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How I’d Score 175+ On The October and November LSATs
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The good news is, if you're taking the LSAT in October or November, there's going to be less material for you to study. Today I'm going to share with you what I would personally do if I wanted to score a 175 on the LSAT in October, November, or both. For those who don't know me, my name is Steve Schwartz. I've been teaching the LSAT since 2005 and I personally increased my LSAT score from a 152 to a 175 on LSAT test and now of course, I took the LSAT back when logic games were on the test and even back when the LSAT was on paper, I probably would have done a lot better if logic games were not on the test and so I'm in a way jealous of all of you that you get to take it with two scored logical reasoning sections. This means you get to narrow your focus on the LSAT and any gains you make in your understanding of logical reasoning will be doubled across the two sections. So if I were taking the LSAT this fall, I would devote roughly two thirds of my time to logical reasoning, roughly one third of my time to reading comprehension, but if I were taking the LSAT in October, November, or both, I would consider since I've only got maybe three, four months to study that I would consider that since I only have roughly two to three months to study for the LSAT, I would already have built my foundation by this point and I would switch gears spending more of my time on pacing and endurance considering that you want to take at least 10 full length time practice tests before the big day so that test day itself would be just another run through. I wouldn't get bogged down on those rare types of logical reasoning questions that hardly ever show up like evaluate the argument or must be false and I can say that although I don't love parallel reasoning questions, there's only a couple of them per section. You're going to get a lot more bang through your buck if you invest your type in the types that show up more frequently like necessary assumption, inference, and flaw. Those are the most common types of logical reasoning questions. You want to make sure you've nailed those before addressing the less common types. Students very often get bogged down in logical reasoning because there are so many different types of logical reasoning questions but once you're at pretty decent accuracy, say roughly 70% or so, you want to move away from drilling questions by type and instead shift gears to focusing on pacing and endurance. Pacing is how you allocate your time over the course of the section so consider that logical reasoning questions are presented in a general order of difficulty meaning they get tougher as the section goes on. So if you have standard timing with 35 minutes per section, you want to introduce the first 10 questions in roughly 10 minutes or so, building up a time bank that you can then apply to the tougher questions later in the section. And by the way, questions 15 through 23 on average tend to be the toughest questions of the section and so you might want to flag three or four questions in that band and you want to know which questions are the types that you are most likely to want to flag. For me personally, I would flag questions on hard natural science, questions on philosophy, anything really abstracting this wording, anything very formal logic in its presentation and parallel questions just because they're lengthy. And the thing is, every question is worth the same. So you don't want a risk getting bogged down or stuck on any single question, you flag it, skip it, come back to it later. By the way, questions 24, 25, 26 may actually be slightly easier. Perhaps LSAC is looking to punish students who don't allocate their time and don't get to complete the end of the section. But the good news is, if you can finish the section with a couple minutes to spare, you can then go back to those questions you flagged and skipped earlier and maybe with a fresh perspective, a second look, you'll be able to break out of your previous tunnel vision and nail that question in the end. Now, of course, beyond pacing, you also have endurance. You want to do at least 10 full length time to practice tests before the big day. So that tests day itself will feel like just another run through. And you want to do those practice tests in all different combinations. Your extra section on test day could be either logical reasoning or reading comps. You want to do some practice tests with an extra reading comp, some with an extra logical reasoning. And if you would hate having two reading comps back to back, or you would hate having three logical reasoning sections back to back, you want to take several practice tests in those exact formats, because you don't want the first time you experience that to be on LSAC test day itself. So maybe you do one reading comp, followed by three logical reasonings, or three logical reasonings, followed by one reading comp, whatever your worst nightmare is. That's what you want to do before test day itself. We've talked about pacing. We've talked about endurance. The one thing we have not yet talked about, however, is the review process to often neglected. I've developed a framework to help you review LSAC questions better called the Socratic Review Method. It's the cornerstone of my LSAC courses and my one on one coaching programs. You could check out the links below this video to find out more and to book a call with me, my team. We'd be glad to help you out. Now, the reason the review process is so important is because if you don't learn from your mistakes, you're doomed to repeat them. And the people who make the LSAC are incredibly lazy. They keep pulling from that same bag of tricks every single LSAC and students keep falling for those mistakes because they don't learn from them when they're taking their practice test. And so don't let that be you. When you're making a mistake in logical reasoning, for example, you want to look at why? Was your mistake from the question stem, the stimulus, or the answer choices? A lot of students drill questions by type, hoping that will magically unlock the key to the LSAT. But the thing is, if you're scoring 165 or above on your practice tests, you're probably not noticing any major trends in the question types you're getting wrong. And that may be frustrating for you until you recognize that you could be getting those questions wrong, not because of the question stem type, but because you fundamentally missed understood a difficult method of reasoning in the stimulus, or maybe you failed to recognize a key indicator word, or maybe you didn't recognize a sub conclusion or a counter premise in the absence of a key indicator word. So you want to pinpoint exactly what mistakes you're making and why, whether they're in the stimulus or the answer choices. Perhaps they were in the answer choices after all. And it was because you were thrown off by attempting wrong answer or an unappealing right answer. And so if it was attempting wrong answer, you want to know what made it tempting for you and what made it wrong in the end. If it was an unappealing right answer, what made that choice unappealing and what ultimately made it correct, because you have traps of encouragement towards the wrong answer and traps of discouragement away from the right answer. And until you can fundamentally understand what mistakes you're making and why, you may end up making them again on LSAT test day itself. And we don't want you to do that, of course. And so you want to make sure that when you're reviewing your practice tests and your time sections, you're looking at every question you got wrong. And every question you had difficulty with, even if you got it right through luck alone, and you guessed and got lucky, of course, it could have gone the other way. And we want to make sure that you are fully extracting all the key insights and the key takeaways from the practice tests you're doing. Because every question you get wrong is an opportunity to learn something new. Anyway, folks, it's all for now. In the meantime, I wish you all the best and take care.