Stuck at 174-175 / General LSAT advice Forum

[Asterismos]

Before I decided to sign up for the LSATs, I took a full length 2007 exam (I forget which PT) just to do a diagnostic; I took them under timed conditions, and scored a 168.

I've gone through roughly two of the preptest books (one was the super early ones - before #50 & then went through the most recent compilation one (vol. 5, with preptests 62-71, I think), and I'm going through the compilation one with preptests 52-61 at the moment. To be quite honest, I didn't really read any of the 'bibles' that are really popular, even though I did purchase a Logic Games one since that was the only one that I'd missed a lot on my diagnostic for.

I honestly kept doing LG for a lot of the PTs, watched the full length video tutorials, and since then I've found that for every LG section I've solved afterwards I've been able to adapt pretty well.

Right now I'm scoring in the 174-175 range repeatedly, without fail, for the past 15 PTs. (To be honest, I shot up from a 168 range to a 172/173 range after the first few PT's after I had gotten down a lot of the LG's, and I've basically just been floating around the mid 170's). I miss around 1-2 for each Logical Reasoning section, almost always exactly two (never more, occasionally, rarely less) at the LG, and around 3 for the reading comprehension. A lot of times I go back and check it, and the LG misses are always mistakes I made due to my time rush, but the LR and RC are rather legitimate misses.

I am going back and reviewing each question I missed and looking up how I should have solved them / reasoned them out vs. how I actually solved them, but I just wanted to know if anyone else felt as though they kind of hit their 'glass ceiling' score-wise, so to speak???

(But also a note: 1. I've taken every PT I've ever practiced with under timed conditions, and 2. this is all within the span of less than a month. I ended up signing up for the December LSAT two months ago, and wasn't able to study until around the second week of Nov. because of unexpected things popping up.)

So on that note-

1. Is this normal? I'm honestly going through this kind of blind and just figuring out what study methods work best for me, and I'm not sure if I just don't have enough practice under my belt to overcome the 174-175 hurdle I've seem to hit, and I'm not sure if its a) just a normal place where everyone gets a bit stagnant or b) my personal thing where I just don't have enough practice

And does anyone have any studying advice on how I'm supposed to overcome the stagnancy?

2. Is there anyone who would suggest that I just cancel taking the Dec. test at this point? I have less than two weeks to prepare now, and I ideally want to score around a 177 on the actual exam. I have heard a lot that your actual score drops on test day by a couple of points, and so I thought that in order to feel confident that I could get a 177, I have to be scoring perfect 180's while practicing - which I clearly haven't reached.

3. On the subject of dropping a few points on actual test day, is this typically because of stressed time conditions? I'm actually a bit odd and I've almost always done better on actual test/exam days than on practice, etc, since I'm just kind of a good at taking tests / dealing with test environments, and I'm not sure how seriously I should expect to drop in terms of points on the actual day.

/ Sorry for the overload of qs, please just reply if you have an answer to even part of one of them, hahaha. I just had a lot of random qs floating around without anyone to reference before deciding to just throw them all up here.

[RZ5646]

You probably just need to do more PTs. Pretty much the best thing anyone can do to improve their score is to practice more. What are you getting on blind review / untimed PTs? In my opinion, if you aren't consistently getting 178+ untimed, then you would still benefit from drilling fundamentals.

The test day drop is very real and you should expect it. Anything can happen on test day (someone in the October group with a low 170s PT average miraculously got a 179), but you can put your money on scoring a couple points lower than your practice average.