The Official September 2014 Study Group Forum

[Comstock]

Thanks for all the replies! I guess its a mute point in the sense that if it is harder I will just need to adapt, but glad to here there isn't a huge pragmatic shift in the test fundamentals

[Learn_Live_Hope]

I did do PT70's RC for funsies yesterday and I was able to get it done with a near-perfect degree of accuracy but I was sitting at around 38:00 minutes in time I believe. While one PT is hardly indicative of the new stuff, was PT70 easier than usual? I feel like it really wasn't different from the RC I've been working with (early EARLY PTs)

All I want to do is finish RC on time and get a -4 or better every time (of course, once I get to that goal I am invariably going to want a -0).

Along this line, I was wondering if anyone who has done the old PTs (1-40) and the newer ones (40+) would be able to chime in on if any of the sections changed a lot. For example, is LG/LR/RC considered a lot easier on the older PTs? Just wondering for selfish reasons as I'm now moving on to more modern PTs (PT 44 Tomorrow!) after doing pretty well on the 1-40 range and hope I'm not in for a major shock

This is one of the few areas where TLS is bad, in opinion.

Someone asks about if there's a huge difference in the old PTs and new PTs, someone says RC is a little harder, someone says games are a little easier (which after June 2014 I'm not even sure that's correct but anyhow), this "consensus" of three posters is taken as fact, someone else asks a month later and someone (in a fashion much too dogmatic) states that games are easier and RC is harder, this cycle repeats, repeats, and repeats, people think it so when they take a new PT they subconsciously think to themselves that games are a little easier and RC is a little harder, then they tell someone else that when they ask, repeat, repeat.

The differences between old and new LSATs is extremely overblown on TLS in my opinion. Although there are differences.

Extremely well said.

[WaltGrace83]

It is true though that the more recent LSATs (65 and on I do believe) have that lego section involving spacial reasoning. Just remember to bring your own set on game day!

EDIT: Does anyone know where we can pick up the Cambridge lego set? I can't find the link.

[kbrizz]

Somedays, you sit down to study and go -4 on three problems and think, maybe it's just not gonna happen today...

[bound]

So glad you're here with me

Hi! I didn't realize you were retaking.

I just started studying. I'm trying to get a feel for if it's worth it.

[BlackCanary]

So glad you're here with me

Hi! I didn't realize you were retaking.

I just started studying. I'm trying to get a feel for if it's worth it.

Your score was already really good, it might be tough, but it's probably doable.

[flash21]

anyone want to be study partners? Looking for someone high 150s skill or more and also pretty motivated

[longhorn65]

Man working 8 hours, studying 3-4 hours a day, and trying to find time to still lead a semi-healthy life (i.e working out and eating healthy) is much harder than i thought going in to this. Luckily my boss is awesome and a lawyer and can relate to the struggle otherwise I would have been canned for being over 20 min. late! How do you all balance everything? Hopefully someone has some tips for me somewhere out there!

[gnomgnomuch]

Drilling Principle (Identify) questions today, before I blind review PT 40.

gave myself 30 minutes for the first 40 questions and went 37/40.

[some1uknown]

Man working 8 hours, studying 3-4 hours a day, and trying to find time to still lead a semi-healthy life (i.e working out and eating healthy) is much harder than i thought going in to this. Luckily my boss is awesome and a lawyer and can relate to the struggle otherwise I would have been canned for being over 20 min. late! How do you all balance everything? Hopefully someone has some tips for me somewhere out there!

I workout on the weekends to compensate as for eating healthy, i'm stuck on that too

[gnomgnomuch]

Man working 8 hours, studying 3-4 hours a day, and trying to find time to still lead a semi-healthy life (i.e working out and eating healthy) is much harder than i thought going in to this. Luckily my boss is awesome and a lawyer and can relate to the struggle otherwise I would have been canned for being over 20 min. late! How do you all balance everything? Hopefully someone has some tips for me somewhere out there!

I play an hour and a half of basketball on Tue/Thur. Work out for about an hour on Sunday. Before bed i do a 10 minute ab workout. Plus, i add up every question i get wrong during the days LSAT prep, multiply that number by 5 and do that many push ups. Eating healthy is super tough, but i try eating salads, and i cut myself off for everything but fruits after 6:00PM. Thankfully, i haven't gained any weight, but my bench has gone down by like 40 pounds and I've lost a lot of speed. =/

[Frozinite]

Hey folks, just wanted to check in here, I posted a couple comments a few pages back but wanted to give a more formal introduction.

I took the test last year (October) and am a 0L (rising 1L?) now and feel like I did decently well. I wrote a guide post earlier this year (check my posts, not linking here for self-promotion reasons), and I have some free time before school starts (and I'm leaving my job in about 2 weeks, so I'll have even more free time). I really like teaching/helping/tutoring, so I'll be on this thread ready to answer any questions if people have. Or I'll take PMs too.

Good luck on studying and the test everyone!

[dowu]

Alright. I'm here as well. Let me formally introduce myself. My name is dowu. I took the lsat in June 2012 (zones). I scored a 160. I was PTing in the low 160s. I am afraid I might not be able to improve. I studied pretty diligently for about 4-5 months. My initial diag was (iirc) a 144. A 16 point jump seems like a lot. My GPA is crappy (not below a 3.0). I need a 165 + to make the schools I want to go to worth it. I'm basically going to start from scratch and relearn a lot of stuff. It's been two years since I've looked at lsat. Quite frankly I'm worried I won't score higher but I'm willing to put in the work from here on out to try. I've already read a few chapters of the blue print logic games book. I'm about to tackle formal logic (should be a piece of cake - one of my majors was philosophy).

My strongest section was logic games. I missed around 4 on the test. I'm decent at LR, missing around 5 to 7 per section. I got CRUSHED by reading comp (mostly due to rushing and not having a clear method). Anyway, here I am. Just trying to stay motivated and gear up for a retake in September or December. Thank you for reading this. Any recommendations for a retake are welcome.

[Louis1127]

Welcome Dowu.

Dowu try spending more time up front with the passages. I find when I do this I don't stumble through the questions as badly as when I try and race through them like speedy gonzales. Also when I have to look back, it takes me a very small amount of time to find what I am looking for, and the stuff around that excerpt (which is quite frequently used as part of the credited response) comes back to me pretty quickly, as opposed to when I rush through the passage and go back and look at a specific line or group of lines and don't remember what was before or after that in the passage.

And thanks Frozinite! I'll be sending a couple questions your way for sure.

edit: post count 420 hells yea

[bound]

Alright. I'm here as well. Let me formally introduce myself. My name is dowu. I took the lsat in June 2012 (zones). I scored a 160. I was PTing in the low 160s. I am afraid I might not be able to improve. I studied pretty diligently for about 4-5 months. My initial diag was (iirc) a 144. A 16 point jump seems like a lot. My GPA is crappy (not below a 3.0). I need a 165 + to make the schools I want to go to worth it. I'm basically going to start from scratch and relearn a lot of stuff. It's been two years since I've looked at lsat. Quite frankly I'm worried I won't score higher but I'm willing to put in the work from here on out to try. I've already read a few chapters of the blue print logic games book. I'm about to tackle formal logic (should be a piece of cake - one of my majors was philosophy).

My strongest section was logic games. I missed around 4 on the test. I'm decent at LR, missing around 5 to 7 per section. I got CRUSHED by reading comp (mostly due to rushing and not having a clear method). Anyway, here I am. Just trying to stay motivated and gear up for a retake in September or December. Thank you for reading this. Any recommendations for a retake are welcome.

My life in a nutshell. Pretty sure every point I missed in Dec 13 was RC.

[longhorn65]

Man working 8 hours, studying 3-4 hours a day, and trying to find time to still lead a semi-healthy life (i.e working out and eating healthy) is much harder than i thought going in to this. Luckily my boss is awesome and a lawyer and can relate to the struggle otherwise I would have been canned for being over 20 min. late! How do you all balance everything? Hopefully someone has some tips for me somewhere out there!

I play an hour and a half of basketball on Tue/Thur. Work out for about an hour on Sunday. Before bed i do a 10 minute ab workout. Plus, i add up every question i get wrong during the days LSAT prep, multiply that number by 5 and do that many push ups. Eating healthy is super tough, but i try eating salads, and i cut myself off for everything but fruits after 6:00PM. Thankfully, i haven't gained any weight, but my bench has gone down by like 40 pounds and I've lost a lot of speed. =/

Me to man ive been a religious lifter for years now but its slowly becoming less and less ha im down to like an 80min a day I enjoy it but i guess the is the way until the lsat

[mornincounselor]

Post removed.

[gnomgnomuch]

Man working 8 hours, studying 3-4 hours a day, and trying to find time to still lead a semi-healthy life (i.e working out and eating healthy) is much harder than i thought going in to this. Luckily my boss is awesome and a lawyer and can relate to the struggle otherwise I would have been canned for being over 20 min. late! How do you all balance everything? Hopefully someone has some tips for me somewhere out there!

I play an hour and a half of basketball on Tue/Thur. Work out for about an hour on Sunday. Before bed i do a 10 minute ab workout. Plus, i add up every question i get wrong during the days LSAT prep, multiply that number by 5 and do that many push ups. Eating healthy is super tough, but i try eating salads, and i cut myself off for everything but fruits after 6:00PM. Thankfully, i haven't gained any weight, but my bench has gone down by like 40 pounds and I've lost a lot of speed. =/

Me to man ive been a religious lifter for years now but its slowly becoming less and less ha im down to like an 80min a day I enjoy it but i guess the is the way until the lsat

I'm 5 ft 7, and i weigh 155. I bench(ed) 250 at my highest point...which was right before i started to study for the LSAT. I cant wait for the LSAT to be over, just so i can hit the gym again.

[ilikebaseball]

speaking of gym, i couldnt find the workout thread, but I just took a new pre workout today at noon and im still shaking cuz of it. I have a private tutoring sesh at 3 30. this will be interesting.

[Comstock]

Hit up PT 44 Today.

Score: 168 (88/100)

Breakdown:
RC: 23/27 (-4)
LR 23/25 (-2)
LG 21/22 (-1)
LR (21/26 (-5)

Clearly botched the 2nd LR and if I didn't could have easily broken 170, but I realize my issue is timing so it should be correctable with some practice (got to the last 6 questions with about 5 minutes left). I've had this issue before so I will be working on full 35 minute sections along with specific question drilling to correct this.

RC, despite being the second worst, I was fairly happy with since the science passage in this was very dense and many questions I was far from sure on. Did miss two questions on the last passage that I probably should have had but sort of ran out of time at the end since the science passage took me about 11 minutes to get through.

LG, stupid mistake and correctable.

Overall I'm pretty happy even though its a drop from my last PT. The raw score is decent and the curve on this (-10) kept me down a bit in keeping me from breaking 170. Still mostly correctable issues and I see my faults so a decent day.

[dowu]

Man working 8 hours, studying 3-4 hours a day, and trying to find time to still lead a semi-healthy life (i.e working out and eating healthy) is much harder than i thought going in to this. Luckily my boss is awesome and a lawyer and can relate to the struggle otherwise I would have been canned for being over 20 min. late! How do you all balance everything? Hopefully someone has some tips for me somewhere out there!

I play an hour and a half of basketball on Tue/Thur. Work out for about an hour on Sunday. Before bed i do a 10 minute ab workout. Plus, i add up every question i get wrong during the days LSAT prep, multiply that number by 5 and do that many push ups. Eating healthy is super tough, but i try eating salads, and i cut myself off for everything but fruits after 6:00PM. Thankfully, i haven't gained any weight, but my bench has gone down by like 40 pounds and I've lost a lot of speed. =/

Me to man ive been a religious lifter for years now but its slowly becoming less and less ha im down to like an 80min a day I enjoy it but i guess the is the way until the lsat

I'm 5 ft 7, and i weigh 155. I bench(ed) 250 at my highest point...which was right before i started to study for the LSAT. I cant wait for the LSAT to be over, just so i can hit the gym again.

Don't let the lsat get in your way of lifting. You can do an entire workout in 45 minutes if you tried.

[Calbears123]

How's everyone prep going? Going to work some LG chapters in the trainer tonight. PT 43 hopefully at 10 in the morning so I can get it over with. I'm going to have to rip the answer sheet out of the Cambridge PT packets because obviously I don't have the self discipline not to check answers mid test

[cavalier2015]

my first full length PT after about 1.5 months of drilling.

PT45
160
LR: -13
RC: -9
LG: -3

RC were really dumb mistakes, need to make sure this doesn't repeat. and as for LR, yikes! back to the drawing boards, atleast we still have time!

[gnomgnomuch]

Don't let the lsat get in your way of lifting. You can do an entire workout in 45 minutes if you tried.[/quote]


If only it was only the LSAT. I work, Mon/Tue/Thur/Fri/Sun. Saturdays and Wednesdays are solely LSAT days. I try getting 3-4 hours on tue/thur and like 1-2 hours on Mon/Fri. I also have classes starting up the 21st.

[gnomgnomuch]

=(

Super disappointing. After an amazing start to Principle (Identify) questions, i ended up going 78/96 on the packet. I made TEN (10!) mistakes on LVL 4 questions, which means i went only 15/25 or a 60% on the hardest questions.

I need to re-read the sections on Principle questions in the trainer.