You want to review the questions you had difficulty with in excruciating detail - whether you get them right. That is one of the biggest things you want to focus on if your exam is coming up very soon. You want to look at everything you get wrong. Every question where you were down to two and you were unsure, and everything that you got right but could have done more efficiently.
You want to look at all of those things. You want to look at what you answered incorrectly and WHY you answered it incorrectly. What trap did the test-makers lay for you? What trap of encouragement did they use to lure you, to pull you towards that wrong answer choice? What trap of discouragement did they use to push you away from the right answer choice?
Was it something in the answer choice, or was it something in the stimulus or the passage? If it was a particular topic or method of reasoning or wording, you want to look at that exact thing and you want to find other questions exhibiting that exact thing as well.
So if there's a method of reasoning involving numbers versus percentages or absolute terms versus relative terms, and that's what gives you trouble, you want to look at all of those questions that deal with that.
You want to go online and search for categorizations of similar questions. If it's a circle game or a pattern game, you want to go and do lots of circle games and pattern games. It's not enough to just look at the answer key and say, “Oh duh, I get it now.”
Obviously you don't get it just by looking at the correct answer, or you wouldn't be in this position now. You wouldn't have kept repeating the same mistakes over and over to the point where you've done, possible 10-20 exams by this point, combining timed and untimed, and you're still not where you want to be.
Obviously, you've got to change something about what you're doing. If you were already getting 175+, you wouldn't be reading this right now. So think about whether you're taking the exam the next few days from now or the next few weeks from now, or months, whatever it is.
What could you be doing differently? What is the work that you know you should be doing but aren't doing?
Sure, it's much *easier* to simply take exam after exam, score it, be happy or sad about your results, and then move on to the next one and say, “Oh, I get it,” whenever you look at the answer key.
But that's not enough. The people who do the best are reviewing in excruciating detail. They've got notebooks filled with their own analysis of what was difficult about the problem, why they got it wrong, and what they need to do differently. They're not spending time on message boards and social media.
They're not just doing exam after exam or reading / watching tons of explanations. Sure, all of that can help to some degree, but the *real work* is sitting with the practice exams on your own in a quiet environment where you can focus on your own thought process. That's where the magic happens.
You don't see too many people talking about this because they're too busy doing it. The people who are on message boards and forums complaining or talking about how great they're doing, they'e likely not doing that great because they're procrastinating rather than doing the actual work. The work is in your own analysis, and the reason that you're not doing that enough is because it's not fun.
And a sign that it's valuable is that it's not fun. A lot of the time, the toughest workouts are the ones that are excruciatingly difficult in the moment, but you also feel really good afterwards because you could take pride in knowing that you've done a great job. That you've given it your all and you get the results accordingly. So that's where I want you to focus between now and Test Day.
For more, I've got an entire playlist focused on LSAT Test Day prep here -----> and several articles on LSAT Test Day prep here ----->
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