LSAT Plateau

[bk1111]

Hello,

I have a general question about what I can do to improve my LSAT score? I have been reviewing for about 5 months and have been scoring around 161-163 in the past 3 PT's I have taken. Generally, I miss around 9-11 questions in LR and 3-6 in LG. RC tends to vary for me, but I only do 3/4 passages as I see no way to get to all four given my performance in that section.

I want to focus my efforts on improving on LR and LG. I am most concerned about how to go about doing that in LR. I have identified my weakest question types and I have been drilling those and working on how to approach them correctly. However, I am unable to see any substantial improvement on the question types I am weak in. My weakest question types are Necessary Assumption, Weaken, and MBT sections, which comprise a decent amount of LR.

Timing isn't much of an issue for me; only sometimes I don't get to a couple questions for any given LR section. I would appreciate any advice on how to go about improving. I intend to take the LSAT this June and I want these last four weeks to be used as productively and efficiently as possible. I know 4 weeks is a lot of time for even a little improvement.

Thank you.
BK

[Jonathan Evans]

BK,

Thanks for the question and for sharing the helpful details about your performance.

I'll preface my remarks with a couple follow-up questions. On AR, are you missing questions on multiple games? In other words, do you attempt all the games and then miss some here and there? If this is the case, you need to drill down on your accuracy. Where you are right now in performance, you need to ace three games. In other words, don't miss any questions on three of the four games. Easier said than done? Perhaps, but there's a pretty straightforward diagnostic and litmus test you can use:

1. When you miss questions, determine whether the cause was a misrepresented rule or faulty pre work. If this is the case, you'll need to make sure that you've got a solid, meticulous, systematic approach to your set-ups and that you double-check your work before you move onto questions.
2. If your work is solid, did you miss questions because you didn't do adequate initial analysis of the game? Did you fail to notice crucial deductions that caused you to suck up tons of time during questions? If this is the case, establish a better system of knowing how much work to put into the initial analysis. For instance, if the scenario is highly restrictive, the game will likely benefit from more up-front work. If it's open-ended, get into questions ASAP.
3. Do you miss questions because you are answering them when you're mostly sure of your answer? In other words, do you kinda come down to two possibilities, look at one, and go, "oh that has to be it!" You're going to miss questions that way. You have to hit a sweet spot on AR questions: do precisely the amount of work necessary to answer the question with 100% confidence; then try not to spin your wheels doing extra work once you have found this answer. Students on the higher percentile end sometimes get in such a hurry to get through the section that they let their accuracy slip.

Get your games up to 100% accuracy on three. Preview the games if necessary to determine which games you will ace. Then spend the remainder of your time trying to earn some points on the last game, via a Global-List question or a couple narrow Local questions that you can do the work for on the fly. This process should earn you a couple more points on AR.

For LR, it's difficult for me to determine precisely what your principal issues are based on the information you have shared. MBT, weaken, and assumption questions span a pretty large conceptual spectrum on LR. I could give you general advice for each of these question types, but it would be very helpful for me to know what kinds of issues you encounter in each scenario that cause repeated errors. For instance, do you do better on strengthen questions than on weaken questions? Why do you think this is? I ask because the analysis for both question types is frequently similar.

You might consider reviewing MBT from the very beginning. It's such a core skill on the LSAT that work you do to improve your understanding of these questions on LR will benefit you on AR and RC as well.

Please follow up with further questions, and good luck!