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Hi all!
I recently took a diagnostic LSAT and got a 172. My top choice is Yale, and my GPA is slightly below their avg accepted (3.85 at an elite LAC), so I would really like to get an excellent LSAT. Nearly all of my missed points were from LG, mostly from running out of time. My current plan is just to drill the Logic Games Bible until my timing improves. I plan to take the July 2019 LSAT, so I have about 8 months to prepare (but obviously I still have school and internships, so I don't have a ton of time for prep on a day-to-day basis.

Is this a good plan, or do people have other suggestions?

Thanks!

bck2171 wrote:Hi all!
I recently took a diagnostic LSAT and got a 172. My top choice is Yale, and my GPA is slightly below their avg accepted (3.85 at an elite LAC), so I would really like to get an excellent LSAT. Nearly all of my missed points were from LG, mostly from running out of time. My current plan is just to drill the Logic Games Bible until my timing improves. I plan to take the July 2019 LSAT, so I have about 8 months to prepare (but obviously I still have school and internships, so I don't have a ton of time for prep on a day-to-day basis.

Is this a good plan, or do people have other suggestions?

Thanks!

A 172 is an objectively excellent score, and even those who get a 180 may fluctuate between the mid-170s and a 180. I think at this point, you should obviously be pushing for a 180 and the way to get there will be to identify which question types you score under 95% on, and fine-tune those question types. I would err on the side of not changing the way you are approaching the questions if you're scoring a 172, and using the guides to simply learn more about the test and individual questions rather than a wholesale do "a, b, c" approach as these approaches were not developed for people starting out in the 170s.

Thank you!!

I assume that you get -0 on games - you have to be at this point if you want to improve from 172. Games should be a given. Not to say they are easy, nor to say that every time you'd get a -0 due to some ridiculous games (snakes/lizards, dinos, all the hits), but you should really be banking this section since there is absolutely a right answer for every question. The nice thing is, -0 on games is very achievable - it's a muscle memory - and once you get there, you can take the mentality of "hey, if I can miss just 1 or even 2 on each of the other sections, I'm getting 174+ easily."

The above aside, something that helped me once I "got" the test was to put a rank beside each question. I used 1-10 in terms of how certain I was of the answer, but you could do any system that makes sense and take 0.3 seconds per question. Then, after the test, go to all of the questions that you ranked low (weren't confident about) and, untimed, redo those questions. At 172, you're talking about 2-6 questions per section that are sort of the dividing line. This works best for LR, not quite as powerful for RC.

Finally, I took a bunch of old PTs that I had done in the distant past, or which I knew I wasn't going to get to, and just did timed sections of the last 7-8 questions from each of the LR sections. (Yes, it was a bitch to do all that copying). The last questions tend to be the hardest, so if you're doing those sections and only missing a few, "normal" sections will seem easy.

HTH