The Official September 2016 Study Group - WAKE ME UP WHEN SEPTEMBER ENDS Forum

[proteinshake]

Drilled the Cambridge Sufficient Assumption packet over the past 2 days - feeling much more confident in my skills.

Focusing on the Necessary Assumption packet this entire upcoming week, as it is much larger.

currently working on the NA packet, got about 70 questions left. took me forever cause I never spent a large amount of time on any one packet.

[appind]

I'm really surprised I got all the questions in the "Chinese Talk-Story" passage correct, that one was tough!

that's a good sign. it's a really tough passage, congrats

[proteinshake]

I'm really surprised I got all the questions in the "Chinese Talk-Story" passage correct, that one was tough!

that's a good sign. it's a really tough passage, congrats

yeah I honestly thought the Purple Loosestrife passage was harder. I missed 2 on that one.

[Rupert Pupkin]

Drilled the Cambridge Sufficient Assumption packet over the past 2 days - feeling much more confident in my skills.

Focusing on the Necessary Assumption packet this entire upcoming week, as it is much larger.

currently working on the NA packet, got about 70 questions left. took me forever cause I never spent a large amount of time on any one packet.

Protein- when you are drilling packets, how many questions of each question type do you do in sitting? Do you do like 20 Assumption, 20 MBT and mix it up like that or in one day of drilling you finish a packet for one question type?

[appind]

I don't know how you all prep in cafe's. I tried it out yesterday, didn't work out so well. Let's just say almost ALL the questions I did at the cafe I got wrong (all the conversations that were surrounding me didn't help either..).

I just finished MBF questions, went -2 on the remaining 7 questions. One was a stupid mistake, once I identified what I thought was the false answer I didn't leave room in my brain for a potential false choice. When I looked at the answer though and came up with a resulting scenario, I realized my mistake. The other question, I can see why the one I chose is wrong (I was choosing between the correct answer choice and the one I went with), but no idea why the right one is correct.

So, I'll be spending the next two hours doing heavy review. Never doing LSAT prep in a cafe again lol.

also in the never-cafe crowd.

[Rupert Pupkin]

I don't know how you all prep in cafe's. I tried it out yesterday, didn't work out so well. Let's just say almost ALL the questions I did at the cafe I got wrong (all the conversations that were surrounding me didn't help either..).

I just finished MBF questions, went -2 on the remaining 7 questions. One was a stupid mistake, once I identified what I thought was the false answer I didn't leave room in my brain for a potential false choice. When I looked at the answer though and came up with a resulting scenario, I realized my mistake. The other question, I can see why the one I chose is wrong (I was choosing between the correct answer choice and the one I went with), but no idea why the right one is correct.

So, I'll be spending the next two hours doing heavy review. Never doing LSAT prep in a cafe again lol.

also in the never-cafe crowd.

Ive tried star$ and its just too loud most of the time. I stay away too if i can

[proteinshake]

Drilled the Cambridge Sufficient Assumption packet over the past 2 days - feeling much more confident in my skills.

Focusing on the Necessary Assumption packet this entire upcoming week, as it is much larger.

currently working on the NA packet, got about 70 questions left. took me forever cause I never spent a large amount of time on any one packet.

Protein- when you are drilling packets, how many questions of each question type do you do in sitting? Do you do like 20 Assumption, 20 MBT and mix it up like that or in one day of drilling you finish a packet for one question type?

I'll spend more time on Q types I find hard. I didn't really spend much time on Flaws cause that's my best/favorite Q type, but I'm going to do all of the NA since I find those harder. but I just do however many I feel like, I don't really have a strict study plan or anything, but I would do 5 easy, 10 medium, 5 hard -- that seems like a good distribution and enough questions for one day's drilling of a Q type. if you want to do more, I would still stick with a 20/80/20 distribution. of course, if you only miss hard questions, just do mostly hard ones.

[proteinshake]

if you want some cafe vibe music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmOD7ayA1y8 -- currently studying to this

[Rupert Pupkin]

Drilled the Cambridge Sufficient Assumption packet over the past 2 days - feeling much more confident in my skills.

Focusing on the Necessary Assumption packet this entire upcoming week, as it is much larger.

currently working on the NA packet, got about 70 questions left. took me forever cause I never spent a large amount of time on any one packet.

Protein- when you are drilling packets, how many questions of each question type do you do in sitting? Do you do like 20 Assumption, 20 MBT and mix it up like that or in one day of drilling you finish a packet for one question type?

I'll spend more time on Q types I find hard. I didn't really spend much time on Flaws cause that's my best/favorite Q type, but I'm going to do all of the NA since I find those harder. but I just do however many I feel like, I don't really have a strict study plan or anything, but I would do 5 easy, 10 medium, 5 hard -- that seems like a good distribution and enough questions for one day's drilling of a Q type. if you want to do more, I would still stick with a 20/80/20 distribution. of course, if you only miss hard questions, just do mostly hard ones.

Okay cool. I will keep question of difficulty in mind. I just usually jump around question types (and do a good amount of a question type at a time) until all of them are complete in the packet pretty much. Thanks!

[appind]

I'm really surprised I got all the questions in the "Chinese Talk-Story" passage correct, that one was tough!

that's a good sign. it's a really tough passage, congrats

yeah I honestly thought the Purple Loosestrife passage was harder. I missed 2 on that one.

is that the comparative passage about invasive species? idk iirc somehow chinese talk story had a couple of inference questions which along with it being a sorta dense passage made it difficult for me.

[thatlawlkid]

PT 54: 165 (86 raw) -15 overall

RC:-4 - Starting to become my average missed on this. Down from -6 or -7
LR1: -6 - Haven't missed 6 questions in a LR section in longer than i can remember. Praying this was a fluke
LG: -4 Goes with my above, also haven't done this bad in LG for awhile now
LR2: -1

Didn't really feel like my head was in it today for some odd reason. Gunna BR tomorrow and hopefully identify what is was that put me 5 below my average

[tofuspeedstar]

Been spinning my wheels all day...should probably stop for today but I can't.....................

[proteinshake]

I'm really surprised I got all the questions in the "Chinese Talk-Story" passage correct, that one was tough!

that's a good sign. it's a really tough passage, congrats

yeah I honestly thought the Purple Loosestrife passage was harder. I missed 2 on that one.

is that the comparative passage about invasive species? idk iirc somehow chinese talk story had a couple of inference questions which along with it being a sorta dense passage made it difficult for me.

yeah it is!

[Alexandros]

Anyone else having (or had) a bit of a low to mid 170s plateau? Trying to think how I should structure my prep going forward.

Realizing my accuracy still isn't 100% - it's not all just misreading. Might go through and drill the most difficult LRs or something.

[Alexandros]

PT 78's now on amazon! (might be late to the party here )

[Barack O'Drama]

My apologies, I haven't read the past 188 pages of this thread and just skimmed what was on this page before posting. Clearly I need a little work on my reading comprehension skills.

Best of luck with the 180. I wouldn't get disheartened. Anything above a 176-177 or so has a slight hint of luck to it. You start to get penalized so heavily for a question that you could lose a point just from not reading a "the", a "only", etc.

Anywho... finished most of my macro that automatically writes my questions to a word document. About the only thing I could improve upon is finding a way to check whether the most recently typed question would break columns, and, if so, insert a column break before it so that it fits two or more questions per column when possible. If anyone knows that, hit me up...using a typetext method...it's kind of funny to watch it type really fast. If anyone decides to make a spreadsheet of questions they missed, feel free to use a variant of this to plug it to word... made some note next to where you need to modify it

[+] Spoiler

Public Sub copypasta()

'@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
'@@@@@@@@@@@@@@SETTING UP THE DOCUMENT@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
'@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

'@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@CREATING DOC AND APP@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

Dim newWord As Object
Dim newDoc As Object

Set newWord = CreateObject("Word.Application")
Set newDoc = newWord.Documents.Add("C:\###############################.dotx")

'##########Set "C:\ to the location of a word template with 2 columns and narrow margins and font and all...macro should do this....

newWord.Visible = True
newWord.WindowState = 1

Set wordSelection = newWord.Selection

'@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@TEXT AND SUCH@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

With wordSelection
.Font.Bold = False
.Font.Name = "Times New Roman"
.Font.Size = 10
.ParagraphFormat.Alignment = wdAlignParagraphLeft
'.ParagraphFormat.Alignment = wdAlignParagraphJustify #####if you rather it justify to margins like a newspaper
End With

'@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
'@@@@@@@@@@FINISHED SETTING UP THE DOCUMENT@@@@@@@@@@@@@
'@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

Dim mySheet As Worksheet

Set mySheet = Sheet2

Dim myQuestions As Range
Dim myRows As Range
Dim myOffset As Integer

myOffset = 0

Set myQuestions = mySheet.Range("A3:A52")
'############this is the base row... think of each of these as being a row with all info pertaining to a question
For Each myRows In myQuestions

For myOffset = 0 To 15
'########## change 15 to the number of rows in yours....mine is higher because it has a bunch of information from LSAT and TM source...if you just did stimulus, prompt, a, b, c, d, e 15 should be = to 7 ... alternatively you should be able to just have blanks in columns A-I or delete the typetexts and set it to goto skipthecell

'skip the clrf for columns A-G and skip the cell for H-I
'testmasters homework #
If myOffset = 0 Then
wordSelection.TypeText "TM HW#"
wordSelection.TypeText myRows.Offset(0, myOffset).Text
GoTo SkipTheCLRF
End If
'testmasters question#
If myOffset = 1 Then
wordSelection.TypeText " Q#"
wordSelection.TypeText myRows.Offset(0, myOffset).Text
GoTo SkipTheCLRF
End If
'testmasters question type
If myOffset = 2 Then
wordSelection.TypeText " TYPE "
wordSelection.TypeText myRows.Offset(0, myOffset).Text
GoTo SkipTheCLRF
End If
'LSAT month
If myOffset = 3 Then
wordSelection.TypeText " ||| LSAT "
wordSelection.TypeText myRows.Offset(0, myOffset).Text
GoTo SkipTheCLRF
End If
'LSAT year
If myOffset = 4 Then
wordSelection.TypeText " "
wordSelection.TypeText myRows.Offset(0, myOffset).Text
GoTo SkipTheCLRF
End If
'LSAT LR section
If myOffset = 5 Then
wordSelection.TypeText " LR"
wordSelection.TypeText myRows.Offset(0, myOffset).Text
GoTo SkipTheCLRF
End If
'LSAT Question
If myOffset = 6 Then
wordSelection.TypeText " #"
wordSelection.TypeText myRows.Offset(0, myOffset).Text
GoTo SkipTheCLRF
End If
'selected answer
If myOffset = 7 Then GoTo SkipTheCell
'correct answer
If myOffset = 8 Then GoTo SkipTheCell

' newDoc.Content.InsertAfter vbNewLine
wordSelection.TypeText vbNewLine

SkipTheCLRF:

'stimulus
If myOffset = 9 Then
wordSelection.TypeText myRows.Offset(0, myOffset).Value
End If
'prompt
If myOffset = 10 Then
wordSelection.TypeText myRows.Offset(0, myOffset).Value
End If
'answer choice a
If myOffset = 11 Then
wordSelection.TypeText " ( A ) "
wordSelection.TypeText myRows.Offset(0, myOffset).Value
End If
'answer choice b
If myOffset = 12 Then
wordSelection.TypeText " ( B ) "
wordSelection.TypeText myRows.Offset(0, myOffset).Value
End If
'answer choice c
If myOffset = 13 Then
wordSelection.TypeText " ( C ) "
wordSelection.TypeText myRows.Offset(0, myOffset).Value
End If
'answer choice d
If myOffset = 14 Then
wordSelection.TypeText " ( D ) "
wordSelection.TypeText myRows.Offset(0, myOffset).Value
End If
'answer choice e
If myOffset = 15 Then
wordSelection.TypeText " ( E ) "
wordSelection.TypeText myRows.Offset(0, myOffset).Value
End If

SkipTheCell:

Next myOffset

wordSelection.InsertBreak Type:=1

Next

Set newWord = Nothing
Set newDoc = Nothing

End Sub

Damn you are the man! You do coding, LSAT, and are an incredible writer!

That is so awesome! Thank you so much for this

Haha thanks.

If interested I can send you the workbook sans questions. It has mildly improved code so you don't need to into VBA to adjust be ranges anymore and it will do it automatically.

I really want to find out a way to find out if the question splits. I think I can probably get around it in a less than ideal fashion.

It also has a sheet that displays one question at a time with the answer hidden but you can reveal it. Either in order or randomly. I could add a filter by type but I'm not going to use that so I probably won't. Made for current excel but should work in all versions.

Anywho. Taking today easy. Diag tomorrow. Also did not sleep well last night. Maybe do one or two RC passages.

Sample sale (maybe for myself maybe to sell) and dinner with friends.

Awesome! I have all the tests and cambridge packets on PDF, would there be a way for me to implement this into the code you've written. Either way, I think its so damn cool you do so much, lol.

Good luck on your diagnostic tomorrow. I hope you're not on TLS and enjoying time with friends You grind hard, take a break!

[appind]

Anyone have a link/summary for the exact breakdown of how to BR? I've always attempted, but never really understood if i was doing it right. From what i understand its just basically going back and doing redoing the questions you were unsure of without a time limit and seeing where you went wrong ? Thanks buddies!

I thiiink the ideal BR is going over the entire test without a time limit, using a fresh version so you don't know what your answers were last time? Not sure if that's what's usually done in practice though.

also you're not supposed to have looked at what qs you missed or your section or total score prior so you're not biased due to that when BRing.

[ngogirl12]

Finally finished reviewing the MBF questions. Did NOT think it was going to take me all day. Oh well, hopefully I will slay MBF questions from here on out. I learned a lot about the process and how to deal with the answer choices in doing this.

If anyone wants to help me out there was one question from PT 4, I couldn't figure out.

[tofuspeedstar]

Anyone have a link/summary for the exact breakdown of how to BR? I've always attempted, but never really understood if i was doing it right. From what i understand its just basically going back and doing redoing the questions you were unsure of without a time limit and seeing where you went wrong ? Thanks buddies!

I thiiink the ideal BR is going over the entire test without a time limit, using a fresh version so you don't know what your answers were last time? Not sure if that's what's usually done in practice though.

also you're not supposed to have looked at what qs you missed or your section or total score prior so you're not biased due to that when BRing.

Yup.

For PT59, I took the exam. Took the rest of the day to do other non-lsat things and began my BR first thing in the morning.

This time around though I will go back with a blank copy though. That seems like a really good idea. I just went through the exam I actually took, and marked the hell out of it. If during BR I changed my answer, I boxed in the letter and gave my reasoning as to why. But a clean copy sounds like a much better idea.

w/ a free 7 sage account you can input everything in (including your BR answers) and it'll break down the exam for you and tell you where you need to work. A great, great tool that I've begun to utilize this time around.

[appind]

-1, 25 min on an RC set. No motivation to do anything today, jfc. Hitting the gym then another RC set and some LG.

you must read a million words a second.

that's great job on rc. how do you finish rc section in 25 min? like how much time do you spend reading the passage. which pt?

[Shemp]

how did you train to not read in your own voice and in someone else's? do you mean no subvocalization? i thought it wasn't possible to have no subvocalization.

I did it by spending a few months reading while saying the alphabet or counting out loud. That way you put yourself in a spot where you can't really subvocalize and you have to just put what's on the page directly into your brain. Now if I push myself I can test out around 800-900 wpm with 90%ish comprehension, but it's not really comfortable for any extended period. So I usually go a fair bit slower than that at around 400-500 wpm with only rare instances of subvocalization. I also listen to a lot of K-pop on headphones when I'm reading for pleasure because it's bouncy and pleasant, has a good pace to it, and since I don't speak Korean it fills up the sound part of my brain without taking up much if any space in the language part. The Obama voice is really to force myself back into subvocalizing because I'm not in the habit of it and if I don't intentionally slow myself down I'll end up going too fast and the RC passages are hard enough material that I'll end up not getting it all.

[appind]

Tour question: would I get anything out of touring during Thanksgiving break? Like, I know classes wouldn't be in session, but would it be worth it if it's one of the few times that works for my schedule?

I mean I don't see why not if you have nothing else to do or it isn't too much of a financial burden. Granted, you're not going to get that much of a feel for a place in a day or two.

Agreed. I guess things would be potentially closed, and no classes, but I don't see why not.

Also, totally unrelated, but - how are you doing timing for the Economist passages, SweetTort?

I don't time anything but the recap part.

Ah, okay.

not sure what this is in reference to, but in case it's for RC, why time recap of the passage?

[20170322]

Tour question: would I get anything out of touring during Thanksgiving break? Like, I know classes wouldn't be in session, but would it be worth it if it's one of the few times that works for my schedule?

I mean I don't see why not if you have nothing else to do or it isn't too much of a financial burden. Granted, you're not going to get that much of a feel for a place in a day or two.

Agreed. I guess things would be potentially closed, and no classes, but I don't see why not.

Also, totally unrelated, but - how are you doing timing for the Economist passages, SweetTort?

I don't time anything but the recap part.

Ah, okay.

not sure what this is in reference to, but in case it's for RC, why time recap of the passage?

Look up 7sage's RC memory method.

[20170322]

So, after a LONG hiatus from LSAT prep and general productivity, I started prepping again this morning. I instantly saw a HUGE jump in my accuracy.


How should I react to this for test day? Obviously I need to prep between now and then, but should I take the last week off? The last few days off?

[Mikey]

So, after a LONG hiatus from LSAT prep and general productivity, I started prepping again this morning. I instantly saw a HUGE jump in my accuracy.


How should I react to this for test day? Obviously I need to prep between now and then, but should I take the last week off? The last few days off?

That's good man. I think the consensus from looking at other threads is to relax for a few days before the exam. Someone had a schedule type thing for what you should do the week leading up to the test and when you should stop prepping but I forgot where.

I mean, fwiw, I prepped until the day before June's test and look where that got me haha.

I think something to do before the test (few days before with no prep) is to just go over your strategies for everything on the test. Not necessarily doing sections or questions, but just jogging your memory of what approaches you take for a question type, game , etc