20 to 25 Forum

[splittermcsplit88]

I'm constantly getting 20/25 on LR sections. How do you go from getting 20 to 23+ consistently? What kind of effort is required?

[Blueprint Mithun]

I'm constantly getting 20/25 on LR sections. How do you go from getting 20 to 23+ consistently? What kind of effort is required?

Here are two things that usually keep people from getting those last five points:

1) Getting the hardest LR questions right.

You may have read somewhere that Logical Reasoning questions get more difficult as you get further along in a section. This is generally true. The first 10 all tend to fall in within easy/medium difficulty, and it gets progressively more difficult from there on. Harder questions might not pull any new tricks on you, but they tend to be more dense, have more tempting wrong answers, etc.

Since the hard questions almost inevitably take more time than easy ones, a good strategy is to work through the early questions at a faster pace so you'll have more time later on. At Blueprint, we encourage students to aim to get 10 questions done in the first ten minutes. If you can pull that off, you're in a good place. The tricky thing is to do this without rushing the easy questions and making silly mistakes, since all questions are worth the same.

If you want to just practice more difficult questions, take some old or even new LR sections (if you have plenty of unused ones) and work through questions 15 - 25. You can also do 10 -25 if you prefer. It's definitely a bit intimidating, but if you work through these while timing yourself, you'll get better at handling longer, more complicated questions. They'll seem less scary to you on full sections, and the easy questions will become a breeze.

2) Consistently wrong answers on certain question types

When you review LR, do you find that there are certain question types that you're consistently getting wrong? Maybe you're always missing one or two Parallel, or Necessary Assumption, or Weaken questions. Whatever q.type it is, if you can find a weakness, then you've found a path towards improvement. Review the strategies for those q.types and drill them! Students are often reluctant to do this, because they know there's a q.type or two that they hate and that gets them nervous. But until you overcome that weakness, it's always going to hurt your score and your confidence.

So yeah, it takes a bit of effort. Improving your LSAT score gets exponentially harder the higher up you go, since there's less room for mistakes, but that doesn't mean it's not doable or practical without a good study plan!

Hope that helps. If not, I might be able to help if you're a bit more specific about what you're struggling with.