The Official September 2017 Study Group Forum

[PrezRand]

Drilled 5 game sections (-2) with about 6 mins to spare for each. Drilled 40 disagreement Qs, went -1 on a particularly difficult one.

Took PT41, scored 179 (LR -1, RC -1, LG -1). Even though I know the 40s and 50s are slightly easier, it still feels good to be getting in range

How many hours a day do you study for this test lol? That's a lot of time

[Mikey]

Drilled 5 game sections (-2) with about 6 mins to spare for each. Drilled 40 disagreement Qs, went -1 on a particularly difficult one.

Took PT41, scored 179 (LR -1, RC -1, LG -1). Even though I know the 40s and 50s are slightly easier, it still feels good to be getting in range

How long have you studied for this test so far?

[HesusChrist]

Drilled 5 game sections (-2) with about 6 mins to spare for each. Drilled 40 disagreement Qs, went -1 on a particularly difficult one.

Took PT41, scored 179 (LR -1, RC -1, LG -1). Even though I know the 40s and 50s are slightly easier, it still feels good to be getting in range

How many hours a day do you study for this test lol? That's a lot of time

Yea, if I don't have work, I'm studying. No point in leaving anything on the table, IMO. Mikey - I have been doing about 40 hours a week for since the end of April.

[PrezRand]

Drilled 5 game sections (-2) with about 6 mins to spare for each. Drilled 40 disagreement Qs, went -1 on a particularly difficult one.

Took PT41, scored 179 (LR -1, RC -1, LG -1). Even though I know the 40s and 50s are slightly easier, it still feels good to be getting in range

How many hours a day do you study for this test lol? That's a lot of time

Yea, if I don't have work, I'm studying. No point in leaving anything on the table, IMO. Mikey - I have been doing about 40 hours a week for since the end of April.

I think I'm just gonna have to start doing that.

[Mikey]

Drilled 5 game sections (-2) with about 6 mins to spare for each. Drilled 40 disagreement Qs, went -1 on a particularly difficult one.

Took PT41, scored 179 (LR -1, RC -1, LG -1). Even though I know the 40s and 50s are slightly easier, it still feels good to be getting in range

How many hours a day do you study for this test lol? That's a lot of time

Yea, if I don't have work, I'm studying. No point in leaving anything on the table, IMO. Mikey - I have been doing about 40 hours a week for since the end of April.

You just made me feel like I'm a failure

[AvatarMeelo]

Anyone know which logic games are centered on compound conditional rules? I understand the used/new CD game pretty well but would def love the extra practice of breaking down the compound conditionals!

Would love to know the answer to this as well, but I know that the 7Sage question bank also breaks things down pretty nicely.

I'm on my phone during a work meeting but I just tried this, and it only shows me 22 games with conditionals. Does that seem right? I always thought there'd be more than that... I was hoping to find more games with grouping/conditional rather than sequence/conditional!

[ThatOneAfrican]

Going to drill some Assumption LR questions then go back to LG practice. I'm super paranoid about LG at this point. I feel like if I leave it for too long I'll go back to spending 20 minutes on 1 game.

[Impressionist]

Id kill to be able to do 40 hours of study a week . Thankfully im taking off work all of September up to the test so I'll get 15 days of full time study. Saving vacation time paying off!

[creed]

Checking in! Seems that I'm a bit late.

Planning on using pithypike as a general study guide. I have essentially 40 hours a week to study until August 28, when I return for my senior year at UG.

Scored a 164 on my diagnostic yesterday. Majority of losses came in LG-- I believe I went LG -14, LR -3, RC -2. Is this normal?

[chargers21]

Checking in! Seems that I'm a bit late.

Planning on using pithypike as a general study guide. I have essentially 40 hours a week to study until August 28, when I return for my senior year at UG.

Scored a 164 on my diagnostic yesterday. Majority of losses came in LG-- I believe I went LG -14, LR -3, RC -2. Is this normal?

yupp, and a very good starting point. If you did this timed, even better. If you get LG down to -0 like many on this board, and maintain ability on the other sections, then a top notch score is in reach

[HesusChrist]

Checking in! Seems that I'm a bit late.

Planning on using pithypike as a general study guide. I have essentially 40 hours a week to study until August 28, when I return for my senior year at UG.

Scored a 164 on my diagnostic yesterday. Majority of losses came in LG-- I believe I went LG -14, LR -3, RC -2. Is this normal?

No, if that was a strictly timed, cold diagnostic, it was not a normal score... it was really high. If you can learn logic games as most do, I would shoot for 175+.

[creed]

Checking in! Seems that I'm a bit late.

Planning on using pithypike as a general study guide. I have essentially 40 hours a week to study until August 28, when I return for my senior year at UG.

Scored a 164 on my diagnostic yesterday. Majority of losses came in LG-- I believe I went LG -14, LR -3, RC -2. Is this normal?

No, if that was a strictly timed, cold diagnostic, it was not a normal score... it was really high. If you can learn logic games as most do, I would shoot for 175+.

That's great to hear. It was entirely cold. I timed strictly during each section-- didn't finish LG because of time, finished RC with a few seconds left, and finished with about 3 minutes to spare for both LR's. But I did get up and grab a water after Section II. I don't know if that matters or not.

[CottonHarvest]

I finally know what all the hype is about with Lizards and Snakes (PT 27, game 2). Although I went -0, I found the section as a whole to be difficult.

[abujabal]

Checking in! Seems that I'm a bit late.

Planning on using pithypike as a general study guide. I have essentially 40 hours a week to study until August 28, when I return for my senior year at UG.

Scored a 164 on my diagnostic yesterday. Majority of losses came in LG-- I believe I went LG -14, LR -3, RC -2. Is this normal?

No, if that was a strictly timed, cold diagnostic, it was not a normal score... it was really high. If you can learn logic games as most do, I would shoot for 175+.

That's great to hear. It was entirely cold. I timed strictly during each section-- didn't finish LG because of time, finished RC with a few seconds left, and finished with about 3 minutes to spare for both LR's. But I did get up and grab a water after Section II. I don't know if that matters or not.

You're in great shape - learn those logic games and you're set. Not hard to do via the LG Bible or something like that. Not sure you'd need the Trainer if you can maintain those LR and RC scores

[earlyfrost]

Where should I buy RC and LG drill packets from?

[lurksoh4rd]

Question about drilling by type: I've bought all the LSAT tests in the ten packs in the books, do u guys make copies of the Qs you're drilling?? Or is there somewhere online where you can buy them pre assembled?? Or is it better to just go by section and not drill by type because of printing efforts? Very confused on this part

[Impressionist]

Question about drilling by type: I've bought all the LSAT tests in the ten packs in the books, do u guys make copies of the Qs you're drilling?? Or is there somewhere online where you can buy them pre assembled?? Or is it better to just go by section and not drill by type because of printing efforts? Very confused on this part

Imo it's much better to copy everything to preserve the content in the books to reuse down the road. Plus the book is unwieldy to work in.

Iirc some years ago LSAC banned all the online pdfs of questions (like Cambridge packets) so you're stuck finding someone who has then already or just photo copying.

[HesusChrist]

Not a particularly productive day. Drilled 10 game sections, went (-5). I need to reduce reading errors and mistranslations to get more consistent. Hit 30 disagreement Q's (-0). Also put together some LG packs of the hardest MISC and sequencing games. Open ended sequencing games are the hardest on the LSAT IMO, more difficult than multi-conditional IN/OUT for sure. Planning to take PT71 on Sunday.

[AvatarMeelo]

Not a particularly productive day. Drilled 10 game sections, went (-5). I need to reduce reading errors and mistranslations to get more consistent. Hit 30 disagreement Q's (-0). Also put together some LG packs of the hardest MISC and sequencing games. Open ended sequencing games are the hardest on the LSAT IMO, more difficult than multi-conditional IN/OUT for sure. Planning to take PT71 on Sunday.

I gotta say it's pretty impressive you're getting so much done! Can you post a rough schedule that you've been following? Like how many hours, when you take breaks... just how your day tends to go when you're studying as much!

[Ira Hayes]

RC is becoming the bane of my existence. Anyone have any tips? My sections are so inconsistent it isn't even funny.

[it's allgood]

Question about drilling by type: I've bought all the LSAT tests in the ten packs in the books, do u guys make copies of the Qs you're drilling?? Or is there somewhere online where you can buy them pre assembled?? Or is it better to just go by section and not drill by type because of printing efforts? Very confused on this part

The books from Powerscore are organized this way (by type)--and I am not talking about the Bibles--and if you take one of their courses you get several these books with LR organized by type including obscure question types. These materials were very helpful for LR, though I did not realize it until I took the LSAT for the second time and did all the timed PTs!

[abujabal]

A tremendous flop of a PT today that leaves me incredibly disappointed in my performance:

PT 53

LR1: -4 (-4 BR) | 32:05
LG: -0 (No BR) | 36:55
LR2: -6 (-4 BR) | 29:36
RC: -8 (-5 BR) | 35:00

Score: 164 (168 BR)

--

This was really just a fantastically horrendous flop of a test for me that I'm quite annoyed about. For one, that RC score is not to my standard - I'm typically -1 to -3 on these sections, so this really did destroy me. One thing I think worth noting as a mitigating factor is that typically I take these tests in silence. Roughly halfway through the RC section, though, my neighbor started blasting music, and I felt myself lose focus multiple times. That, combined with the "pressure" of my morning teas clearly threw my focus for the section. It's not an excuse, but I'm annoyed because I could have broken 170 if I had silence. Though, I suppose, this is a simulation of test-day issues, so that's good.

I'm happy with the improvement that my LG score and timing has made over the last week. I've been doing around 2-3 sections in the evening every day this week, and I suppose it's paid off to an extent. I did note that I hit 35:00 at the last question - had I been strictly timing, this would have been a -1, barring a 20% lucky guess. However, I think I got lucky in that this test had no Conditional In/Out, which is my worst. LR continues to be a bane of my existence, though I think if I were to do a drill week like I did with LG I could add another two points.

All in all, not where I need to be, not where I should be, and worth re-evaluating how I'm studying. Given my previous two PTs were 169 and 167 respectively, this represents a trend that needs to be stopped immediately.

[abujabal]

Not to double post, but a further analysis of what questions I got wrong and why reveals some interesting thoughts that I thought I should document (mainly for my own sake, but maybe y'all will find them useful)

- For RC, I need to divorce my own interest from particular passages (I was very interested in Passage 1 personally, so I spent a little more time than I should have thinking about it outside of the scope of the questions) while also maintaining my typical reading speed through boring passages. Doing so will keep my time/segment low, and keep me from a situation like this, where a lack time caused me to make stupid mistakes on 4 questions. That, plus reading things in my normal pace would have put me back to -1/-3.

- For LR, I have the distinct benefit of having 3-6 minutes left on each section that I take. Given that 3 of the questions that I marked for BR I ended up getting right on BR, those are just easy points to grab while filling out the entire section's allotted time. In short, cutting my prep time today likely cost me the 167 raw/170 BR.

- For LG, what's really helping me out is annotating my rules in a specific list. I found that diagramming is good, but combining it with a "list" on the page as well helps me make sure that I'm not missing any inferences when I'm on the mid-last questions of the game and wondering why the hell I can't place another element despite assuming that I should be able to. That, plus having the confidence to mark an AC even if the answer is A and I haven't checked B-E is important for time.

As an aside, doing this little exercise really improved my mood about the PT, so that's another lesson. Still mulling taking another PT tomorrow just to see, but that may be overkill. Thoughts?

[HesusChrist]

Not to double post, but a further analysis of what questions I got wrong and why reveals some interesting thoughts that I thought I should document (mainly for my own sake, but maybe y'all will find them useful)

- For RC, I need to divorce my own interest from particular passages (I was very interested in Passage 1 personally, so I spent a little more time than I should have thinking about it outside of the scope of the questions) while also maintaining my typical reading speed through boring passages. Doing so will keep my time/segment low, and keep me from a situation like this, where a lack time caused me to make stupid mistakes on 4 questions. That, plus reading things in my normal pace would have put me back to -1/-3.

- For LR, I have the distinct benefit of having 3-6 minutes left on each section that I take. Given that 3 of the questions that I marked for BR I ended up getting right on BR, those are just easy points to grab while filling out the entire section's allotted time. In short, cutting my prep time today likely cost me the 167 raw/170 BR.

- For LG, what's really helping me out is annotating my rules in a specific list. I found that diagramming is good, but combining it with a "list" on the page as well helps me make sure that I'm not missing any inferences when I'm on the mid-last questions of the game and wondering why the hell I can't place another element despite assuming that I should be able to. That, plus having the confidence to mark an AC even if the answer is A and I haven't checked B-E is important for time.

As an aside, doing this little exercise really improved my mood about the PT, so that's another lesson. Still mulling taking another PT tomorrow just to see, but that may be overkill. Thoughts?

For LR, absolutely slow down and improve your accuracy. Not point in speeding through a section if you get three or four wrong; you get rewarded for correct answers, not finishing under time. I probably would not PT again today, maybe do some a practice LR sections and work on getting your timing right, spending more time on those difficult questions you may miss, and finishing with under a minute to go. Get that down and you could hit 170+ on your next PT.

[tapenade]

So I've pretty much finished the Manhattan books, though I skipped some of the activities that seemed a bit too 4D. From here until September should I be doing full length tests, eventually timed+experimental? I don't feel quite ready to jump in and haven't really improved much compared to when before I started the book series. At least it doesn't seem like it.

December isn't too late for fall admission, right? I'm living abroad, but heading back much earlier than I planned and will take the test in the states. So stressful~~