u/graeme_b

Use this thread to ask questions, give tips, vent, or tell people how you're feeling. Good luck in your studies :)

Taking a preptest is the best way to get a sense of what your score may be on test day. However, it only works well if the PT is fresh, where you haven't seen any of the questions. If you've seen some of the questions before or done the whole test, your score will be inflated.

In this situation, your best bet is to take an audit of everything you've seen, and carefully preserve anything you haven't touched for full timed PTs. You can still learn a lot redoing the other material, but you should use it for drills, timed sections, or even taking PTs but where you know the score is potentially inflated.

You may be reading this and you've done all of the recent PTs. The good news is that older PTs tend to be representative in terms of scores. In my experience people taking PTs 101-120 usually score in the same range as on newer tests. The style of material is a bit different but fundamentally they're still LSATs.

You have to compare like with like. PT 155 fresh might be "more representative" than Pt 105. But, if you've done PT 155, and haven't done PT 105, then PT 105 will be much more representative of what it's like to take an LSAT on test day where everything is new.

You can also use the old, unconverted preptests for this. Preptests 1-18, 21, 23, PT A and the Feb 1997 LSAT are all official LSAT Pts which were never converted to the new format. You can access them through licensees. I've had students use these when they were out of fresh material and, once again, their scores on these Pts generally matched the rest of their range and their official test day scores.

If you're reading this early in your studies, take half an hour to designate some Pts for full tests, some for sections and some for drills. Will make things much easier later.

Most people go to the answers way too fast. Once you read the stimulus and the question, take a moment to try to answer it. You don't need to predict the answer, in many cases this is not possible.

But, say it's a strengthen question. Pause and just sum up the argument you're trying to strengthen. Just literally the conclusion + how they make their case.

If you know what you're trying to do you'll go faster on the answers and avoid traps. If you leap to the answers as fast as you can then you have less of an idea what you're aiming to find and more likely by answer that feels familiar/true/reasonable or anything other than doing the single thing the question is asking you to do.

You to fastest when you know the shape of what you're looking for.

I'm seeing more and more students with this profile:

• Minimum goal score: 165+
• LSAT take history: 2-3 scores in the low 150s or below
• Registered for an LSAT in couple of weeks
• Current PT range: mid 150s

This is guaranteed failure. It is possible to jump 10+ points on the LSAT. It is almost never possible to do it in a couple of weeks, especially if you've been studying for a while.

What schools will see in this record is poor decision making. Choosing to do a thing when there is 0% chance of success. This is pure sunk cost fallacy.

Yes, you paid money to register for the LSAT. You can't get that money back. You're past the refund deadline. This means, you have two choices:

Take the LSAT

Cost:

• $0
• putting a score you don't want on your record.
• Destroying one of your limited LSAT takes
• Stress and loss of your precious, finite time, which you will never get back

Do not take the LSAT

Cost:

• $0
• Clicking "withdraw" in the LSAC interface

----

Option 2 is strictly better. There is no upside to taking it if you can't get the score you want. Taking the LSAT and not taking the LSAT cost the same amount of money, nothing.

The only way to get better at the LSAT is to focus on the underlying skills, not the timeline or test days. The LSAT is a test of reason, and making the rational choice not to fall into the sunk cost fallacy is the first step you can take to assessing things with reason.

Your LSAT takes and your time are precious, don't throw either one away. Take the LSAT when you're ready, withdraw if you're not. Cancelling is not a solution, you still lose the LSAT take and the time, and schools see the cancel.

Students often tell me they didn't pick an answer because "I'm not sure I could assume that".

For example, one question used the term highly inaccurate in the stimulus. The answer talked about unreliable. They were't sure they could pick it.

But if you think about what we mean by highly inaccurate, and by reliable, would you ever consider something highly inaccurate to be reliable? No, it isn't what those words mean. So, it isn't an assumption to come to the conclusion that they refer to the same concept.

The LSAT requires you to use the meanings of words and think through them. Saying "I don't know if I can assume that" isn't logic, you have to actually think about the word and think "would everyone agree this word means this other thing is true?" And if yes, it's not an assumption.

I see this especially when people get into the 160s and can notice small distinctions more easily. You can see a distinction without acting on it: the LSAT wants you to think about whether something is actually a difference or just a distinction.

This has been posted previously, but as more people are taking August now it's a good time to look at it again. The LSAT's content isn't changing, but the interface is changing starting on the august test. You can preview it here: https://www.lsac.org/blog/interactive-demo-minor-changes-test-ui

Note that they've temporarily removed highlighting; there's a note in the instructions. They'll have it back before testing begins.

If you're taking June, you should use the existing Lawhub interface instead. June will be the last test using it.