Any hope with a 143 Diagnostic? Forum

[cahwc12]

...

Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book entitled Outliers: The Story of Success. Without giving away too much, the ‘story of success’ is that hard work leads to success. Throughout the book, he argues that by spending 10,000 hours doing something, one can become truly great at it. I certainly think that 10,000 hours of LSAT studying is a tad too much, but if you are not getting the LSAT score that you want in diagnostics, chances are that you have been studying too little. I estimate that including the 80 hours of class time with Testmasters, I studied about 250 hours for the LSAT. Calculating that as working for a scholarship + stipend at Cardozo (which I was awarded), I would have earned about $600/hour. My scholarship from UVA would have given me a return of $360/hour. Watching DVDs of The Wire may have been more fun then, but it would have been much less profitable.

I am probably not the best person to tell you how to study for the LSAT, but I think I am qualified enough to tell you to go study more. Study as if your life depended on it; I guarantee you now that significant parts of your life will be affected by your score.

I couldn't agree more. To crawl your way up from a diagnostic that low, the magic number seems to be somewhere between 300-500 hours of diligent self-study spread out over several months. If you study 2-3 hours per day, 6 days per week from December to June, you're looking at ~400-450hrs of study.

And if your UGPA is high enough such that the limiting factor is your LSAT, going from 143 to 173 will mean something like $350/hr for your studies (assuming you land a full ride). And this doesn't include any tutoring you could do afterwards on the side for anywhere from $50-125/hr. And beyond pecuniary gain, when you've finished doing this, you'll see the world differently than you do now. Having that kind of mastery of logic will help you in everyday life and those skills won't ever be outmoded.

(I went from 141 to 168, PT avg 174--it took me about 6 months.)

[iamgeorgebush]

Going a little off-topic, but...

Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book entitled Outliers: The Story of Success. Without giving away too much, the ‘story of success’ is that hard work leads to success. Throughout the book, he argues that by spending 10,000 hours doing something, one can become truly great at it.

That is actually not the point of Outliers...the point is that most of those successful people who have spent 10,000 hours developing skills were somehow fortunate in having had the opportunity to spend that time on those skills and for the skills to be in demand. For instance, as a teenager and young adult, Bill Gates was fortunate enough to have had a great deal of access to computers at a time when very few people had such access, and then suddenly computers became very lucrative and Gates was there to capitalize on it all. Or for the Wachtell example, Wachtell was (ironically) fortunate enough to have had a decade's worth of M&A experience from a time when no one wanted to do M&A work, and then M&A suddenly became a very lucrative area of law to practice with all the corporate raiders and whatnot and Wachtell was right there ready to do it all.

That being said, don't let that fact dissuade you from putting in a few hundred hours on the LSAT. It's not really important whether you happen to put in those hours by chance or very purposefully put them in, as long as you get the results!

[modernista]

...

Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book entitled Outliers: The Story of Success. Without giving away too much, the ‘story of success’ is that hard work leads to success. Throughout the book, he argues that by spending 10,000 hours doing something, one can become truly great at it. I certainly think that 10,000 hours of LSAT studying is a tad too much, but if you are not getting the LSAT score that you want in diagnostics, chances are that you have been studying too little. I estimate that including the 80 hours of class time with Testmasters, I studied about 250 hours for the LSAT. Calculating that as working for a scholarship + stipend at Cardozo (which I was awarded), I would have earned about $600/hour. My scholarship from UVA would have given me a return of $360/hour. Watching DVDs of The Wire may have been more fun then, but it would have been much less profitable.

I am probably not the best person to tell you how to study for the LSAT, but I think I am qualified enough to tell you to go study more. Study as if your life depended on it; I guarantee you now that significant parts of your life will be affected by your score.

I couldn't agree more. To crawl your way up from a diagnostic that low, the magic number seems to be somewhere between 300-500 hours of diligent self-study spread out over several months. If you study 2-3 hours per day, 6 days per week from December to June, you're looking at ~400-450hrs of study.

And if your UGPA is high enough such that the limiting factor is your LSAT, going from 143 to 173 will mean something like $350/hr for your studies (assuming you land a full ride). And this doesn't include any tutoring you could do afterwards on the side for anywhere from $50-125/hr. And beyond pecuniary gain, when you've finished doing this, you'll see the world differently than you do now. Having that kind of mastery of logic will help you in everyday life and those skills won't ever be outmoded.

(I went from 141 to 168, PT avg 174--it took me about 6 months.)

This is the best thing I've heard all day and people say money doesn't talk...

[modernista]

Bump.

[10052014]

.

[modernista]

I've started studying and it's extremely laborious and a huge time suck. I'm reading the LG Bible, making notes in the margins, and marking it up but I find that itself takes up about three hours a night. I am learning but it's a very slow-going process. Does anyone have any tips to make it go faster? Am I going about it the wrong way?

[Jeffort]

I've started studying and it's extremely laborious and a huge time suck. I'm reading the LG Bible, making notes in the margins, and marking it up but I find that itself takes up about three hours a night. I am learning but it's a very slow-going process. Does anyone have any tips to make it go faster? Am I going about it the wrong way?

Going through the prep books the first time to read about all the basics and understand them takes a significant amount of study time. No way around that unless you already understand what is being discussed in the chapters, but if that was the case you wouldn't need to read the books.

It's only been less than two weeks since you started the LGB and posted about how dry you found the material. Given the limited amount of time per day you said you have available for LSAT prep due to work, I wouldn't expect you to have made it super far through the book yet since even just doing the drills and practice games for each chapter takes a lot of time.

How much progress do you make through the book in each three hour study session? If you are spending a lot of your study time on highlighting and note taking instead of learning, understanding and applying the information to the sample questions and drills, then you could cut down on getting fancy with you highlighting & note taking system so it doesn't slow down the actual learning. Other than that, you should take as much time per chapter and set of practice questions as it takes to really understand what is going on so that you learn as you go. Racing ahead just for the sake of getting through the materials faster cuz you get impatient is a solid way to prep badly that will not lead to much improvement.

You really do need to put in as much time as it takes you to really understand the stuff you read and practice the stuff a lot in order to get good at applying everything. Again, it IS a very slow laborious process. You WILL have to spend HUNDREDS of hours doing this for several months or more if you want to improve your score into the 160s-170s range. There is no shortcut to putting in the time and work, it is very hard and takes a LONG TIME to significantly improve your score. There is a reason that, even though it is possible for people starting in the 140s/150s to prep themselves into the mid/high 160s-170s, VERY FEW people EVER actually do it! Most people give up early due to the workload once they realize how much of their lifestyle they actually have to give up and how grueling LSAT prep work can be.

Please re-read my long post on the previous page about what is required to improve your score and reflect back on it now that you are about two weeks in. Getting impatient at this early point does not bode well for your chances of working hard and long enough to reach your goal. Seriously, you have MONTHS of this ahead if you are really determined to at least hit 160+ due to your limited hours a week for LSAT prep. Getting frustrated about slow progress after only several three hour study sessions over the last two weeks shows that, despite what everyone on the forum has already told you about what it takes to improve from 140s/150s to 160s/170s, you still have unrealistic expectations of what YOU yourself will actually have to put in to significantly improve your score and are still holding out false hope that you will be an exception to the rule. There is no easy way to significantly improve or speed up your improvement rate.

Nobody in this thread was exaggerating about a long time meaning like 20-30+ study hours a week continuously for many MONTHS. Again, please re-read my long post on the previous page and think very seriously about it this time, everything I said does apply to you, there is no shortcut to serious LSAT score improvement. If you are not dedicated enough to invest the enormous amount of prep time needed, you will not reach anywhere near your target range no matter how quickly you want it to happen or how many study shortcuts you look for. Sorry for the harsh reality alert again. Strap yourself in for a long ride with not much/no free time for a while if you really want a solid LSAT score. If you want a social life and free time for fun or whatever, change your target score to something realistically obtainable with much less prep and settle for a crappy law school. You can't have it both ways.

[IgosduIkana]

When I took my first cold diagnostic, I got a 138 with a -18 Logic Games, essentially getting only the first question correct in each game. I also started off very low in RC, and with about a -14.

Yesterday I took a PT and got a 158, so large gains are certainly possible. I'm looking to add another 10 points to my score to get into the lower- end of the T14 (Cornell, GULC, NW, ect) by December and apply this cycle. I'm not sure if that will happen, but I've come so far and I think that picking up on a few LR patterns will help me get there. Once on a PT I got a -9 LR combined and got a 160 on that PT, so I'm really about 6-8 points away.

For RC you will need to really focus on the structure of the passage and not getting caught up on dumb extra details. I used MLSAT RC and the LSAT trainer for this, it helped me go down from a -15 to a -6 to -8 that I'm getting now. I'm considering signing up for 7Sage or Velocity to get ready for December and get me over this last hurdle. My main improvement needs to be on LG timing, LR accuracy, and RC in general. Any suggestions? and sorry for the rant.

But to the OP large gains are certainly possible. You just need to work hard and consistently and another thing, you need to really focus on drilling by question type for both LR and LG, because you'll pick up on patterns very quickly and soon realize that all Logic Games are essentially the same.

My story is near-identical. Keep grinding. Also, this is likely not going to happen in December, wait until February, June, or October...just later.

[iamgeorgebush]

If you don't like studying for the LSAT at least on some level, you're going to just love being an attorney...

[modernista]

I've started studying and it's extremely laborious and a huge time suck. I'm reading the LG Bible, making notes in the margins, and marking it up but I find that itself takes up about three hours a night. I am learning but it's a very slow-going process. Does anyone have any tips to make it go faster? Am I going about it the wrong way?

Going through the prep books the first time to read about all the basics and understand them takes a significant amount of study time. No way around that unless you already understand what is being discussed in the chapters, but if that was the case you wouldn't need to read the books.

It's only been less than two weeks since you started the LGB and posted about how dry you found the material. Given the limited amount of time per day you said you have available for LSAT prep due to work, I wouldn't expect you to have made it super far through the book yet since even just doing the drills and practice games for each chapter takes a lot of time.

How much progress do you make through the book in each three hour study session? If you are spending a lot of your study time on highlighting and note taking instead of learning, understanding and applying the information to the sample questions and drills, then you could cut down on getting fancy with you highlighting & note taking system so it doesn't slow down the actual learning. Other than that, you should take as much time per chapter and set of practice questions as it takes to really understand what is going on so that you learn as you go. Racing ahead just for the sake of getting through the materials faster cuz you get impatient is a solid way to prep badly that will not lead to much improvement.

You really do need to put in as much time as it takes you to really understand the stuff you read and practice the stuff a lot in order to get good at applying everything. Again, it IS a very slow laborious process. You WILL have to spend HUNDREDS of hours doing this for several months or more if you want to improve your score into the 160s-170s range. There is no shortcut to putting in the time and work, it is very hard and takes a LONG TIME to significantly improve your score. There is a reason that, even though it is possible for people starting in the 140s/150s to prep themselves into the mid/high 160s-170s, VERY FEW people EVER actually do it! Most people give up early due to the workload once they realize how much of their lifestyle they actually have to give up and how grueling LSAT prep work can be.

Please re-read my long post on the previous page about what is required to improve your score and reflect back on it now that you are about two weeks in. Getting impatient at this early point does not bode well for your chances of working hard and long enough to reach your goal. Seriously, you have MONTHS of this ahead if you are really determined to at least hit 160+ due to your limited hours a week for LSAT prep. Getting frustrated about slow progress after only several three hour study sessions over the last two weeks shows that, despite what everyone on the forum has already told you about what it takes to improve from 140s/150s to 160s/170s, you still have unrealistic expectations of what YOU yourself will actually have to put in to significantly improve your score and are still holding out false hope that you will be an exception to the rule. There is no easy way to significantly improve or speed up your improvement rate.

Nobody in this thread was exaggerating about a long time meaning like 20-30+ study hours a week continuously for many MONTHS. Again, please re-read my long post on the previous page and think very seriously about it this time, everything I said does apply to you, there is no shortcut to serious LSAT score improvement. If you are not dedicated enough to invest the enormous amount of prep time needed, you will not reach anywhere near your target range no matter how quickly you want it to happen or how many study shortcuts you look for. Sorry for the harsh reality alert again. Strap yourself in for a long ride with not much/no free time for a while if you really want a solid LSAT score. If you want a social life and free time for fun or whatever, change your target score to something realistically obtainable with much less prep and settle for a crappy law school. You can't have it both ways.

Roger that. I guess what I'm saying is that I'm the visual type of learner who learns best by writing things down and doing the problem sets on my own.

[Dr.Zer0]

Tag cuz this thread is full of motivational posts.