3 Last-Minute Tips to Boost Your LSAT Score - U.S. News & World Report
Raising your LSAT score significantly takes time and effort. A multimonth study plan can ensure you master the basics and hone your skills through sustained practice.
To keep your skills from plateauing or even backsliding, your approach to practice must be focused and methodical. A lifetime of practice won’t help if you are merely repeating the same mistakes and reinforcing bad habits.
However, this advice is cold comfort as test day approaches. What can you do to nudge your odds of success upwards if you’ve run out of practice time?
- Choose the questions you do.
- Hunt for conclusions.
- Know when you’re stuck.
When you first start studying for the LSAT, it makes sense to aim to cover the whole field. But as the test approaches, it’s time to be honest about which questions aren’t worth sweating over.
Perhaps you get tripped up by logical reasoning questions that ask you to resolve a paradox. Early on, you can address this weakness with extra practice. But if you’re still struggling close to your test date, it may be time to recognize that these questions are more trouble than they’re worth.
After all, the digital LSAT makes it easy to flag questions and move on. If you hate paradox questions, simply flag them and do them last. Since each question is worth the same, devote your energy to the questions that you are most likely to get right.
Get choosy on the reading comprehension and analytical reasoning sections, as well. There is no reason to tackle passes and logic games in the order they appear within each section. If you hit a tough science passage, move on. That isn’t surrender, it’s choosing your battles.
The LSAT is a test of logical reasoning, which is essentially a way to derive conclusions from a set of premises. Much of the test involves looking for conclusions, then strengthening, weakening or evaluating those conclusions – or leveraging them to find further deductions.
If you aren’t focused like a laser on conclusions, then you’re taking the wrong test.
Identifying conclusions is crucial for most logical reasoning questions and even some reading comprehension questions. Get comfortable using the digital tools provided to highlight or underline conclusions whenever you spot them.
And if your conclusion-spotting skills are unreliable, take some time to learn how to do it with 100% accuracy. This is a fundamental skill that is not hard to master, but all too easy to overlook.
Test-takers commonly complain about running out of time on the LSAT. But where does that time go? Are they drawing complicated diagrams for logic games or deciphering thorny reading comprehension passages?
Rarely. The greatest time-waster on the LSAT is decision paralysis, feeling confused, or hemming and hawing between competing plausible answer choices. At that point, your mind runs in circles, sends you on a wild goose chase or tumbles into self-doubt. Your thoughts may move quickly, but they’re taking you nowhere. Meanwhile, the clock ticks away.
There is no way to stop this from happening. No one makes it through LSAT test day without feeling stumped. What allows high performers to succeed is that they recognize when they’re in a hole, and then they stop digging.
Get in the habit of catching yourself when you’re feeling stuck or going in circles. Close your eyes and take a deep breath to recenter. Rather than panic or beat yourself up, just ask yourself a simple question: What is one small step I can take right now to bring myself closer to the finish line?
Whether that means diagramming an argument, looking closer at a conclusion or flagging the question to return later with fresh eyes, take the test one step at a time.
Mastering these three tips should help you succeed on test day. But if you still end up disappointed with your results, remember that there is no penalty for retaking the LSAT. It may be worth taking more time to prepare rigorously before giving the test another try.
source: https://www.usnews.com/education/blogs/law-admissions-lowdown/articles/last-minute-tips-to-boost-your-lsat-score
Your content is great. However, if any of the content contained herein violates any rights of yours, including those of copyright, please contact us immediately by e-mail at media[@]kissrpr.com.