#lsat practice exam

[stuclyblrs]

anyone have links for lsat tips/practice exams/masterposts?

[trentteti]

The GIFs That Keep On GIFing: LSAT Edition

This is what it’s like to be an LSAT student:

When I figured out how to diagram “unless”

How I feel when someone gets a 160 on their first LSAT practice exam

How to handle a distracting proctor during the LSAT

Two sentences into my first reading comp section

When you’ve just been told on LSAT test day that your photo ID won’t work

The first time I associated an LSAT fallacy with my roommate’s logic

What I’m going to do if I’m ever at the same party as someone from LSAC

The GIFs That Keep On GIFing: LSAT Edition was originally published on LSAT Blog

[trentteti]

Making the Most of Your LSAT Practice Tests

As we come down to the wire here, practice tests are increasingly important as an LSAT practice tool. They’re hugely useful for replicating the experience of a real test, and for exposing you to more and more questions.

But a practice test is perhaps most useful for helping you identify what you don’t know – and if you aren’t testing with that in mind, then you’re far from optimizing those PTs. How can you make sure you’re getting the most out of those grueling hours? By focusing on your errors.

You should be reviewing and reworking every single question you’re missing in PTs. That’s easy enough for LR, where you just have to review the stimulus, and most people do it. But don’t shortchange yourself on Games or Reading Comprehension either, even if it may be more time consuming.

For those of you with T14 ambitions, I’d strongly recommend you start keeping a log of all the questions you miss, either in drills or PTs. Include the test, section, and question number (obvz), but also note whether it’s LR or RC or LG. Even better: note whether your LR error is a Sufficient Question, or a Must Be True; identify on LG whether you missed an absolute or a conditional question. An immediate review of your errors is important, but I’d also recommend that you go back a few days later and check in to make sure that you’ll be set on that problem (and the concept it tests) when you see it in the future.

Additionally, keeping a log aggregates what might otherwise be scant and uninformative data points. You can’t infer much from the six LR questions you missed on your last PT, but after several, when you have, say, forty missed questions logged, it’s much easier to identify your problem areas.

Any other suggestions? Questions? Comment below!

Making the Most of Your LSAT Practice Tests was originally published on LSAT Blog

[trentteti]

Why Aren't My Practice Test Scores Improving?

Hey, you baseball players out there – remember a year or two after tee-ball when your coach took you aside and told you that what you thought of as your graceful Hammer-of-Thor swing was, in fact, rubbish? And then you had to completely reconstruct your approach? Well, the process of studying for the LSAT is a little like that – here’s how.

The LSAT is a skills-based test with no prior knowledge required. This means that when you take your first diagnostic test, you’re naturally going to be coming up with strategies and methods and heuristics on the fly. This is great in the fight-or-flight circumstance that is that diagnostic test, but when you think about it, it’s obvious that the approach you conjure up under pressure is unlikely to be perfectly aligned with the most efficient and effective methods.

Thus, the first few weeks of LSAT studying usually require a lot of deconstructing. Just like with your swing, what feels right intuitively often isn’t going to be the best basis for long-term success. Often I encounter students whose individual approach does a good job at getting them up to, say, 70% accuracy on Logic Games. That’s no small feat, because LG is tough, but those students are rarely happy to settle with six or seven point drop incurred by missing 30% of their Games questions. Typically they need to scrap their method (while retaining the conceptual understandings cultivated its production) and begin more or less anew. They need to completely reconstruct their swing.

When you abandon a practice you’re comfortable with and adopt something foreign, it’s natural – even expected – to struggle initially. As a result, many students’ scores stagnate for a practice test or two when they’re doing the bulk of their learning. This can be frustrating, but remember that the LSAT is designed to test where you are, not where you’re headed. Rather than getting hung up on your practice test score, focus on how well you’ve been developing your LSAT skills: How are you at Grouping Games at the time of the test? How well can you identify the point on which the speakers disagree? Any individual practice test’s predictive power – meaning its ability to discern how well you’re setting yourself up for success in October or December – is pretty much nil.

If you, like many students, experience a period of no score increases early in your studies, it probably isn’t a cause for worry. Keep your focus on getting perfect at the fundamentals — on choking up on the bat.

Why Aren’t My Practice Test Scores Improving? was originally published on LSAT Blog