I've taken it four times and I'm currently, well, I was just dropped from the UVA wait list yesterday, which is a bummer. But that kind of convinced me that I totally need to take the LSAT again. I've been admitted to Loyola here in Los Angeles, but it wasn't my first choice of school. And I also didn't get as much scholarship money as I was hoping for.
And I really think that this is all boiling down to my LSAT score, right? I applied with the 156. It wasn't what I was getting on my practice tests. And so I felt like I left points on the table, for sure.
And I'm thinking now would be, so I haven't been studying at all for the LSAT in this time that I did applications that have been receiving my admissions and whatnot. And now I'm thinking starting June, I'm going to start gearing up again and studying. Sure, great. Do you have a target test in mind?
No, because I don't want to take it again until I'm scoring above 160s, like solidly, because that's what I did last year. Last year I kept signing up for the test and then I kept having to push it. And I felt like it was tremendous pressure to take it. And I did.
And I consistently scored on three tests at 156. One of them I scored at 155, but really right about that same range. So I'm really hesitant to select a date. But in my perfect dream world, it would be October and at the latest November.
So that could still apply early. Okay, great. Well, you've got plenty of time. We're speaking now in midnight.
You've got a good five, six months, which is plenty of time to make really anything happen, especially given everything you've done up to this point. Do you notice any trends or particular week areas you might want to focus on? Yeah, so I was always weak at logic games. I never made it past a third game.
And I noticed that on my all of the LSATs that I took, I struggled even on the third game and not necessarily in that order. But yeah, so that's like a huge week spot of mine. And then also, L.R. was always my best.
But reading comp, I can get much better at. Okay, so there's there's some sounds like logic games and reading comp in particular would be two areas to focus on in depth. And interestingly, those are the sections where the questions are grouped, right? So there are some strategies you can apply to both related to the order in which you choose to approach the questions for games and reading.
Do you typically just approach the questions in the order given or do you jump around a little bit? So I used to on practice tests, I jump around. Like I felt calm enough where I would read one of the games and be like, you know, like I'll jump to game four instead. So I've often skipped game three and practice tests on the actual tests.
I'm pretty sure I just did one, two and three. I think I just went in order. I actually have like, I know you're not supposed to save like your papers, but I saved them. I tried to piece them back together after I ripped them all up.
But so I think I kind of know I could look back and see, but I'm pretty sure like all strategy tended to go out the window and I just pretty much did things in order on the actual tests. Okay, well, that's something we're definitely going to want to look at because you've got to have a strategy and it's going to be ingrained enough during your study period that it becomes automatic on test day. If you are practicing one way, but then the adrenaline of the real thing throws it all out the window, then that's a problem because you're not truly benefiting when it comes to game day. And so we want to make sure that you've refined the strategies first untimed, then in individual time sections and finally in full length practice tests, deeply enough that on test day, it's like just another practice and you do the exact same thing.
There are strategies they do work. And part of that is choosing deliberately what to do and when. So for example, in logic games, you want to do the orientation questions, then the local if questions and finally the general global ones that way you're building up a library or archive of hypothetical scenarios that you can use for those more general questions. Have you ever heard of anything like that before?
So I have, but I never actually did it. I mean, I always do question one, obviously, the elimination question, but I, and I. I'm trying to remember where I read it in one of the books I read about like going to the did you say that if questions? Yeah.
Yeah, somewhere I read that, but I've never actually done it. That's something to work on. And you'll see in the course videos where we have the full and class recordings, you'll see that we consistently apply that again and again in every single logic games class, do the if questions and use those to help you solve the global general questions more quickly. They will often let you eliminate some wrong answers and in some cases, they will even give you the right answer, saving you a ton of time and then reading comprehension.
There's also some similar strategies you could apply about the order in which you do the questions. There you could do the main point, primary purpose questions first, then the detail oriented questions. So you do the, it's kind of the opposite of games with reading comp, you read the passage, you extract the key takeaway regarding the main idea of the author's opinion. You knock those out because if you don't know the author's opinion, you don't, you don't know anything, right?
You got to just walk away with that. Yeah. And then for the local detail questions, you can go back and find the nitty gritty when you need it, but you can't remember all the details in time to conditions you don't even need to try to. Okay.
Awesome. I think that also like I left points on the table on LR as well. I know that I could have sharpened my skills in LR because that's where I, it's the, it's the section that I find the easiest. And so like I would want to maximize my points there and get as many as possible.
And do you think that may have held you back in some cases in some ways? There's anything you might want to look at there we could talk about. I don't know. I don't, I mean, I don't like trying to maximize my points.
I mean, you know, LR is like the one section that I could completely finish. I never finished a thing and then I can actually stop and think, right? Like at a halfway point, I can look down, see how far in I am and see that the pace that I'm going at and tweak it a little bit. So like they'll really comfortable in LR, but I don't have that same feeling at all in logic games or in reading comp and I've never finished reading comp either.
I've never, I mean, sometimes I could go pretty fast and I can make it to read the last passage, but like it was pointless because I wouldn't be able to extract anything in like the structure really from it or even have time on the questions. So I never pushed myself to do the fourth passage, but I would like to get to all four. Yeah, of course, I mean, for a 160, 165 plus you really want to attempt all questions on the exam. And it sounds like your logical reasoning pacing is really solid.
And of course, there probably are some points you could pick up there as well in particular, engaging in a deeper review process. But I would start with logic games and reading comp as we've talked about even just adjusting the order in which you approach the questions may change a lot for you in terms of helping you speed up and helping build your confidence there. And I would also make sure that I said for logical reasoning, you look to review more deeply any mistakes that you're making and why or also including anything that you're not totally sure about because if you're just getting the hardest questions wrong on LR, you're not getting them wrong necessarily because of the questions, then type. They're just hard questions.
And so familiarizing yourself with the tricks and traps the test makers are using and noticing and learning from which ones in particular you're uniquely prone to falling for can help you avoid making the same mistake the next time around. Okay, cool. And then what is, what is the timeline usually that you start like I'm going to be starting to study in June completely from scratch again? You know, I haven't been studying since I took the last test in November.
So how long does it usually take to see significant improvement? It varies for everybody. I mean, just taking what we've talked about today, if you apply that for a couple of weeks, you might see gains pretty quickly just from changing your approach. And what we talked about here, it's not even content, right?
It's not even anything logical. It's just change the order in which you do stuff and you'll see efficiency gains there. So if that saves you even three minutes per section or four minutes per section, that could get you several more points. So you could see gains overnight just by doing that.
Then if you take on something like changing your review process, that'll be a bit slower to see the gains, but the gains will be more significant in the long run because you will in a way be learning how to learn. You'll be learning how to learn from your mistakes, which means that if you just keep doing that, you will get more patterns of reasoning under your belt. For example, the more you get under your belt, the more you familiarize yourself with, the more the better equipped you'll be for anything that LSAT makers might throw at you. I mean, the reason I can get perfect or close to it on logical reason consistently is because I've seen every single trick the test makers have ever thrown out.
And so the ones that I was prone to falling for, even if they showed up once every 10 exams, I'm ready for it, even when it's rare. And so if you see more rare things over time, then you will inoculate yourself against them, even if they show up in a frequently. Awesome. Yeah.
Yeah. Go ahead, please. Oh, yeah. So also, what worries me is that it will be my last attempt.
I'm at five for the five year testing period. I had written them to try to let me take it earlier because I wanted to see if I could take it while I was still on the wait list for school. So I can submit a new score and they said, no, so like, I'm really yeah. So I'm so now I know that like I don't think that unless somebody knows a trick that I don't know, I don't know how willing they be to budge on the testing limit.
So like that gives me a little bit of anxiety to only have one shot left. I just want to sit and know that I'm not going to score, you know, less than a one 60. Yeah, of course. I agreed.
And by the way, you can appeal that test taking a limit. If it comes to that, let's hope and cross our fingers that it won't, of course. But you may be able to appeal it. In the absence of counting on that, of course, I would suggest you build your foundation, adjust games and reading, kind of like we talked about in Gengen, deeper review, then start taking several full length practice tests and then aim to get yourself to at least 165 consistently to have a little bit of a buffer.
And then if you are scoring consistently 165 plus on those practice tests, then you could go ahead for one of those tests in the fall. Yeah, I like that. That makes sense to me. I was actually really surprised that I was consistently scoring in the 160s and then on the three tests that I took, I scored, I mean, almost every single time, four points, less like there was no one I never got lucky.
Like I literally always scored four and then that one time, five points, less than what I was scoring on my practice test. Yeah, I mean, the LSAT is a remarkably consistent exam. It's kind of, yeah, it's kind of eerie in that way. But I mean, a test day drop is actually sadly normal and things if you're dealing with adrenaline, if you're not applying the strategies on your time conditions, and if you're having issues with the time constraint, like you mentioned, I mean, that can those running out of time can is a dangerous slippery slope kind of thing.
Because if you were getting bogged down on particular questions, then you can fall into a kind of quick sand where minute after minute, it just kind of drags on and you start panicking a little bit. Perception of time gets weird under the test day conditions with the real thing. So I want to make sure we get you to the point where you are consistently completing every section with a little bit of buffer of at least a minute or two. And that's something I would work on a lot over the next several months as the pacing.
OK, awesome. Yeah, that makes sense. So how does the coursework, how does tutoring work, how is your program set up? Yeah, sure.
So the course we have live classes almost every single day, they're typically from seven to ten PM ish Eastern time will have a study group, a class, and then another study group following it, the schedules consist in every week. So we'll have logic games every Tuesday, for example, we'll have reading comp every Monday, every Monday, logical reasoning every Thursday, for example, we don't change up what we do within logic games or logical reasoning, but you could say, I want to attend the reading class every Monday night and I want to attend the reading comp study group every Monday night as well. And so those classes are live via zoom meeting. You can type in the chat or you can talk just like we're talking now on zoom as well.
The agenda is posted prior so you can see what game we're going to cover or what passage we're going to cover and all the classes recorded if you ever miss one. So I don't say that anybody's in a 10 life classes every single night, people have other things to do, of course, and you have your priorities. So attend what you'd like, the community benefits are huge. You can find study buddies and you can it's always good to have somebody to talk through the problems with and resolve any questions you have about them either with an instructor or with another student who's far there along in the process that you are and you can also learn by teaching as well.
So if you wanted to go to a logical reasoning group, you could clarify your understanding and prove to yourself, you know it, by explaining to somebody who's not as strong in that particular area. Yeah, I see benefit to that. At one point, I started trying to explain games to a family member and that was the point with it. But I knew that it had a lot of value because I was like, I can't explain this and I really don't know it.
You know, it ended up being very true. So I can see a lot of value in knowing a game well enough to be able to explain it to somebody else that maybe is having a hard time. Do you instruct us on like from like the beginning of the process, like how you do games? Yeah, I do.
So I have a lot of introductory videos in the course just covering the very basics, the very one on one for someone who has no prior knowledge at all. And a lot of those videos are pretty concise. They're pretty short. So even if you felt pretty good about something, if you wanted to just run through it for a refresher, you could of course do that if you'd like.
And then I also have the full length class recordings as well, where I'll go a lot deeper, a lot more in depth, getting to some more intermediate to advanced material as well, working through more difficult problems in full length, hour long classes with student Q&A involved as well. Awesome. Yeah. So I have worked with a couple other tutors.
I worked with the blueprint course that wasn't the right course for me. I got some basics down. I worked with one of their tutors, which it wasn't the best experience because I really had fundamental questions about the process. I didn't know how to approach certain questions and the tutoring was set up where my tutor was like, okay, just bringing questions.
What are your questions on problems? And I was like, everything because I don't know how to do the problem at all. Well, you can imagine that at scoring at a 156, I already know an approach, but I've done games. I've worked with two separate tutors and I've structured games to completely separate ways.
So I'm adaptable. I'll learn however it is you're teaching it. But I just wanted your thoughts on it because I've done grouping horizontally and I've also done grouping vertically and I've also erased games. Yeah, like I was taught to erase.
And so I was wondering how do you go about games? Yeah, sure. So vertical versus horizontal, that sort of thing is really quite arbitrary. I'll typically do horizontal if there's a chronological or ordered component.
But in the absence of that, vertical is also fine. That's somewhat really arbitrary and you'll see sometimes I might do it one way and then as you say, what about the other way? And then in class, I will actually flip the way I do it just to see what would it be like the other way is the other way better because it really is arbitrary. I might do the same game two different ways and that's totally fine.
However, the erasing thing, I'm not so keen on that because I mentioned before, the value of previous hypothetical scenarios. If you erase those across them out, you're losing valuable information and there is plenty of scratch paper on the LSAT. So unless you write huge, there's not a reason to really erase that stuff. So I would suggest keeping that previous work and you'll see in the classes, we often reuse that.
OK, awesome. And then what are your general thoughts on it? So I'm literally thinking I'm not going to be rephrase what I'm saying. I'm fortunate that I already gone into Loyola and then I'll have June, July and August, right?
We'll already be studying and by maybe by that time I'll have taken a practice test and see where I'm landing. But like I'm on the course to not attend law school this year to get a higher LSATs work, which is like a very big risk, but I really do think I can do better. And I just want to know, like, what are your thoughts on what I'm doing here? Absolutely.
No, I think what you're doing is very wise. I mean, especially if scholarship money is important to you or getting into a better law school is important to you as well. I have a student who actually went to Loyola, but he got a one 64. And because he got a one 64, he got a full ride to Loyola.
And so just not to kind of around where you're aiming to get. Yeah, like that got him a full ride. Loyola is not a top ranked school, of course, which means that getting a one 60 plus can't get you significant scholarship money. And then if you're not set on that school and you want to go to a better school, I mean, that opens a lot of doors as well to get into the one sixties.
And so I think it's perfectly achievable for you, especially since you have the time you're willing to change your approach. There's some easy points you could pick up just with what we talked about today. And so I do think that if you're not in a hurry, which it's really worth it to wait. I do think it's better for you to go for that extra take in the fall.
OK, OK, awesome. So how often do you do you how many hours a week is the do you recommend that I study? It depends on what your other obligations. So I'm not going to work.
So I'm going to I'm fortunate enough that I've saved up so many that I don't have to work for, you know, for this four or five months, maybe I could push it six months, we'll see. But I have a four year old. So, you know, after she gets home from school, I get four. That's my big obligation.
And then usually it would be tough to do anything after she's here. Understood. I have a three year old myself. So I know, you know, I know, I know.
So that's fine. I mean, if you can make the most of that time while she's out, yeah, you can do all the studying. I wouldn't recommend studying 12 hours a day. So if you can study from nine to threeish or 10 to threeish, that's really more than enough and you can you can do a few hours in the morning, take a break for lunch, do a few more hours.
That's really all it has to be. I even have a sample schedule. I could send you kind of along those lines ending at four. And so you just put in a good five, six hours a day, including banks.
That works out to roughly maybe 30 hours a week, 25, 30 hours a week. That's really enough, especially if you can do that over the period of five, six months. That's really, I would consider really ideal. OK, awesome.
And this ideal for anybody really, I think that you're in an optimal position to be able to achieve your fullest potential here. So I'm really excited for you, honestly. Awesome. I'm really excited to.
I mean, like, I feel that I've been, I I've learned a lot from applying the cycle and from like studying for the LSAT all the last year, I learned how I made so many mistakes, like I, you know, I shouldn't have taken the test when I did. I shouldn't have kept taking the test when I did. Like I literally did August, October, November, which was like, why do I do that? But I really thought I would get that 160 and I really didn't.
And so like that opened my eyes. So I feel that I have the right approach. Like I need the score before I take the test. Yeah.
It's good. I'll work in the skull workout. I mean, you now have five, six months to study basically full time. You can now achieve your fullest potential.
I suspect you will end up doing far better than a 160 given what you can put in now. Awesome. Great. Sounds wonderful.
Awesome. Danielle was really great to meet with you to anything else you wanted to cover before we wrap up. No, Steve, I think I recovered it. Awesome.
Well, it was great to meet you again. I look forward to having you in the course in June. Don't worry about the LSAT for now. Just OK.
Not enough on your plate, but then we're in June when your schedule frees up. Just reach out. OK, thank you so much. My pleasure, Danielle.
Have a good one. You too. 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 of you who feel with your prep. I'm happy to help. However, I can. In the meantime, I wish you all the best and take care.