- Thu Oct 20, 2016 6:31 pm
#29954
Wow, I commend you on the huge amount of studying you have done already! You have a lot of questions, and I'll try to answer them all, but please realize that others may give you very different advice and that someone who has worked with you in a class or one-on-one might have more insight than someone who hasn't worked with you at all (me).
I have received 160 on September 2016 LSAT for my first attempt. I am planning to write another one in February 2017.
You didn't ask for advice on this, but I just want to say that, if your timeline doesn't require you to take the test in February, you might want to wait until you consistently score in your desired range on timed practice tests. This will help you feel more confident on test day. Additionally, it is not advisable to take the LSAT more than twice. This is different from the common wisdom for the SAT, where generally your highest score is the only one that really matters. In contrast, poor performances on the LSAT count against applicants somewhat.
I was destroyed on reading comprehension and dramatically under-performed on logical reasoning.
Remember that for LSAT scores, it doesn't matter how you do on each section. It only matters what your overall score is. For that reason, you do want to work on your weak areas, but you want to perfect your strong areas as well. That said, because logical reasoning is 50% of the test, you will want to work very hard at improving this section.
1. Would it be possible to bump up my mark to 170 with attending school as the full time student?
Yes. Any score change is possible. Keep in mind, though, that putting a lot of your time into LSAT studying could hurt your GPA if you're not able to manage it all. Because LSAT score and GPA are the two most important predictors of law school acceptance, you don't want your GPA to decrease!
Also keep in mind that the better you are performing now, the more difficult it becomes to increase your score. Many students see that their practice scores increase a lot at the beginning and then plateau. So there's no guarantee about how much hours of studying you will need to increase your score by 10 points. Even going a step further, it's possible to overstudy. Your brain needs rest time to synthesize information!
2. How can I possibly improve on reading comprehension and how much time is ideal to put per day?
You have already done a lot of reading comprehension practice that was specifically in the test-prep context. You can, of course, always continue to do more of that. What I might recommend as a supplement, though, is to incorporate more active reading in your daily life. Choose essays, articles, or newspaper editorials that interest you and try to practice reading actively: summarize each paragraph in your head, annotate them for VIEWStamp, ponder the author's choices in structuring the piece. Making these types of skills second nature for you will contribute to a strong reading comprehension score and, more importantly perhaps, a strong performance in law school.
3. What are the strategies to review the passages?
See above.
I have already taken the online LSAT course with powerscore and have tried all of past LSAT tests available.
4. What are the other resources I could use to study with?
You could try the Powerscore Bibles, some of the other online courses, or take a full-length or weekend course with Powerscore. There are also, of course, other lists of questions online, but I have found that questions that did not come from past tests are less helpful because they differ from how real LSAT questions in form or substance.
5. Should I go back and review all the tests again? As it was limited to print only once, I am not quite sure how efficient it would be to look at questions with indicated answers.
My advice is no. If there are tests you can retake (because you took them a long time ago and don't remember), then that's what I would do. I wouldn't simply review the test with the answers right in front of you, though, because you wouldn't be PRACTICING, which is what studying for the LSAT is all about.
Good luck!
