Study plan. Any drawbacks? Forum

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rotar

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Study plan. Any drawbacks?

Post by rotar » Fri Feb 03, 2012 10:15 pm

I just wanted to get some input on my study plan.

I have the LG & LR Bibles, the 4 10 LSAT books, Superprep, and about to buy the 40's separate as they are not sold as a group correct?

I am going to take the newest 15 tests and put them aside to take as full tests leading up to the real test.

From the rest of the tests I have I plan on splitting them up into sections to drill, not taking them as full tests. I have started on LG's and I am drilling by game type. For example, I have just started studying and am working through all the basic linear LG's. When I am done doing all of those 1 time I will move on to the next LG game type. After I finish all the LG's from all the tests minus the 15 newest I will move on to LR and then to RC. After this I will move back to LG's concentrating on my weak areas first.

My ideas behind this are that by not studying LG's and LR together I can better focus on LG as I am the weakest on those. Also by doing all the LG's now when I come back to them after going over LR and RC they will not be as fresh in my mind and I will have a better idea what I have learned and not just what I remember. If I were to do a LG now and then again in a month or two I will be able to recall the answer or at least have it narrowed down pretty well. I started studying LG a few months ago for a week before I had to stop until now and redoing the ones I took before I finish very fast and accurate as compared to others.

I plan on taking the test in June.

Any advice or input you may have is appreciated.

Thanks

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EarlCat

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Re: Study plan. Any drawbacks?

Post by EarlCat » Sat Feb 04, 2012 2:35 am

The fact that you have thought about these things and actually have a plan puts you off to a really good start. The one thing I don't like about your plan is your fear of recognizing material you've used before. This comes from an idea that, if I remember seeing it, it's not any use to me. For some reason people studying for this test tend more often than not get this idea into their heads--so often that I wrote a really long post about it a while back.

I also talked about it in this thread.
And this one.
And this one.
And this one.

My advice is this: Don't be so concerned about whether you remember certain games or questions looking at them again. Your ultimate goal, in fact, should be familiarity. Trying to forget about what you've seen is, thus, counter-productive. Yes, you'll have very little difficulty answering a question that you remember doing last week (you'll remember the answer is C before even reading the entire stimulus). But your goal in studying is not simply to find the right answers (you've got 15 practice tests set aside for that). Your goal at this point is to understand and master all the material LSAC might throw at you on the test.

This goal is achieved by slowly and repetitively combing through the old tests until you see the inner workings, so to speak. You want to see the template for the argumentative flaws, for the sequencing game setups, for the reading comp implications and inferences, etc. You should notice that questions tend to have structures you've seen several times before, and only their subjects have been changed. That game about cars, you realize, is almost exactly the same as that game about lunch trucks--you realize this instantly because you did that game about lunch trucks three or four times last week, and now the car game is a breeze.

Ultimately, you should be able to look at any new question and say, "Hey, this is just like the such-and-such question." Your familiarity with those old questions gets you 90% of the way to the answer in the new ones. So please, keep your memory fresh.

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