A little stressed

[Morehouse20]

I'm stuck in the 140s trying to score 160 on test day which for me will be July or September 2019. My study habits are from 5am-9am and every Monday I'm in an LSAT course provided by my school. All of my PT scores are listed below, I took PT 77 and got a 143 yesterday. I want to focus my taking PT's but obviously, there's still material in on the test that I need to master. My weakest section to LR and RC, LG is pretty strong (I just need to be faster). These were my untimed scores btw. I have been studying since June 2018, how should I best reconfigure my study schedule to optimize my score. I tried doing two PT a week (untimed) but it took up too much time. I'm thinking of going hard down to one but I'm not sure if I should.

Schedule

Sunday-Saturday (5am-9am)
5-7 (Powerscore/Kaplan book study)
7-9 (Practice Test)


Any tips would be greatly appreciated.

[Robert Carroll]

Morehouse,

I strongly suggest you change the balance of prep to emphasize mastery of material before doing a lot of PTs. Ultimately, if you're getting questions wrong on a PT, you need to understand the question type better. You even mention that you need to master the material better. Make sure you have study materials that will cover every section type and every question type within each section. Two PTs a week is reasonable in the final stage of studying, before the test date itself. It's not as useful early on, and, though you've been studying for a while, if July 2019 is the earliest you'd plan to take the test, you still aren't in that final stage of studying right now. Consider devoting more time to content mastery right now and less time to PTs. I think cutting down to 1 at this point does indeed make sense.

You definitely want your PTs to be timed as some point, and well in advance of the test, so consider taking your PTs timed. You might see a drop in score because of that. That's not a big deal. The point of studying now, with the test still months away, is to get better at doing the questions. Getting faster can't happen until you understand the questions better, and you can always work on speed AFTER you have the mastery necessary to understand the questions.

Robert Carroll