You were to look back three to five years from now and see if this coaching conversation with me today changed everything for you about your prep. What would need to happen? My score would need to increase and I would need to get my dream score. So what is your dream score?
Where are you right now? I'm 170. Okay. Well, I took a real LSAT test in November and that was 156.
But the practice I've been taking, I'm ranging between 158, 168, I'm kind of getting between that. So I haven't hit like 165 yet. Okay. So what's the biggest thing holding you back right now?
For sure. I see I'm really okay with logic games. I feel like there's a lot of improvement in logical reasoning, especially because it's two sections. So I feel like if I can get that figured out, my score can really bump up a lot.
Sure. So in logical reasoning, what's giving you trouble? Are there certain question types or your approach to the section? What do you think it is?
I honestly don't know. I try to track and see like which questions exactly I get wrong. But it seems like it varies a lot. I do have some questions that like I'm not like I'm not easily or like I don't find really easy like infants questions are not my favorite parallel reasoning stuff like that.
But there is not I couldn't figure out a pattern exactly. It sort of just fluctuates from section to section. So that's something I need to help with like pinpointing how I can find my mistakes or what where I need improvement exactly. Sure.
Yeah. It's not always about the question type specifically. It could be complex methods of reasoning in the stimulus, the short paragraph. It could be in patterns and tempting wrong answer choices and discouraging right answer choices.
How do you find time to be for you on lunch games? Okay. Like sometimes or I'm short like a few questions, but mostly I'm like, okay, with the time. But one thing I need to help with is like sometimes I get stuck.
Like I get really I guess determined to figure a question out and I take so long on it. And I just want to know like the right time to move on from that question and just continue and then get back to it if I have time or not. So sometimes that happens and then I lose time. But in general, I'm I am able to finish it in 35 minutes.
And of course, like I've done practices timed and untimed and my scores are much better when I take like as much time as I need and I do like really well. So, you know, the time obviously affects my performance. Sure. Sure.
And you talked about knowing when to stop working on one question and move on to the following questions. Do you notice there's a certain point at which you start to panic rather than improving your understanding on that question? Yeah. That's the moment.
So when you're not making any progress in deepening your understanding of let's say the argument and the answer choices are only serving to further confuse you at that moment, say, you know what, I'm going to make this one of the handful of questions that I flag and hope to come back to at the end and that's okay. Personally, I'll flag four or five questions in a single logical reasoning section sometimes, because I don't want to deal with them in the moment. They could be like longer power, a lot of reasoning questions or principle application or topics that I don't feel super comfortable with. Those are the ones that I say I'm going to leave these aside and the digital L set even has a flagging tool on it to make it easy to see those particular questions.
Skip them, come back at the end. Do you select an answer to just in case you weren't able to come back to them? Personally, I probably don't, but that's because I feel comfortable that I'll finish the section. I'll get to the end and have time to go back.
I'm working at a really fast pace on the easier questions so that I have a time bank built up of close to five minutes. So if those first 10 questions, I'm doing them typically in 10 minutes or less. Okay. There's that general order of difference.
Okay. But if understanding does not improve with further work on the question, just skip it. Okay. That makes sense.
You also talked about being down to two choices. You want to share more on that? Yeah, it seems like a lot of the times I'm down to two and then I pick the wrong one or like I see two choices and I'm like neither of them make sense or both really make sense and I don't see difference between two and I get really stuck. So is there a way to just try to figure out which one is, I mean, it's usually the 10 thing choice that I'm narrowed down and the right answer and then I just don't seem to lean more towards the right one than the wrong one.
Sure. Sure. There are definitely our tempting wrong answers and so you really do want to be sure especially a logical reasoning to go through all five choices. Even if you feel good about choice A, still go through the rest.
They are really good at making tempting wrong answers specifically with necessary assumption and sufficient assumption questions. So for example, a lot of times they'll make the tempting wrong answer to a necessary question, a sufficient assumption because people like strong language, they gravitate towards it predictably and LSAC takes advantage of this. So be aware of that. You also want to tend towards certain types of choices in certain question types.
Like for influence questions, you want to gravitate towards more moderate language, choices containing more moderate wording, like some or maybe or sometimes or not all, as opposed to extreme language, like always, never, all, any more moderate is more likely to have been supported by the stimulus than more extreme language would be. On the flip side, question types like strength and weaken strong language is perfectly fine. It could be as strong as you want as long as it gets the job done. So you want to have certain tendencies based on the question type.
Okay. I just, so like what I do right now is whenever I take, I have a spreadsheet where I put all my incorrect answers or the ones that I was like guessing on and I write the type of the question and like my thought process, what was wrong, things like that. I don't know how to use that. Like I always go through and when I look at the answer choices, I understand why it's wrong, but then I'm not improving.
You know, it's not, I feel like I'm not learning anything from that, even though I do analysis, I do an analysis, I review each and every one question. So I, like I don't know, I feel like like I reach the max, but I feel like I don't know. One thing you could do is you could do you ever redo the questions you've gotten wrong in the past? Um, not like intentionally, like probably maybe I did it section like more than once because I've been like studying for a long time, but I don't like like say that I'm going to redo this.
I know I did this wrong and then I'm going to take it again. I don't know. One thing you could do is let's say two weeks later out of two weeks, every two weeks you come back to this list and you redo all the questions you've done that you haven't yet redone. Okay.
So if they're right now you have a lot you could do because you haven't redone any of them intentionally yet. So you might have 30 or 50 or whatever it is, you could have a day when you just sit down and redo all of them and see, do you get them all correct again? Do you get them all correct this time? And if you don't and there are some that you got wrong a second time, even though you reviewed them, those are really worth reviewing even more death to avoid making the same mistakes because those are where your mistakes are.
Those are the types of questions that you are uniquely prone to making mistakes on and else that does repeat itself. So there's value to be gained from further analyzing those. Okay. And I also want to think about how deep is your review process?
Like you talked about tracking it and you said it's a spreadsheet, right? So how much are you writing down about your thought process related to the stimulus or the question of the answer choices? So I have like two columns. One is for like, what was the mistake I did and then the other one was like what was the wrong choice that I picked?
Like was it an extreme choice, but I still thought it was correct, like things like that. And then I sort of explain what like write things like, oh, I was rushed because I was just like, I'm not really like deep into the stimulus and I just picked and dropped or something like that. So there's that like sometimes I feel like I don't know if I should go through it a question and like write my thought process on each answer choice or like why I think each answer like I don't know if like that's a waste of time. It might take a long time.
Just don't know what to do at this point with our other than practice regular. Well, you don't need to go through all five choices and explain all of them because I'm sure that you're eliminating a few of them as being ridiculous off the bat. So you're you have the tempting one and you have the correct one and it's typically probably two choices to look at. Then you also might want to talk about the stimulus as well.
If there was something confusing about the stimulus, maybe it was finding the conclusion or the sub conclusion or the evidence or the filler or confusing conditional indicators like unless or the topic. There could be a variety of things that make a question difficult just in the stimulus alone. So you might want to have another column just for analyzing the stimulus and module reasoning and you might want to have yet another one. If the question stem was worded in a confusing unfamiliar way in the older exams, it was a lot more regular.
But in the exams in the 50s and 60s and up, that's when it starts to get a lot more creative with the question stem wording. And it can be an extra step just to figure out what they're even asking you because there aren't really any new question types, but there are new ways to refer to old question types. And that could sometimes be the problem. And maybe the problem is that you you maybe you correctly ID the question type at first, but then you forgot what it was halfway through that happens a lot where people will be looking at the choices and then they forgot that it was an accept question or they forgot which assumption question was necessary or sufficient.
So there are variety of things you want to look at and then specifically for the wrong answer that has choices themselves, what was tempting about the wrong answer that you pick it and what ultimately made it wrong and what was discouraging about the right answer that pushed you away from it and what ultimately made it correct for those talents. Okay. Do you recommend so like there's a lot of like notes and lessons like that I did in the past like, oh, okay, for necessary assumption, you look for like not extreme answers or for extreme is it extreme? So necessary is the more moderate?
Yes. So necessary, more moderate and insufficient, maybe more extreme or like some notes like that and steps on how to approach each question type. So if you recommend like studying that or like looking at that when I'm solving or should I just like do you think that would sort of help with the training wheels? Yeah.
So like use it for you could use it for now if you're a little bit rusty and not 100% certain on what the process is for each type, then yeah, have a little cheat sheet next to you as you're working through those questions by type. But at a certain point, once you're starting to do individual time sections and then full length exams, you've got to remove the training wheels, put the cheat sheet aside and just trust in your understanding of the types and having done it a lot through the repetition. It'll become automatic. Okay.
And like I asked you this before, but like what do you recommend the practice desk? Because I do like I've been saying for so long and like I usually try to take at least practice as once every one week or two weeks of full one. But if you're like I'm running out of material and but I am taking the October test. So I have like probably like four or five weeks left, five to six weeks left.
So if you recommend like doing the newer ones, I think the latest that I've done was in a November, I waited the one that I took in November, but I haven't done anything after that. So if any of those are released, like do you recommend starting to do them now or should I wait like so like October or what do you suggest? Yeah, well, you have a couple that have been released since then, right? You have 87 from June, I believe December was 86, right?
So you've got a couple there and then you have anything else from the 70s and 80s potentially. Do you have other ones from 60s, 70s, 80s that are untouched? The problem is like I'm a little rusty on what exactly I wasn't very great at tracking. I haven't been tracking now, but I feel like I probably took most or like at least did them like not a full test, but at least did parts of the sections.
And I always worry that if I take a test, you know, I look for it a little bit and the material doesn't seem familiar, but I'm like, what if I take it in my score is high just because I did that test already or something like that. So I mean, I can try to find ones that I don't think I did, but like do you think that it's not helpful if I took it like like months ago because probably like I would have taken it like last summer or like last fall. It's far enough back that I wouldn't worry too much about it. And if you have seen it before, yes, it's possible that your score will be slightly inflated.
That does happen. But remember the value of doing these exams is not so much simply to measure yourself as it is to have the experience of a full length five section three plus and we're sitting doing the material working on your endurance. And we know that you have at least a couple the most recent ones since your last test last year to do as fresh new material. You really, and with the exam only about a month away or so you only need if you're doing one exam a week about five exams two exams a week, maybe 10 exams.
So maybe a couple will be totally fresh. You could save those to be the last ones you could do 87 the week before. Okay. You do 86 two weeks before maybe.
You recommend more than one a week or is that if you have the time to a week could be nice, but how many have you done? How many have you done in recent weeks? I haven't taken one in two weeks. So I've done like three two weeks ago, like, yeah.
Yeah. And what's your schedule like these days? So you're working in school. So yeah, I work nine to five this or nine to six.
So I, what I do is I study during my lunches and after work for a couple hours, I want to say like I do three to four hours a day or I try to do three to four hours a day one day to Thursday and I take Friday off and then I study, I do a test or like if I'm doing a test that week, I would do that on Saturday and then review the test on Sunday and do some more studying on Sunday as well, like about four to six hours on Sunday. That sounds pretty reasonable. I would say that probably one exam a week will be enough for you and during the rest of the week, you could do individual sessions. You could do for like many sessions, things you could do maybe like two sections back to back on a Friday or weeknight or even three back to back, which will be like a partial simulation of test day.
Okay. That would be enough for you. And just try to find if there's any exams at all from the past 10 plus years or so that you haven't done, you could do those. Okay.
Search through everything from the fifties enough just to find a handful of exams that you haven't touched at all. Okay, for sure. Yeah, I'm going to do that set them aside and then make the schedule for the next five weeks or so. Do you think it's, um, a reasonable to, to expect my score to raise up to 170 and that amount of time I have a left?
It's possible, you know, it's really hard to make predictions, but you never know when a single insight can change everything about your prep. It's not a, it's not gradual increases are not gradual. They're much more often sudden for an explicit reason sometimes, but if you can crack something about your approach that was inefficient and find a better way, then yeah, everything could change. Okay.
All right. What do you say is the biggest insight you got from our session today? Um, I think the way approaching the analysis for the logical reasoning, I think, um, is helpful. I'm going to try to do more in-depth analysis and think about the stimulus and really write down my thoughts and review those.
Um, I think that might help me. Thanks for tuning into the show. Please subscribe if you haven't done so already to be notified of new episodes as I release them and feel free to reach out if you need anything at all as we move over your prep. I'm happy to help.
However, I can. In the meantime, I wish you all the best and take care.