Top Law Schools

I'm going into my junior year next year, and plan to take my LSAT in June or Oct 2014. When should I begin studying?

Xixak wrote:I'm going into my junior year next year, and plan to take my LSAT in June or Oct 2014. When should I begin studying?

It will ultimately depend on what your diagnostic score ends up being and how quickly you can progress, but I think most people need at least 3-4 months. If you have the time though, or if you have other time consuming commitments (like school), 5 or 6 months could be ideal. Personally, I think more than 6 months for a first test can be overkill.

This heavily depends on how much time you're able to devote to LSAT studying. If you're able to devote 15-20 hours per week to studying, I would plan on at least 4 months. For me, I'm taking the LSAT this October and I started studying in February (totaling ~8 months of studying) since I've been in grad school for my PhD and MBA, and also working ~60 hours per week. So I'm averaging 15 hours per week for 8 months, although I plan on increasing this from August to October. My first PT gave me a 152 and after the first 3.5 months I'm now at a 168, but I figured I would need another 4 months to get to the score I want (173+). I'd recommend at least 6 months if you're really serious about doing well, but if your workload is high I'd recommend starting even sooner.

I would also recommend you taking a LSAT practice test without any studying to see where you are and that might indicate how much studying you need to do to get where you want to be.

SteelPenguin wrote:

Xixak wrote:I'm going into my junior year next year, and plan to take my LSAT in June or Oct 2014. When should I begin studying?

It will ultimately depend on what your diagnostic score ends up being and how quickly you can progress, but I think most people need at least 3-4 months. If you have the time though, or if you have other time consuming commitments (like school), 5 or 6 months could be ideal. Personally, I think more than 6 months for a first test can be overkill.

If you prep correctly for 6 months, you're at or near your limit. Not saying you can't improve more, but at that point, you're going to see severely diminishing returns on the time spent. So I think Penguin is spot on.

When you say diagnostic, you mean the free test that LSAC gives out right?

Xixak wrote:When you say diagnostic, you mean the free test that LSAC gives out right?

Any prep test will do, but that one is free, so many people start with it. I took a Power score course that used a different test.