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Thoughts on this?

I am always a little skeptical when I get a decent score on a PT with a few questions I have already seen. In preparing for the December test do you think I should avoid any of the PTs I have already done? Or are they valuable as well?

I'm just a little unsure and I really do not want to waste my time

Thanks

3 months plus? Good to go. Just take off 3-4 scaled points.

3|ink wrote:3 months plus? Good to go. Just take off 3-4 scaled points.

Bizarrely (or not) I always did worse on tests where I'd seen the questions previously. I got my best PT scores from completely "fresh" tests I'd never encountered. I don't know if previous exposure led me to think about the question too much (usually got the ones I remembered wrong!)

Anyway, OP, extremely valuable. Approach them and pretend you've never seen them before.

I found it helpful for Logic Games that you have done a little while ago or games that you bombed in the past. Because even though you might remember the answer to a logic game question, you still have to get there with the diagram etc, harder to cheat yourself.

I didnt think it worked for LR/RC because you start to read about turtles or the Magna Carta and your brain instantly remembers what the flaw was or something, and in some cases, I even remembered that it was "B"...

Just my thought.

It might not be ideal, but sometimes you have no choice! I did nearly all the available PTs (and many of them I did too early in my studying), and if I have to retake, I'll have to redo PTs.

I don't think it's a bad thing at all. In fact, I've noticed that ironically, I had sometimes scored BETTER on tests that I had not seen (this was towards the end of my prep), partially because you can get bogged down in overthinking the questions you have seen before.

One thing you might want to consider is decreasing the time for each section from 35 minutes to 30 minutes. If I'm going to retake in Dec, I'll be doing this.

Regardless, if you're at the point that you have done so many PTs that you need to redo them, that means you've done A LOT of preptests. I know that I've looked at 45+ tests. Some I just couldn't find, like PT 1-6 and some other PTs up to 60. So the point is that you should be at the level where you are dissecting specific problems that give you an issue, and for that reason, you should use the old preptests as a way to really study the problems that give you difficulty.

Sinra wrote:

3|ink wrote:3 months plus? Good to go. Just take off 3-4 scaled points.

Bizarrely (or not) I always did worse on tests where I'd seen the questions previously. I got my best PT scores from completely "fresh" tests I'd never encountered. I don't know if previous exposure led me to think about the question too much (usually got the ones I remembered wrong!)

Anyway, OP, extremely valuable. Approach them and pretend you've never seen them before.

I had the exact same experience on some of the older PTs, particularly with the arguments sections.

I think its perfectly fine to redo practice tests, who cares what the score is anyway you dont get a gold star for a 175 on a PT....the point is to go through the excercise and oftentimes even when you remember the content of the question your ability to solve it depends more on your grasp of the logic. So its still good practice.

I think it helped me for two reasons, the first being that I could narrow down mistakes I was still making and the second being that it helped me stay in the rhythm of 35 minute sections while avoiding burnout...most of the time I'd cut down to 30 minutes a section on retakes (only retook a handful of tests).

Just before Oct 2010, I retook PT 56 (I think it was pt 56, it has the reading passage about gypsies? that and the game with moving furniture) and I got 155 cold. A month later and no in depth review, I got a 167. This was the last PT I took before the test and it helped calm the nerves.

I'm sorry but I have trouble trusting anyone's PT average when they are taking the LSAT for the third time.

Far too many high 176-179 averages for my liking; especially when you see some of them end up with a high final score in the 160's. I, for one, would not trust the score of any PT that I have already taken in its entirety.

After doing a few thousand problems (40+ Preptests), you begin to build up pattern recognition. It really doesn't matter if you have to redo tests at the point because you should be able to extract the fundamentals of a problem and be able to sift through the details. This is one of the reason's why I think that towards the end of my prep, I would sometimes be more likely to stumble on the LR questions (in particular) of preptests I had done before compared to ones I hadn't done. I would get bogged down on recognition of the details (since I had slight memory of the problem) and it would partially distract me from recognizing the core of the problem.