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I think this is pretty common. I went through a similar situation throughout my time studying. I wouldn't recommend taking an entire section before a PT though, as you'll just burn yourself out. Somewhere around 1 LG and 10 LR questions seemed to work for myself and others.

The other thing that is important to remember is to remain consistent in how you answer questions. You should have specific steps in place for how you work through each question type/passage/game type, so that when you're going through a question you won't fall for the trap answers; especially at the beginning of the test when you will be the most nervous/not in a groove. Best of luck and if you find you're scores are still not where they were earlier on, it's never a bad idea to take some time away to reset.

Lurk, what type of sections were the two that you bombed? Were they both the same type?

And more importantly, where were the questions that you missed within the section?

If you're finding that you're missing a handful of questions early in the section, then it may well be that you're simply not awake yet and that you need to do some warm up problems before the exam to prepare yourself.

However, if the questions you're missing are from the later part of the section, it might be a pacing and prioritizing issue. Rather than worrying about practice sets early in the morning, I would take a few minutes before your next preptest to run through your goals and pacing strategies. Go through each section and ask yourself:

1. How many questions am I trying to get right in this section?
2. Where am I most likely to find those questions?
3. How many questions can I afford to guess on?
4. How often will I allow myself to skip a question the first time through and return to it once I've answered all the easier ones?

These are questions that, in my experience, start occurring to people a section or two into the exam. By then, however, you might have already damaged your score. So instead, start with these.

That's just a general suggestion based on the assumption that the sections you're bombing vary and that you aren't just missing the first handful that you attempt. If you give me a little more information, I'd be happy to follow up with some more focused strategies that might help you out.

Either way, it sounds like you're getting some pretty impressive scores as it stands, so congrats on that!

Take care,

Travis
LSAT Expert
http://lsat.magoosh.com

I semi-bombed the first section of the real test. I think the best things you can do to prevent that are:

1) Get used to waking up early. Morning exams are difficult for me because my brain simply can't go from 0 to 60 in the space of an hour, even if it's swimming in coffee. I suggest you get used to rising at least two hours before test time for at least two weeks before gameday (but also get adequate sleep!).

2) Force yourself to do morning PTs. In retrospect, I never simulated test conditions with high accuracy because I'd always do PTs in the afternoon or evening, so I had no idea that taking the test at 8:30 AM would knock points off my score.

3) Warm up on gameday to put yourself in an LSAT mindset. Take two pages of each of LR, LG, and RC to the test center and do them before you go up to your testing room. Choose easy questions so you don't stress out.

In my experience, performance almost always improved as the test went on (i.e., I usually did better on section 4 than section 3, and better on 3 than 2...), which suggests that it takes multiple sections to warm up and reach peak performance. If I were taking the LSAT again, I'd experiment with warming up by doing 25-50 questions instead of the ~15 that I actually did. Of course, the danger here is that you will become fatigued faster, so it's a balancing act.

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