Taking the LSAT in February. Suggestions?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’ve reviewed just about all the previous LSAT threads, which were extremely insightful. (Gadarene, hope school’s treating you well!)

I’ve signed up for the February 8 administration. I spent Thanksgiving reviewing the Princeton Review book I bought four years ago (during senior year of college), taking practice tests on the included CD, deconstructing my mistakes and getting into the LSAT lingo groove.

I plan to spend the next month using the official Tripleprep books, taking practice tests several times a week, drilling the heck out of things. (I’ve got a lot of free time.)

Any hints, suggestions, or condemnations for my approach? :slight_smile:

(For example, here’s a nice, streamlined tidbit I read somewhere, probably in a previous thread: during reading comprehension questions, if you’ve eliminated all but two choices, and one is an instantiation of the other, more general choice, then the answer must be the more general one. If the specific statement were true, then the general statement must also be true, which would be impossible.)

Also, is there any evidence demonstrating that fewer people tend to sign up for the February administrations, and thus the scoring curve tends to be a little easier at the higher end?

2

LSAT sucks, if you are looking to get a good score, like a 160+, then, IMHO, it is all made and lost on the games. You should be able to get almost 100% on the other sections as they aren’t that hard, but on the games is where you make the points. So, if I were you I would spend the majority of the time on game prep.

3

Thanks, RR – yeah, although I was always good with logic puzzles, I was still tanking on the games section until I actually read Princeton Review’s method for solving them. Shot my scores up a few points alone.

I might dig up one of the harder games questions I still had trouble with from my Princeton Review book (if it’s allowed – I know one of Gadarene’s threads had a few), and see if anyone has any good advice. :slight_smile:

But also, anyone have any hints or mindsets to adopt when doing the non-games sections?

4

You can either do the analytical logic or you can’t. If you can’t then you’re destined to score < 160. I finished my B. in math last year, and did the LSAT just over a year ago, and I thought the A.L. was easily… the easiest part. I can’t stand the ambiguity in the other sections, where you have to infer shit that they don’t say (oops. ranting).

Learn to do the puzzles. I don’t think anything will help you with the other sections, really. As long as you practice pacing yourself and you know what to expect, you’ll be fine.

I did an official preptest when I started studying for it, then I went through a Barron’s book (in which the tests were not very well written and thus, IMO, much harder). My score on the real LSAT was one point below the first one I did. It’s a pretty good test I think, in the sense that studying your ass of won’t save you from yourself.

5

One last thought on the games, if during your practice exams you find you can only get through two games or maybe three, be sure on the real test to look at all the games first and pick the easy ones to do first. Usually, of the four, two will be pretty simple, one will be harder, and one will be a real bear. Don’t make the mistake of spending alot of time on the bear and missing easy points on the two easy games.

6

I’ve said this before in other posts, but please please please–check out a book on first-order logic. (You don’t have time to take a course in it before Feb, unfortunately.) It will teach you a nice systematic way not only of considering logic, but it will hand you the LSAT logic games on a plate. Got me a 174.

Now, just don’t get me started on law school. :smiley: (I quit…but my wife is going to law school next year!)

7

IAAL, so I took the LSAT (many years ago…I’m older and if not wiser, at least more cynical now). I also taught the LSAT and the GMAT for The Princeton Review for a while.

On the Analytical, and to a lesser extent, the Reading Comprehension section it is very important to make certain you understand exactly the question that is being asked. Read the question first on analytical sections, then go back and review the information provided. Then re-read the question. For Reading Comprehension, I’ve found that good technique is to do a quick read of the passage to get a general idea of what’s being covered and the location of the various topics, then read the questions and refer back.

For games – practice, practice, practice. A good chart is half the battle. Again, remember the question and don’t go farther than you have to. For instance, if the question asked who is sitting between Albert and Claudia, stop working as soon as you figure out who it is – you don’t need to know where all 14 people mentioned in the problem are sitting.

Warning, obnoxious gloating ahead! I strongly believe that practice can help with games. When I took the LSAT I had studied a little bit from a book, but hadn’t spent that much time on the games. As I took the test, I knew my performance was mediocre, and my score reflected it. Later, while being trained by TPR, I learned some techniques and got lots more practice. I felt a little more comfortable, but wasn’t entirely comfortable teaching them. Finally, this past summer I took the GRE which has a very similar games section. I did every game I could get my hands on, including games in the Logic Puzzles magazines. 800 on the Analytical section. So, I believe you can learn to do the games.

8

Sounds like the LSAT has changed quite a bit since I took it, probably 15 years ago or so. Back then, a great score was in the lower 40’s or something like that. I guess even standardized tests experience grade inflation.

I used to teach prep for the SAT, math and verbal sections, so my advice is going to be more general in nature. You apparently have a pretty good handle on the types of questions and on the analytical/logical stuff (Here’s the exact wording of a question on the test I took: “Mr. Brown, Mr. Jones, Ms. Smith all take trains into town for work; one wears a blue hat, one wears a red hat, and they get off at Broadway, Baltic Avenue, and New Ellington stations, irrespectively. If Mr. Jones cooked pancakes for his three sons Joe, Homer, and Fudd . . . . then who thinks J. Lo has a nice ass?”)

Sooo, my advice is to pace yourself in your preparations and don’t do so much that you burn out by the date of the test. In fact, everything will seem fresher and you’ll probably feel much sharper on the day of the test if you stop all pretests and practice and strategizing for the week immediately preceding the test.

Instead, spend those days reading a good novel and eating right and getting a regular sleep schedule. The day before you might want to quickly review the general format of the test and make sure you have gas in the car, know how to get there, have a working and properly set alarm clock, etc.

Based on what you’ve shared here, you will surely have prepared yourself better than 95% of the other test takers, so your main concern should be that you don’t let random circumstances conspire to prevent you from being able to do your best. In short, ease up a bit before the test day, so that you really are firing on all cylinders.

This may not be the kind of advice you’re looking for here, but its the best I’ve got. Good luck, and don’t forget to have fun with it.

9

Keep it comin’, folks! :slight_smile:

This is all great stuff, thanks!

FYI, some background on my goals here: Before I started reviewing in earnest, I scored in the low/mid 160s range. Little by little, I’m raising it. I’m confident I can exceed my goal of 170 or higher, given my academic history and lifelong love of standardized tests. And I took a class on deductive logic in college, in addition to a number of other philosophy courses, so I’m not so concerned with the basic gist of the games section, but rather how to quickly size up and diagram the most complex one in a given section. I’ll post an example when I get a chance to transcribe it…

10

Thanks for the shout-out, Saxman. :slight_smile:

Law school’s treating me well–just reached the halfway point, although I’ve got a thirty-page paper draft on campaign finance due before classes start in January. And I ended up with a 173 on the LSAT, much of the credit for which should probably be directed to the good folks on this board. Thanks, y’all.

I don’t know what I can add to the good advice already given in this thread, except: 1) I found that nothing helped nearly as much as sitting down with past tests. The people at Barron’s and Kaplan and all may do a decent job of replicating the tenor of the questions (or, in Barron’s case, a piss-poor job), but you need the real thing to get any understanding of what the test’ll be like. Looks as if you’re all set in that department, so good on ya. 2) Even having taken past tests, I underestimated how long the games section was going to take me. I remember breezing through the other portions, time-wise, but the games were a bitch just because it took so long to work out the basic rules for each. I even ran out of time on one of the games sections and had to guess quasi-randomly for the last four questions (something about a pet store, if I recall). Got every one of those four wrong, damn it.

Good luck–it sounds like you’re gonna be well-prepared. Let me know if you have any other specific questions about that or law school in general. And if you’re looking for a place to go, my school has a hell of a lot to recommend it.

11

Okay, so I’m definitely feeling comfortable with the games section – just aced it on a practice. But I keep making stupid mistakes, particuarly second-guessing ones, on Arguments. Scored 167 on this test-run, so if I just get my act together…

It’s weird, I’ve never had a problem reading complicated text, whether it’s literary or academic writing. Until now. I’ll be plowing through these practice tests and without warning, I’ll freeze when I get to an ultra-dense, completely arcane paragraph. My brain has truly atrophied when it comes to reading anything more complicated than screenplays. (Thanks for nothing, Hollywood development job.)

I’m pretty sure it’ll just be a question of, as Mistress Gadarene reiterates, practice, practice, practice. My high school Latin teacher echoes through my head right now, with his mercilessly relentless chant of “Repetitio est mater studiorum”…

12

just do as many of those bleeding practice questions as you can find. I like the computer disks, as they will tell you where your weaknesses lie.

blanx

13

If you’re not a morning person, do some Games sections under “real” conditions - haul your butt out of bed at that godawful hour and sit down to do them. I made the serious mistake of having more caffeine than I was used to, and almost tanked the first games section of the morning because I had the shakes. I managed to pull out of it (and I got a 175), but it was way more difficult than it needed to be. If I had thought beforehand to see how with it I was in the morning and titrated my caffeine accordingly, I think I would have scored even higher.

14

First of all, don’t fret so. I went to a top 15 law school, and my 169 was looked upon by my peers as an excellent score. If you’re going to hit the mid-60’s then you’re in strong shape.

The other big thing is to take your time. With the exception of the games, you have plenty of time to finsih. Even with the games sections that you might not finish, you’re likely to have a better score getting right answers on 80% of the questions then being shaky on all of them because you’re rushing.

Beyond that, practice. It’ll speed you up more than anything else.

–Cliffy

15

Probably too late!

Games, games, games. It’s all the games.

Reading the Princeton Review materials will help some, but I recommend the actual course (again, too late).

Good luck!

16

What I meant about the logic stuff- it’s not really something you can cram. An undergraduate degree in philosophy helps a lot with LSAT, law school and Bar exams. It’s the critical thinking.

17

Hey Saxman: “Mistress”? :slight_smile:

18

I will echo my fellow dopers…work on those f******g games. I missed only one problem (which I still disagree with) outside the game section. I still ended up with mid 160’s but only out of pure luck… I wish I could go back and practice them before the test…then Stanford would have let me in…

[sub]Well, they did anyway, but I couldn’t afford it[/sub]

19

Games – I’m cool with.

Arguments, and Reading Comp – Anyone vastly improve their score on these parts? How?
Gadarene, I thought I recalled a post indicating your gender – my apologies if I misremembered.

20

All I have to say is jealous- All of these posts are really along the right lines and would’ve taken a lot of the mystery out of the LSAT for me. I still pulled a 172 out of a hat- but it was mostly practice, practice, practice as every person here has already mentioned.

For the reading and arguments I found the Princeton book helpful, but more so than that, I found that relaxing was key. I was keyed up and over-caffeinated for the first 2 sections, and really didn’t hit my STTG (Standardized Test Taking Groove) until I looked around, saw the looks of desperation and fear on my peers faces, and it struck me as funny. The quick laugh reminded me to breathe.

Gadarene, I’m still trying to choose a school, where are you? It sounds like you’re really enjoying it.