Hi kcolclough6,
Thanks for reaching out! I'm glad to weigh in
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I understand you prepared with Kaplan for the June test, scoring 140. Since then, you've been using the PowerScore Bible Trilogy, and over the course of the next two months were able to increase your score to 145. Your accuracy across all sections hovers around 50%. You've been scoring at the mid-140's range for the past week and a half, and worry that this score plateau will prevent you from reaching your goal of 156 in September.
First off, keeping the same score for a week and a half is hardly a cause for concern
We've written about score plateaus on our Blog, so please check out the following Blog posts to learn more about what a score plateau is, and how to overcome it:
Second, a score improvement from the mid-140's to the mid-150's is hardly unusual: in fact, it's probably the most common "bump" people get when they start prepping. It's easy to see why - an improvement in this range requires answering about 20 more questions correctly, most of which probably LG and LR questions in the low-to-medium difficulty range. The better question for you is - after using the Bible Trilogy for 2 months, what's preventing you from reaching a comparable level of improvement?
The answer most likely lies in the absence of question-type specific training from your regimen. The Bible Trilogy is a wonderful resource, but it's not designed to provide you with thousands of type-specific questions to practice with. You will learn how to use the Assumption Negation Technique, for instance, but won't have the chance to apply this technique across one hundred Assumption questions. Meanwhile, the LSAT is not a knowledge-based test: they won't ask you to define what an assumption is. Rather, they will test your ability to apply this knowledge to a wide variety of arguments - deductive and inductive, conditional and causal, easy as well as difficult. The same is true for Logic Games. The Logic Games Bible will teach you how to approach every single game type you will likely to encounter on the test, but cannot possibly provide you with 50 games of each type that you can train with.
This is where both the
Bible Workbooks and the
Question-Type specific training volumes become exceptionally useful. They allow you to apply this knowledge in a manner that isolates and drills into questions of the same type, obtained from PrepTests 1-40. While I'm loathe to recommend adding even more books to your repertoire of study aids, virtually all of our
Self-Study plans combine the Bible Trilogy with the type-specific training, for one simple reason: you really do need both in order to automate the techniques you learn in the Bibles. If games are a particular cause for concern, I'd also recommend the
Setups Encyclopedia, which will allow you to compare your setups to ours and help you figure out where you're coming short.
For now, worry more about accuracy than timing. In fact, I'd probably take a few untimed practice tests in order to identify specific conceptual areas in need of improvement. If you're missing 50% of the questions in each section, you are clearly missing low-to-medium difficulty questions, suggesting that your basic conceptual understanding of the material is not universally solid. Your job, over the next few weeks, should be to identify precisely what types of questions are costing you the most points: is it science-based causal reasoning arguments? Is it undefined grouping games with conditional rules? Is it law-related passages? Once you know where your weaknesses lie, the type-specific training I mentioned earlier will become even more useful.
Good luck! And please don't hesitate to reach out to us again if you have more specific questions that we can answer
Thanks,
