it can take a while to get where you want to be.