Getting Difficult LSAT Questions Wrong

Then it's probably worth looking into a course or one-on-one. Could just be that you get hard things wrong b/c they're hard. I'd focus on thoroughly understanding method of reasoning, beyond Q-types.

I made a YouTube video about this (170+ LSAT Logical Reasoning strategy).

If you aren't able to afford 1-1 LSAT coaching or tutoring, some ideas to get help:

• study partner (online or in-person)
• local tutor (maybe a current law student at your local law school, or craigslist)
• free videos / courses

On that last point, aside from what I linked in my last comment to you, there's a lot more on my YouTube channel. Keep browsing. There are plenty of free resources that could help you figure out whatever's holding you back.

LSAT Test Day Prep Advice

Excellent LSAT test day prep advice from JK in the LSAT Unplugged Facebook Group:

"If you are having trouble getting through full tests while staying focused then you should take tests with extra sections. Once you get used to 6 or 8 section tests, 4 or 5 sections seems super easy.

If your burnout is more in the sense of your interest in studying then you should reconsider your motivation for studying and doing well. If you have strong desires to succeed then you should cling to those desires when you find your motivation waning.

Lastly, the part that nobody wants to hear and most people are unwilling to change. Your diet, exercise, and sleep schedule make a HUGE difference in your ability to learn and succeed on this test. If you don't get enough sleep, your performance will noticeably suffer. If you don't eat healthy foods, your performance will noticeably suffer. If you don't exercise, your performance will never be optimal.

Since you have a full-time job which takes up a lot of your time, you will probably have to make a lot of sacrifices if you want to prepare yourself properly in a short amount of time."

Law school application advice

From EC in the LSAT Unplugged Facebook Group (with paragraph breaks added):

"what I keep hearing is that we should use all parts of the application as a pieces that complete a puzzle, and that we should avoid being repetitive.

If you’re submitting a resume (which I think is the case in most places) they will already know what your work experience and achievements in that front are. So there is no need to make your PS a repetition of your work experience.

What is the narrative you’re trying to sell them of yourself? Imagine for example someone that has mostly corporate consulting experience as WE but they are actually super passionate about access to food in food deserts, and so have spent time volunteering on that front, bringing their corporate knowledge to improve whatever org they volunteered with.

In that case, the person might wanna highlight their traditionally corporate achievements in their resume, and use the PS to explain why the got into fighting against food scarcity and how they’ve pursued that on the side and how what they learnt in that work and in their proper job has led them to wanna take the step to go to law school.

I hope this is helpful! When I was applying for my masters my first draft was basically a narrative version of my resume, and friends that gave me feedback said that they got bored/it was too much.

So in summary, resume to highlight your work experience and that part of yourself, and use the PS to weave your narrative. If you’re a minority and are writing a diversity statement, I think that you don’t need to make your PS about being a minority necessarily, you can use the DS for that.

Super rambly way of saying what I’ve heard in other forums: make the most of each part of your application and don’t be repetitive! 🙂 good luck 🙂"

Posting LSAT PrepTest Questions in Facebook Group Forum

LSAC doesn't allow posting LSAT questions online without a license and has issued warnings in the past. They require a license for the display of all LSAT questions - even just a single one.

I believe it should be permitted - both because the LSAT is a gatekeeper to the legal profession, and this would help level the playing field.

I also believe posting individual questions for discussion falls under educational "fair use", but LSAC doesn't think so.

LSAC could get Facebook to shut down this group for copyright infringement if they reported their questions were posted here, and they could sue the law school applicants who posted them.

(How many law school applicants have the resources to fight LSAC? Have you seen their IRS filings? Even prep companies can't successfully fight them.)

So, to protect the group and the law school applicants unaware of LSAC's position, I will continue to remove photos of actual LSAT questions, as I do in all the LSAT groups I moderate.
If they reported the group to Facebook, Facebook could shut it down whether it's warranted or not.

We have to remove those questions in order to avoid jeopardizing the ability of the group to continue functioning.

Details on licensing LSAT questions here:
https://www.lsac.org/system/files/inline-files/rights-management.pdf
Thanks for understanding.

LSAT Study Schedules

No schedule will work for everyone always. These are meant to be a more general framework that students can adapt to their specific situations. They're also more important for the level of specificity they contain about what to do than the particular day-by-day breakdown.

And perhaps it would help if I clarified some background on what led to my creating these schedules:

One of the first resources I created when I started LSAT Blog were free week-by-week study plans. (You can even see the month I created them in the relevant URLs at this link.)

Students started asking me to create more detailed day-by-day study plans, and I resisted because I initially didn't see why students needed anything more specific or detailed than that. But after getting enough requests, I finally sat down and created them over a year later. It took a lot of work, and students found them valuable enough, so I thought it reasonable to charge a modest price.

(Sales from the schedules support my work on LSAT Blog and the LSAT Unplugged YouTube channel and podcast.)

Not every schedule will work for everyone, but they have worked for many students listed here. 

LSAT Prep Advice for College Sophomore

Before you start studying for the LSAT, you might read some books on informal logic (A Rulebook for Arguments is good) and The Economist / Scientific American to work on familiarity with dense text/topics similar to those you'll see on the LSAT.

Once you start seriously studying for the LSAT, your prep won't differ from anyone else's except you'll have more time to study, so you can work at a more relaxed pace and cover more PrepTests. Keep in mind that LSAT scores are considered valid for up to 5 years.

LSAT Prep Motivation Advice

Lack of motivation can be overcome. It just requires a plan of attack and some nudges:

1. Get an LSAT study plan to help you stay on track, so you know exactly what to do (and what NOT to do). I have several listed here.
2. Make an LSAT motivation playlist.
3. Hang up a picture of your dream law school on your wall (or make it your computer/phone background).

LSAT question review process

Taking full LSAT PrepTests is valuable in large part because these tests give you review opportunities. It's not enough to say "oh, I get it now" after looking at the correct answer or explanations and then calling it a day.

Amount of time spent per question will vary from person-to-person. If you need longer than 3-4 hours, by all means, take it. Let it spill over into the next day.

It could take 8 minutes / question, or longer for some and shorter for others. For example, individual LSAT Logic Games and Reading Comp questions might take less time because they're grouped and issues could be due to rules or the passage, respectively.

I wouldn't worry about the specific amount of time / # of questions covered. The process is what matters here.

Here's the LSAT question review process I recommend:

• Analyze exactly where your error or misunderstanding stemmed from. Was it something in the stimulus or the answer choices?
• If it was in the stimulus, was it your approach to reading the stimulus that was ineffective or incorrect, or was it something in the stimulus text itself that you misunderstood?
• If it was in the answer choices, was it in the incorrect answer choice you chose, identify what it was about the wrong answer choice that tempted you. Then identify what made it wrong in the end
• If there was something in the correct answer that made it seem unappealing, identify what it was. And identify what made it correct in the end.

Through repeating this process several times, you'll start to identify patterns in how LSAC constructs tempting incorrect answer choices. You'll see different types of techniques LSAC uses to make incorrect answer choices tempting and correct answer choices unappealing.

And I would take notes or explain it to a friend. There's something important about being forced to articulate your thought process, rather than doing it in your head.

Perfecting LSAT Logical Reasoning + Reading Comp

There's a lot here so I'm going to focus on the last part of your question - perfecting LR / RC.

Since you're already in the high 160s, I don't think you need more resources. It's about your LSAT prep review process.

A couple of things that get you from the high 160s to the mid-170s:

1. Working not only to consistently apply strategies, but to understand why the strategies work. I consider this equivalent to reading the beginning of a chapter in a math textbook where they explain how the formula is derived in the first place.
2. For RC, consistently find the exact lines supporting a given answer choice in the passage. The answer is always in the passage - inference questions don't actually give you a license to go beyond the text.
3. Seeing the exam more from the test-makers' perspective. Patterns in tempting wrong answers and discouraging correct answers.

(For more on the test-makers' perspective, check out this book of interviews I did with a former question-writer.)

---

At this point, if you have a strong foundation, so time to work on pacing and endurance. You also want to be ruthless in skipping tough questions to come back to at the end of a section. Avoid getting bogged-down in any one question. At this point, it's probably more mental than anything else.

New LSAT Retake Limit from LSAC

I don't like the new limit, but I want to be clear about what it involves - the 3 attempt limit is only limiting you to 3 attempts in a single testing year (June-May). You can take 5 times in 5 years, which is plenty!

As unpopular as it is (and deservedly so) I suspect it'll have a negligible impact on the typical test-taker or on the # of high scorers overall.

It'll more likely affect when people take the LSAT - people may postpone / withdraw when they otherwise would've taken only to cancel.

The biggest impact it may have (I hope) is to get pre-law advisors to stop telling people to take the LSAT "just to see how they'll do!"

More thoughts below, as well as the text of the new LSAT retake limit announcement from LSAC.

***

I actually think that to create "a fair and equitable testing program," they should lower their prices and allow unlimited retakes (at least until you get a 180) - that'd be a better way to level the playing field and allow anyone to achieve their fullest potential.

Your LSAT score is the biggest factor in determining your financial aid. To impose this kind of limit privileges those who don't need the financial aid and will lead others to take on massive loans for law school.

Also, for anyone taking for the 3rd time in a cycle, this adds enormous unnecessary stress - to know it's your last time for a while. Especially for those who got bad advice from a pre-law advisor to take it just to "see how you'll do."

Seems kinda strange to add all these additional test dates and limit retakes. Do they want to increase access or not?

***

"Law School Admission Council, Newtown, PA 18940

Dear LSAT registrant,

You are receiving this communication because you have taken, or have registered to take, the LSAT in the 2019-2020 testing year. We want you to know that LSAC is committed to providing a fair and equitable testing program and maintaining the integrity of the LSAT. We will be updating our test-taking limit policy later this summer and it will go into effect with the September 2019 LSAT administration. We are still finishing up the final details of the new policy, but we know that there has been a lot of conversation on social media recently, so we wanted to share the basic elements in an effort to reduce the speculation and any anxiety. Based on our estimates, this policy will impact a small number of people – less than 1 percent of all LSAT test takers.

In effect starting with the September 2019 test administration, test takers would be permitted to take the LSAT:

• Three times in a single testing year (the testing year goes from June 1 to May 31).
• Five times within the current and five past testing years (the period in which LSAC reports scores to law schools).
• A total of seven times over a lifetime.
• This policy is forward-looking, not retroactive. Tests taken prior to September 2019 will not count against these numerical limits.

In addition, test takers would not be permitted to retake the LSAT if they have already scored a 180 (perfect score) within the current and five past testing years, the period in which LSAC reports scores to law schools. This policy will be applied retroactively.

There will be an appeals process for test takers who have special circumstances and want to request an exception to this policy.

We hope that this helps to address many of the questions. We will provide more detail in the weeks ahead. In the meantime, please reach out to us at 215.968.1001 or at LSACinfo@LSAC.org if you have additional concerns regarding our test-taking limit policy.

Sincerely,

The Law School Admission Council"

Getting Easy LSAT Questions Wrong

With regarding to misinterpreting easy ones, it could be a case of nerves/confidence in the material.

The fact that you get some easier ones wrong (and presumably, many harder ones right) correct suggests you have a high ability level and deep understanding.

Two things you might try:

1. Do a couple of questions as a warm-up before starting. Print/photocopy them, complete near test center, and then toss before entering.
2. Make sure you're not overthinking the easier questions. They are likely as easy as they seem. Sometimes students avoid answer choices b/c they seem too moderate, but given the nature of a particular question stem (inference, necessary assumption, etc.), that might be exactly what you need.