It's good to meet you. How's everything coming along? Everything's going well. I'm just jumping in out of kind of some of the week to week, month to month stuff and doing the nightly classes and I'm going to start taking PTs again very soon.
Yeah. Nice. Fantastic. I'm glad you've been diving in and working through everything going to the classes and everything.
That's awesome. Yeah. I wanted to talk to you today a little bit about test anxiety because I know that from my previous test that I've taken officially and unofficially, I definitely have things I need to work on. And I think in particular before I start jumping into my next practice test, I want to talk to kind of build up along the way so that when I get to test a, I'm like, oh, well, I've got this, I'm set and I've been putting a lot of that practice to like not get anxious into motion.
Sure, of course. Glad to help. What's your target tested? I would say October.
Good. Got some time. Yeah. Fantastic.
That's great. So you have a few months where you can put things into practice, take some time to exams and work on that review as well. What are your time to practice tests? Look like have you taken any yet?
Have you simulated test that? Yeah. I mean, before I had taken several, like 30, but I guess when I did, yeah, that was a lot, like in the last month or anything, but like when I studied previously. So I would say that one of the things that I did when I simulated is, I mean, I got into a quiet space.
I made sure that things were the way they would be on test day with lighting and air conditioning and everything. And then, you know, we would do the timing and have like a proctor thing on my phone as well. So I tried to really simulate as much as possible. But I don't know, I guess on test day, you do get those jitters.
And so I'm looking for ways to make sure that doesn't happen, particularly when I get stomped on a question and then I like spend more time than I do on it. That's definitely something to work on is just not getting bogged down in any one question. One thing I recommend for that is mindfulness meditation to just practice taking charge and focusing on what you need to focus on. Have you ever tried that?
Anything like that? I've tried it, but I've not been consistent with it, but I tried a little bit. I guess I need to like do it every day, I think, and be, yeah, beyond that for sure. When you try it before, what was that like?
How long did you try it for per session? 10 or 10 to 15 minutes, I think was what? Yeah, I tried per session. Okay, I try reducing that a bit.
So if you could reduce the duration, but increase the frequency. So instead of 10, 15 minutes, every couple of days, and it's hard to block off 10, 15 or something like this, it can do that part at least. What if you just try to do three to five minutes every single day? Yeah, I think that would be good.
And anchor it to something else that you do. So what's another thing that you do every single day where you could see yourself doing the mindfulness immediately afterwards? I make breakfast in the morning, every day. So I could do it while I do that.
That's like a quiet moment where I could do that for sure. Yeah. Cool. So you make breakfast.
Maybe you don't want it to light eating the breakfast. Yeah, right. Maybe after you eat breakfast, then you give yourself three to five minutes to focus or maybe before you start breakfast, three to five minutes. Typically afterwards, it's a good way to anchor it.
So you have an activity that anchors you and then you do whatever the new habit is trying to form. Do you think it's good to take to do meditation like right before the test? I did that on my last, the last official test I took, but I'm not sure that it I still got anxious. I hear.
Yeah. Well, I do, I do think it's a good idea and maybe you would have more anxious without it. Yeah. But just a few minutes just to kind of send yourself focus on your breath.
It doesn't have to be super serious or super heavy. I would just keep it light and just okay. I'm focusing on my breath for just these next couple minutes and trying to clear mind focus on the breath alone. And that way you're training that focus as a muscle so that if you're finding yourself getting bogged down or stuck on a particular question, you can then recognize that it's happening.
Look, okay, I'm kind of spiraling here and not really getting anywhere and you can get worried about that one question, understandably so, but everything's worth the same. So wherever that question was, you just like, oh, it flag it, skip it. Hope to come back to it later. That was another question that kind of ties into the, like staying on a question for a long time is the idea of hyper skipping and how that works because I'll be honest with you.
Let me turn my brightness up. I have a lot of trouble skipping because then I'm worried and like, what if I don't get time to go back to it? And so I guess just walking through some of the benefits of that because I typically, I typically don't do that. Maybe I should to gain points somewhere else later in the test.
Well, one benefit is that you then potentially have the opportunity to come back with a fresh perspective and break out of whatever tunnel vision you might have had a so pre associated with that question in particular on your first read of it. So that's one thing. You also get the benefit of getting to the end of the section and knocking out any easier questions. So maybe there's a long parallel reason in question that's number 19 or number 20.
But question 25 might actually be a little bit easier. So why would you want to do number 19 first? It's a long parallel and will take you longer to complete my p tougher when number 25 you could secure that point first. Okay.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I know I have to get in the habit of doing that. I mean, I don't want to skip all kinds of questions. I guess what would be a set number that would be okay to skip on a test to then come back to like I might do in logical reasoning.
I might do four questions. I might skip four questions in one section and that doesn't mean that I don't even look at them at first at all, but it's a long parallel or a long principle application. And it's a number 19 or so. Yeah, I might just skip it at first glance and say I'll deal with this later.
I don't want to look at it right now because I'm reading a lot more text and interpreting a lot more text for the same number of points. So that's one thing I might do with those. And then there's others where I might try I might get down to two choices and I'm not really sure between the two. I might pick one and flag it because I want to come back and have some more time.
Hopefully I don't know if I'll definitely have that time, but I'd like to move it a fast enough pace so I can't lock up whatever else there is because of that question is already a 50 50. But I want to make sure I don't overly obsess over a 50 50 and then give up something else that ends up being a 20% one out of five through a blind guess. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, you know, I don't want to lose points where I can pick them up in other places for a question that maybe I have a better shot at.
I think my other question that ties into this too is just about tests for testing the timing of the test and looking at when I should really start doing that again. I mean, I've taken most of my tests timed just because I prefer to do that because I don't want to get when I've done them on time. It's like crazy. Like I can spend 45 on a section and that's way too much.
Sometimes I even do worse, which I don't know why maybe I just have more time to think about a question and change my answer. So I guess when when would be a good time to start timing again or should I just go and do that? I might start now. I mean, if you've already done dozens, you said, right?
You've got exposure to the basics of the exam. You have a good foundation. Do you feel like you have a good foundation? I do.
I guess just my question is because I have done so many of the time ones, I'm wondering if it would be of any benefit to do one or two or three untime and then slowly build up. I don't know. I mean, I've been doing sections on time right now. So I just don't want to jump in too quickly if I'm not ready and then I like I use a test that I could have waited for down the line.
I hear you. I mean, there's benefits to both. I think that you since you're noting that test anxiety is a concern. Yeah.
I want you to keep time exams as part of your routine. Okay. Maybe you want to do one time to exam a week with review and then if you want to use some untime to work on the side, you can still do that as well just to refine your accuracy a little bit more. But remember that the review after the fact is another opportunity to really drill deep into the nuances of the question.
Right. Yeah. Yeah, no, definitely. I think it's a journal and really trying to take time to go through it.
I know it's best to do review like a day or two later, right? You don't want to do it right after for most of them. Well, you want to be fresh. You want to be fresh.
So I would do it with a day or two. I wouldn't want you to do it immediately. Yeah. At least not questioned by question because you don't want to get used to that instant feedback because you're not going to get that instant feedback on test day.
Right. Yeah. Yeah. We wish we did, but we don't.
Yeah. Awesome. Well, I think that's it on my end in terms of just kind of looking at it. I really want to schedule everything out and make sure I do that.
I'll definitely take the test time and go from there. I guess how many before we go, how many hours of review do you think would be sufficient in terms of like two or three hours for a test or less? Well, it depends. It depends on how many questions you got wrong and how many questions you had difficulty with and then how involved your review process is after the fact.
So you see it in the classes you see in the workshop recordings that it can go pretty in depth, especially for logical reasoning of reading comprehension where you have those ambiguities of language and you have the stimulus or the passage. You have the answer choices a lot. You could unpack there. Yeah.
So it would serve you to better understand that question, but it could definitely take at least two to three hours per exam, possibly four. Okay. Good. Yeah.
I just want to make sure I'm getting that in. I really try to do the logic games first because I find that easier to review and then break it up with the other two because it can be a lot, yeah, a lot more challenging. Yeah. You don't have to do all three of you in one sitting.
Definitely. Yeah. Yeah. Spread it over a couple of days if you need to.
Yeah. Just so that you can give it the full attention that deserves. I do have one other comment for you before we wrap up, which is you mentioned about timing yourself and using like an app and part of producing test anxiety is making everything as closely mimicking mirroring test day as possible. And so that would include using the law hub platform with the timer they have there instead of using anything external because of course you can't use a phone on test day.
Right. Right. Yeah. And I think that that was one suggestion that you gave the last time that I'm definitely going to do is I start back into the practice test.
I didn't do this for the diagnostic that I took, but I will now is I have not previously the practicing on law hub. I did take a test or two for the last test I took, but I'm definitely going to do that now. Yeah. Because I think that was a lot, it would be a lot better than like using another service that doesn't actually near what it's going to look like.
Exactly. Yeah. So just start mixing that in with your time exams and also one other thing is that you said that you've done a lot of exams before. Yeah.
Those could still be useful to you. Like don't think that they're done and you can't touch them again. You can read you them. Obviously you've seen it before that could be inflating the scores a little bit, but there's still probably a lot to learn from those exams.
So don't assume that they have no value anymore. Definitely revisit them as it would help you. Yeah. And I think one more thing I just was thinking of in regards to that.
So I pretty much had done I think up from at least like 65 and up. So in terms of this, would it be fair to start at 70 and up for a lot of my now practiced timed exams as a range? Yeah. Yeah.
I would focus on largely 70 and up if you want to see something untouched. Of course, you can go earlier, but note that the note, the question types that are coming up in 70 plus and you've got the exam evolving over time. You have a lot of curveball games in 70 and up. Also the comparative reading, the dual passages only started with exam Juno seven, which is right before 52.
So a lot of what you're going to want to focus on is in the relatively more recent exams. Okay. Awesome. Yeah.
I'll definitely do that. Awesome. Well, it was great to connect with you and chat to anything else for this call. I think that's it for now.
Yeah. Thank you so much. Of course, my pleasure to have a few anything at all. Just reach out and happy to help.
I will for sure. All right.