My LSAT Practice Test Method

Raise your hand if you’ve ever felt personally victimized by LSAT practice tests. Good.

I’d like to share my LSAT practice test study methods in the hopes that it will help one of you out there in any way possible. This will be a lengthy post because it took me MONTHS to figure out my study method and I want everyone to know the different strategies they could try. I was able to create my own LSAT practice test study method from pieces of other study methods from friends, online articles and my LSAT course.

Please note that my LSAT practice test study method may not be the best foundation for self study because I started self studying after I finished my LSAT course, which I wrote a about here.

PROGRESS: My practice LSAT test progress recording method was primarily based on this article under the section “Monitoring Your Progress”, with some personal additions. I have mentioned this method before and I highly recommend it because I am partially a visual learner and this helps illustrate-with a spreadsheet-where and what I can do to improve. I took this amazing person’s monitoring method, and added a mock test yes/no column. (see below)

 

TIMING: The first major weakness I knew I wanted to address was my pace. I started by giving myself about 1 min 30 seconds to 2 mins per question, doing one page of a test at a time. So about 7-8 minutes of questions at a time. As I progressed I slowly decreased the amount of time per question per page. I did this for a very long time (months) until I was able to lower my pace to around 30 seconds to 1 min per question. Then I started doing entire sections (25 minutes) at a time. I kept my practice to sections at a time in order to correct my work right away. (I’ll go over my correction method later in this post) It also helped with allowing myself time to take study breaks, which is very important!

CORRECTING: During the phase I was primarily focused on increasing my pace I did all my questions in a notebook so I had room to write my corrections. During practice tests I wrote on the test in the margins.

 

 

On my incorrect choices I wrote why the answer I chose was wrong, and why the correct answer was indeed the correct answer (shown above). This allowed me to reason with myself and thoroughly absorb the corrections I was making. I would NEVER skip a question if I couldn’t figure out why it was wrong because I found that whenever I left it and came back I could ALWAYS figure it out. Persistence and patience are the keys, keys, keys, keys!

STUDY SCHEDULE: I was possessed by the LSAT. I studied almost everyday. I would say on average 6-7 days a week, couple hours on the weekdays and a majority of my weekends. Even though I had a full time job I found time to study for at least a couple hours after coming home, which is why I studied almost everyday consistently. Most of the week I followed the method above where I do sections at a time and correct, once to maybe twice a week I would do a mock test, and once a week I would study with a friend. Would I recommend this schedule to anyone? Yes and no. Yes because I was driven, I needed to work very hard to get the score I wanted (I had a very low scoring first LSAT test) and I am an over-do-it-achiever, which I’m sure many of you readers are also. No because I went through multiple mental breakdowns from stress, and when I took a week break from the LSAT I noticed that I scored higher (funny how that works huh?). I recommend finding a schedule that let’s you study in moderation… not like a person possessed by perfection.

MOCK TESTS: I didn’t do anything unique from what everyone advises, which is to imitate your test environment. This is down to the pencils, bubble sheets (I printed these), analog watch and silence. Make sure to wake up at the time you will be doing your test, so around 8:00 AM for me.

STUDYING WITH FRIENDS/INDEPENDENTLY: As mentioned above, I studied independently and with a friend. My post here talks about LSAT courses vs. independent study. I feel like I couldn’t do one or the other alone without improving. I am very much an independent study type, but the discussions I had with my study buddy made understanding some of the difficult corrections a lot easier from another perspective. I really recommend doing both.

I really hope that my blog visitors can take advantage of my personal methods and tailor it to their needs. Don’t be afraid to ask others how they study and scour the internet for different methods. I did and it helped tremendously.

If you have any questions feel free to reach out to me!