LSAT Diary: Studying While Living in Europe (Part 1)

This installment of LSAT Diaries comes from RC, who took the October 2013 LSAT after completing 59 LSAT practice tests!

Update from RC: 

"I ended up getting a 180 on the LSAT--needless to say, I am thrilled. (Maybe I should try and get sick before the bar, too…)…Thanks again for all your help in preparing for this!"

If you want to be in LSAT Diaries, please email me at LSATUnplugged@gmail.com. (You can be in LSAT Diaries whether you've taken the exam already or not.)

Thanks to RC for sharing her experience and advice!

RC's LSAT Diary (Part 1):

After graduating from college with a degree in English, I submitted to cliché and worked at a coffee shop for two and a half years. I’ve had law school at the back of my mind for years, but I’ve always taken a long time to make big decisions and I couldn’t settle on a next move. So I traded up for a better cliché and quit the café to travel around Europe for a while. In the middle of my travels I decided I might as well take the LSAT while I didn’t have a full-time job and apply if I did well. To be honest, I’m still not certain about law school, but studying for the LSAT has been a good way to think hard about my strengths and interests and whether this path is one I want to commit myself to.

Despite my ambivalence about law school, I knew there was no point in taking the LSAT if I didn’t commit myself at least to that. I made the decision just over three months before October 5, the next test date, and everything I consulted (including this blog) suggested three months as a minimum study period. That meant buckling down.

Since I was traveling around, however, sometimes WWOOFing on farms with limited internet access, taking a prep course was not an option. I’m also funding this trip through my savings, so I didn’t want to spend that kind of money anyway. I registered to take the test in Paris and ordered all of LSAC’s collections of LSAT PrepTests and got most of the rest of them through this blog.

For the next three months, I took one a day, almost every day. This was not always easy. I often had to do them on trains or buses, or sneak in sections between weeding and shoveling horse poop. One of my first practice tests I took on the Megabus between London and Paris in front of a small child who hummed tunelessly for five hours. This was the first, and not the last, time I got motion sick from furiously reading and filling in bubbles on a bus. I took the first few tests untimed to get used to them and then started taking all of the sections timed.

Because of my circumstances, I couldn’t always be too precious about replicating test conditions; I would try to do them consecutively, but generally I did a section when I had thirty-five minutes free and just made sure I did four a day. Only in the week leading up to the test did I do full-length (five-section) tests with the standard short break after the third section.

Taking the test under timed conditions was crucial. I’m a slow reader and it helped me learn the appropriate pace for Reading Comprehension. Logic Games were all well and good when I allowed myself fifty minutes to complete them, but I quickly realized that was my weakest section when the timer went off and I was still puzzling out game two. I ended up buying the Logic Games Bible and Workbook, which were extremely useful in conjunction with Steve’s Logic Games Videos (godsends!). The drills worked wonders and helped a lot with speed, but I often preferred Steve’s methods. By the end of three months, I was averaging one wrong answer per Logic Games section.

After every test I made myself write down, next to each wrong answer, exactly why I got it wrong. I absolutely recommend this strategy. Not only did it help me understand the questions better and recognize patterns in my test-taking, it also made me notice careless mistakes that cost me points, like misread questions or transcription errors. Also key for me were Steve’s explanations of basic formal logic: necessary and sufficient conditions, the contrapositive, and especially necessary and sufficient assumptions in Logical Reasoning (this last was also excellently explained in LSAC’s SuperPrep, which I recommend).


*** Read on for part 2, where RC shares some LSAT test day tips. ***

Photo by bobaubuchon