Went down on a practice test

[HappySaban_RTR]

I plan on taking the LSAT in September but have been trying to prep as much as possible with school. i took a full length course last summer.
I took the october 2012 lsat today. I scored a 149. On my last practice LSAT I took about 3 weeks ago i scored a 160. I feel like this isn't normal and would like suggestions on how to bounce back and improve my score. Maybe I just had a bad test day?

[Lucas Moreau]

Hello, HappySaban_RTR,

I like to tell my students that a single high score means a lot more than a single low score. A single low score can have many, many causes:

You had a headache
You were tired
You hadn't been studying much lately
You were stressed out by something else
You were just having an off day
You just got some shocking news
It was an unusually difficult test (it happens!)

Or any number of other things.

A single high score, however, only has one plausible cause: you really knew the material and did a dynamite job. The odds of randomly scoring highly on the LSAT - randomly picking right answers, or picking them for incorrect reasons - are astronomical. If you get a high score, you aced it, period.

So for that reason, I wouldn't let a single lower score on a practice test get you down. (A 149's not too shabby in the first place!) It might depend on how much studying you've been doing recently versus how much you were doing on the lead-up to the last practice LSAT you took. There's lots of possibilities.

As far as a general tip, go through a few practice sections *without* going back and checking your answers - just go with your first instinct for the correct answer choice and proceed onward. Don't pay attention to your score, but see which questions you got right and wrong, and why you got them right and wrong. A lot of students second-guess themselves out of right answers more often than they fix wrong ones - if you've been doing work and studying, your first instinct should be pretty good!

If you need more advice, go ahead and ask, and we'll get back to you.

Hope that helps,
Lucas Moreau