Top Law Schools

How many times a week do you study?
How many hours a day do you guys spend studying?
Do you study all at one sit or break it up in 2 or 3 times a day?
How much time do you spend on each section?
How much time do you spend drilling and reviewing?
Do you do LR every time you study?

The reason I am asking all these questions is because I try to study 4 to 5 days a week. But I can't seem to go 6 hours at a time. I feel like I have to break it up in 2 or 3 session of 2 hrs. Which is not a good idea cause the exam is long than that.

Monday
10 to 1 RC (only 3 or 4 passage with reviewing)
3 to 5 LG (max 4 games with reviewing)
8 to 11 LG (this at work so it's not consistent)

I have been doing this for about 1 week because I was spending way too much time on LR and not enough at RC and LG. Actually I haven't looked at RC in 3 months so I had to get back on the RC horse.

I will be posting this on the Oct thread also. I appreciate all the help and input in advance guys.

God bless

meandme wrote:How many times a week do you study?
How many hours a day do you guys spend studying?
Do you study all at one sit or break it up in 2 or 3 times a day?
How much time do you spend on each section?
How much time do you spend drilling and reviewing?
Do you do LR every time you study?

The reason I am asking all these questions is because I try to study 4 to 5 days a week. But I can't seem to go 6 hours at a time. I feel like I have to break it up in 2 or 3 session of 2 hrs. Which is not a good idea cause the exam is long than that.

Monday
10 to 1 RC (only 3 or 4 passage with reviewing)
3 to 5 LG (max 4 games with reviewing)
8 to 11 LG (this at work so it's not consistent)

I have been doing this for about 1 week because I was spending way too much time on LR and not enough at RC and LG. Actually I haven't looked at RC in 3 months so I had to get back on the RC horse.

I will be posting this on the Oct thread also. I appreciate all the help and input in advance guys.

God bless

I study about 5-6 days a week for anywhere from 3 to 6 hours. I normally try to knock it out at once, but unless I'm PTing I permit interruptions. As far as each section, right now I'm focusing mainly on LR, which has shown huge benefits, while drilling a section of RC and LG every day to keep sharp in those areas. After I'm done with LR, I'm doing the same with RC (already did that with LG) and then I'll do totally mixed review for the last month before the test, which will basically be two to three PTs a week with heavy review.

I think it's important to keep drilling the sections you're not currently focused on just to keep you sharp in those areas while you're doing focused review in other areas. I also personally think you should spend at least as much time reviewing the PTs you took as it took you to take the PT, if not more (depending on your confidence level with the sections). If you're breezing through LG and getting -0s with 12 minutes left, you probably don't need much LG review, but if you're finishing a section with less than a minute left, identify the problems/problem types that are slowing you down and determine *why* they are slowing you down.

At the end of the day, I don't think there is one right way to study. What I do works for me, but your mileage may vary. That being said, don't confuse studying hard for studying smart. You can drill all day, or take a PT every day, but if you don't assess and seek to improve, you're just wasting paper and graphite.

When you say "drill RC" what does that entail? Is it just going through passages untimed or does it mean a whole section. Any explanation would be helpful, also as it pertains to LR as well. For example, do you drill by type or by section? I am a retaker really looking to improve from my 164 that I am currently PT'ing at.

Thanks for the help.

meandme wrote:How many times a week do you study?
How many hours a day do you guys spend studying?
Do you study all at one sit or break it up in 2 or 3 times a day?
How much time do you spend on each section?
How much time do you spend drilling and reviewing?
Do you do LR every time you study?

The reason I am asking all these questions is because I try to study 4 to 5 days a week. But I can't seem to go 6 hours at a time. I feel like I have to break it up in 2 or 3 session of 2 hrs. Which is not a good idea cause the exam is long than that.

Monday
10 to 1 RC (only 3 or 4 passage with reviewing)
3 to 5 LG (max 4 games with reviewing)
8 to 11 LG (this at work so it's not consistent)

I have been doing this for about 1 week because I was spending way too much time on LR and not enough at RC and LG. Actually I haven't looked at RC in 3 months so I had to get back on the RC horse.

I will be posting this on the Oct thread also. I appreciate all the help and input in advance guys.

God bless

I study every day, no exception.

Weekly, I manage to reach between 30 and 35 hours, which is roughly 5 hours a day. Some weeks are better than others, yet I have been unable to go over 35 hours (until this week I hope). I like to do timed drills right after I wake up while I am drinking coffee (LG is the easiest, RC is the hardest). This usually wakes me up and allows me to review old PTs or warm up for taking a PT within 2 or 3 hours after I wake up (which I expect to be similar to how it will be on test-day). If its not a PT day, I'll drill or review in 1 hour or 1.5 hour blocks. If it is PT day, I will take an hour break after morning drills, then PT. I'll then take a nice break and review up to 1/2 that PT in the evening.

I do not study consistently for 5 hours. I think that it is inefficient and should only be done if you are working on improving stamina. The longer I study in one sitting, the more I lose focus, which ultimately leads to answering and reviewing questions more slowly. The only exception to this, I find, is when I study under timed conditions. So if you study for longer than 2 hours at a time, my recommendation would be to do it under timed conditions to minimize a loss in efficiency. As far as reviewing, I don't know if reviewing under timed conditions would be smart; in that case, I'd say just review in smaller blocks. To be fair, everyone is different, but this is what I have come to learn about myself.

The time I devote to each section depends on 2 factors: 1) how poorly I have been doing on that section, and 2) how much material I have to study that section. I do worse on RC than LR, but I study more LR because I have exhausted all of my old RC material. So, redoing old RC passages (which I have done at least 2 times already) doesn't feel very helpful. This doesn't mean that redoing old RC passages is useless, I just get more out of studying LR. Since I still need a bit of work on LR, I feel like the neglect is justified. On the other hand, I usually get between -0 and -3 on LG, so I only occasionally (once every other week maybe) devote a day to intensely drill games to curb any loss from lack of practice.

Other than PTing, I spend the rest of the time reviewing and drilling. I would say 30% PT, 20% drill, 50% review. Reviewing takes so much time because I don't review timed, and therefore lose focus a lot. I'm trying to devote more time to drilling, however, and perhaps less time to reviewing. Or just more time overall.

I don't do LR every time I study. If I am drilling a specific section for a day, then I'll only do that section. If that section gets boring, I'll probably more quickly do LG than LR. LG is easy for me to do in a groggy state; LR is very hard, frustrating, and easy to get distracted from.

A disclaimer: I'm very dissatisfied with my results and am currently reworking my study approach. I think that any untimed studying I do is inefficient, and so I am trying to do strictly timed studying. I normally review every answer choice of every question, right or wrong. This helped me recognize why answer choices are wrong or right; however, since it is untimed studying, I lose focus and it ends up being extremely time consuming. If my PT review takes 5 hours, I don't want to feel satisfied that I've already met my 5 hour quota for the day; I realize that I should still do some drilling. Maybe I could assign a time value of 3 hours to a PT review so that I still force myself to get 2 hours of drilling in. My point is, I don't think you should worry as much about how long you study each day, but worry more about how qualitatively you study.

I work full time at a demanding job, which often necessitates that I work late (or very early in the morning) in order to meet with colleagues in our company's offices in Europe or Asia, so I put in roughly 60 hours a week at my job. Still, I manage to get in at least 3 hours a day during the week, Monday through Friday. Due to my work schedule, I need to maximize the time I spend studying on the weekends, so I'll typically do long 10-12 hour sessions on the weekends. Each of these long weekend sessions is broken down into 3-hour sprints, with about a 1 hour break in between each sprint.

During the week (M-F) I work on drilling individual sections. I try to spread these evenly across the week, so that I do combinations of two sections on each day (using a 3-3-4 distribution). The section that I work 4 days a week is the one that I feel that I need to spend the most time on during that week. I try to put in an hour of review following these sections and then do some drilling on particular types of passages/questions/games with whatever time remains. Earlier in my preparation, I focused more heavily on drilling individual questions or game types.

On the weekends, I try to do one PT on Saturday and one PT on Sunday. One of the 3-hour sprints is dedicated to reviewing the PT that I did earlier that day, and if I do a third sprint, it resembles my M-F activity, but focuses on an area that was identified as a weekness on that day's PT. (The results from these weekend PTs inform my selection of sections and question types that I will drill during the following week.)

In practice, I'm not always able to stick to my schedule, but I try pretty damn hard. If I feel too tired to focus or burned out, I take the day off from studying with the goal of hitting it hard the next day.

I envy those on this board who are able to spend more time during the week sleeping and/or studying for this test than what I'm able to do. HTH.

Cerebro, sometimes I think I would be better off having a job while studying for the LSAT. There seems to be something about time constraints that makes me focused and bust ass. Whereas having all the time in the world to study, the moment I feel a little fatigued, I start thinking that "I should rest and pick this back up when I feel more energetic" which is usually dooming. This is my theory, at least. Watch me go get a job and then never study.

GGforLSAT wrote:Cerebro, sometimes I think I would be better off having a job while studying for the LSAT. There seems to be something about time constraints that makes me focused and bust ass. Whereas having all the time in the world to study, the moment I feel a little fatigued, I start thinking that "I should rest and pick this back up when I feel more energetic" which is usually dooming. This is my theory, at least. Watch me go get a job and then never study.

If you don't need to make money, I highly, highly recommend that you do some volunteer work to remind yourself there is life outside of the LSAT and law school.

ilovelawtays wrote:

GGforLSAT wrote:Cerebro, sometimes I think I would be better off having a job while studying for the LSAT. There seems to be something about time constraints that makes me focused and bust ass. Whereas having all the time in the world to study, the moment I feel a little fatigued, I start thinking that "I should rest and pick this back up when I feel more energetic" which is usually dooming. This is my theory, at least. Watch me go get a job and then never study.

If you don't need to make money, I highly, highly recommend that you do some volunteer work to remind yourself there is life outside of the LSAT and law school.

I would but I already locked myself in my room and threw away the key months ago!! But I think that is a great recommendation. Getting a part time job would be nice as well since I would be able to live less frugally.

Eh... 4 days a week, 2 hours per day? I have a job + summer school + I've been studying since May and won't take the test until December so I'm afraid of burning through all my material before it's optimal to do so. Oddly enough, my biggest gains (from the PTs I've taken and individual sections) have come during this most recent month when I've studied the least, the most casually, than when I was studying all day every day like in the first few months.

GGforLSAT wrote:

ilovelawtays wrote:

GGforLSAT wrote:Cerebro, sometimes I think I would be better off having a job while studying for the LSAT. There seems to be something about time constraints that makes me focused and bust ass. Whereas having all the time in the world to study, the moment I feel a little fatigued, I start thinking that "I should rest and pick this back up when I feel more energetic" which is usually dooming. This is my theory, at least. Watch me go get a job and then never study.

If you don't need to make money, I highly, highly recommend that you do some volunteer work to remind yourself there is life outside of the LSAT and law school.

I would but I already locked myself in my room and threw away the key months ago!! But I think that is a great recommendation. Getting a part time job would be nice as well since I would be able to live less frugally.

You have to start holding yourself to a schedule, then. No one is going to look over your shoulder in law school to make sure you're on task. Develop time management now; you'll be leaps and bounds ahead of those that "study" for 14 hours a day.