Don't just study, practice.

[Ambrogi]

There's a difference between studying and practicing.  Most of us taking the test are coming right out of undergrad.  In undergrad, we're stuck in a bunch of classes and asked to remember a bunch of facts about a bunch of topics, and regurgitate those facts on examinations.  This task requires study--essentially staring a bunch of written words until you've more or less memorized them.

The LSAT is a very different beast.  There is nothing that absolutely must be memorized.  Certainly, a lot of LSAT prep methods have lists of various question types, flaw types, or game types that you should be familiar with, but rote memorization of these things is of limited value.  Some people sit up all night, red-eyed, reading whatever prep book they bought over and over as if they're trying to cram for Western Civ.  That's studying.  But the LSAT is a test of skill--it's a performance-based test.  It's much more akin to a piano recital than a chemistry final.  While you can study sheet music all day, without practice your sight-reading performance isn't likely to be terribly impressive.

The best musicians are those who get the most out of their practice, and there are two secrets to quality practice:  Pace and Repitition.

Pace refers to the control you exercise over the speed at which you practice.  The most competent musicians, especially in their early years, spend a significant amount of time practicing extremely slowly.  Yeah, that guy on youtube who absolutely nailed Flight of the Bumblebee, I guarantee you he's practiced that tune one note at a time.  The musician with his metronome set to 30 bpm has time to consider not only what notes come next, but the most efficient ways of hitting those notes.  This creates an economy of motion that allows the musician to play extremely fast and with precision.  The LSAT is quite similar.  Practicing off the clock allows you to consider more than simply what is the right answer.  You can consider things like, "Why is it the right answer?" "What is wrong with the other answers?" and "What about it will allow me to recognize a similar problem on another test?"  Working slow will allow you to develop your most efficient games diagrams, and your most effective reading comp markups.  If you will be diligent in your practice, forcing yourself to work painfully slow, not just answering the questions, but getting to KNOW them, you will eventually be able to attack the test with a speed and accuracy you never thought possible.  Flight of the Bumblebee, my friends.

Repetition refers to just that.  Repetition.  Repetition.  Repetition.  You can't sit down and work on ordering games for one day and expect to have mastered them.  You've got to take every little piece of the test that you're learning about and work with it again and again and again and again.  Get familiar with it.  Work with it.  Play with it.  Manipulate it.  Make it yours.  As I said earlier, this test, much like sight reading with an instrument, is not about memorization.  It's about developing the skill.  Skills----are----only----developed----through----repetition.  

A question that comes up time and time again on the various LSAT discussion forums is about running out of materials.  Should I save PT#XX so that I don't run out?  Should I buy more tests so I always have new material?  These are silly questions.  If you run out, shut up and do them again.  ("But if I take it again, won't that artificially inflate my score???"  Yes.  If that bothers you, don't look up your score.)  In my humble opinion, it would be much more useful to have a set of 10 tests and repeat them each 5 times than to have 50 tests and blow through them all without looking back.  Repetition creates familiarity.  Not that you need to be terribly familiar with PT47 itself, but the concepts tests on PT47 are the same concepts tested on 48, 49, 50, and on the next LSAT to be administered.  And if you've seen PT47 before, you can get past worrying about the answers.  The answers don't matter.  Let me repeat that.  THE ANSWERS DON'T MATTER.  It's the steps you take and the things you consider to get to the answers that matter.  On that second or third or fourth repetition, it's much easier to focus on (or even notice) those more important elements--the things that, over time, are going to make you improve your skills.

So as you begin prepping for this test, I urge you, be patient.  Slow down.  Repeat.  Repeat.  Repeat.  It's not just study.  It's practice.

[The Fear]

That's good advice, thanks.

[BlaineR]

It is always good to get any type of real world experience you can.  This should compliment your education well.

[LSAT Eliminator]

It is always good to get any type of real world experience you can.  This should compliment your education well.

What do you mean by real world experience? OR do you not mean that in the context of LSAT prep? Not sure there is a real world experience out there for LSAT, lol

[xunalex]

for god sake, you save my life on the path. thks.

[criminalattorney]

I also agree with the fact practice is important and it makes you perfect. Hence, it would be really good if you practice it on regular basis.

[Anne]

I also agree with the fact practice is important and it makes you perfect. Hence, it would be really good if you practice it on regular basis.

I like it when spam gets philosophical. It makes me LOL just a little bit.

[cjxicerain]

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[7sagelsat]

I agree that practice is extremely important, but I disagree with the method you suggest. I don't think a person should take any particular test more than 2x. Trial and error is definitely not the right way to go about studying for the LSAT, simply because most people don't have the time for that.

The correct repetition for LSAT studying should cover a wider scope with other steps to complement repetitively taking sample tests.
1) learn the concepts (what they are, ie contrapositive) ---> 2) apply what you learn (ie. first time taking a contrapositive)---> 3) practice and practice (take sample tests)

Practicing for the sake of practicing won't improve your understanding. I agree that repetition is important, but you have to expand the scope of what you are repeating. You have to practice to find the weak links in your understanding, go back to learn the concept, then practice again with your new knowledge to see if there are any improvements.

It's also very helpful to know all the indicators for conditional statements, for sentence structures, and for question types so that that they become a part of your intuition.


When I first saw logic games, I thought about mine sweeper where you eliminate the number of possible cells. That's my real world for LSAT lol

[nick561]

Thank you very much friends for this discussion .......................................

[LSAT Eliminator]

With 65+ LSATs in existence, the likelihood of any single person taking any of them more than twice is pretty low. I do think one of the primary study flaws I see is that a student takes a test, then puts it in a pile and never really looks at it again, except to note their final score. That wastes a huge amount of value that could come from learning from your mistakes. It's the learning from the mistakes that allows one to understand what needs to be studied before taking another full test. In that direction, the proper approach would be:

1. Learn the concepts and strategies
2. Apply them yourself until comfortable
3. Take a full test
4. Study your mistakes from the exam
5. Go back and study/practice those areas you didn't know as well as you thought, and add to your repository of knowledge
6. Take another full test

[Jeffort]

With 65+ LSATs in existence, the likelihood of any single person taking any of them more than twice is pretty low. I do think one of the primary study flaws I see is that a student takes a test, then puts it in a pile and never really looks at it again, expect to note their final score. That wastes a huge amount of value that could come from learning from your mistakes. It's the learning from the mistakes that allows one to understand what needs to be studied before taking another full test. In that direction, the proper approach would be:

1. Learn the concepts and strategies
2. Apply them yourself until comfortable
3. Take a full test
4. Study your mistakes from the exam
5. Go back and study/practice those areas you didn't know as well as you thought, and add to your repository of knowledge
6. Take another full test

 

The churn and burn routine of mainly just taking a bunch of PrepTests timed is NOT an effective way to improve test day performance.  

I don't understand why many people go with that routine and it still amazes me that people try to prep with that method.  Most of them also end up later complaining that they have run out of materials to work with and that their score has not improved much or at all.

The 69 currently available previously administered LSATs are far more than sufficient (and enough to kill a tree if you print them all out) material to study with in order to learn the regularly tested logical concepts, ways they are regularly presented and tested, and effective strategies to apply to the questions in order to achieve a respectable score.

It's important to remember that the LSAT is a standardized test, meaning that it tests the same sets of skills, abilities and concepts in the same ways in every test-form.  There are no surprises to be found, just new variations of the same stuff in each new test-form that is administered with different veneer subject matter the logic is packaged in.

I'm not recommending this as a strategy given the volume of materials currently available, but it is possible to learn everything necessary to be able to perform well and also to do a sufficient amount of timed practice tests to apply it/put it all together and build stamina for test day with 20 or less PrepTests total if you study, practice and review effectively and efficiently.  Basically, study smart, don't just churn and burn.  Thoroughly dissect the heck out every question from several tests in slow motion and the commonly repeated structures, concepts, logical relationships, methods of reasoning, patterns, flawed methods of reasoning, etc. will emerge, start to become obvious and much easier to recognize.  

Doing that is much more helpful to improve how one will score on test day than mainly doing the churn and burn, pin the tail on the donkey routine of taking a bunch of tests timed and mainly focusing on selecting the correct answer choice for each question first time with a particular question or PrepTest.  

Nothing has significantly changed with the ways LSAC constructs LSAT questions to test and measure the same skills and abilities since the current format of the test began in June 1991, plus, logic certainly hasn't and doesn't change.