LSAT studying strategy (How to Overcome a bad/Weak Habit)

[lathlee]

Dear Dave and the Team members ,

You guys put up phenomenal efforts so the students can have and be implemented with |"right" habit and strategy for LSATs.

I am sure I speak behalf of some student population here To the students who are frustrated with these right habit are being developed fast enough thus resulted in score increases,

what would be some of negative habits and studying techniques that you guys(Administration) see often while tutoring for your students that you guys wish your students to get rid or see the students to not to repeat or improve upon?

[lathlee]

Actually, I would like to rephrase and ask in addition of what I just asked in the above which is why I didn't edit the first post..

Anyways, I would like to know What would be the most consistent and recurring bad habits that do you guys , admin, see the students make the same mistakes over and over again that you guys already advised not to do so in Logic bible sets. But you see student do it anyways. Also what would you recommend to get rid or overcome such bad habit.

The reason I am asking this, which by the same is ironic, inspired by you and relate to you: the creator of the LSAT bible book sets, Dave.

I saw in one of the reply to law school admission that you referenced how special Michael Jordan have been and will be and some like Magic and Bird would be considered as next most special only to Jordan (the reply was about university law school's places in the world how Harvard and Stanford are like MJ in simile of special places in basketball to law school.)

Anyways, when I saw that post, I was reminded of two things: one , I remember seeing somewhere that Dave went to Duke University which is very well-known for their basketball team. Two, Michael Jordan's famous quote: If you practice long and hard in wrong way, well then, you shall become good with wrong way of doing things.

The reason I brought this quote from MJ is I have a philosophy of I can always learn some great wisdom from the winners in life, why they succeeded.

I just want to develop into right way of doing things: the admin knows that I went through some failures in my LSAT in the past due to many factors that were outside of my control as well; but, I do not want to make the same mistakes over again; I want to correct my bad habits.

[Dave Killoran]

Hi Lathlee,

Great question! I'll start with a few of the ones I see frequently, in no particular order:

• Trying to cram instead of studying regularly and steadily. The LSAT is not a test you can cram for, and it always worries me when I hear people talking about studying really hard for just a month, or talking about studying 20 hours on the weekend and not at all during the week.
• Overstudying. There is such a thing as studying too much for this exam, and you need to take breaks once in a while.
• Being negative. I talk a lot about positivity and the value of a strong mental approach, and one pitfall I see often is students talking negatively about the test or talking negatively about how they will perform,. Both are like a cancer, and they should be excised immediately. If you find yourself falling into negative thought or language habits, stop and examine those and attempt to change them into positive expressions. It sounds flimsy and a bit new age-y but it actually works!
• Taking a practice test and then not studying the questions sufficiently. I see this happen all the time, and the real value in taking a PT is in going through the questions and learning from them. Some students fail to do that, or they only go over the ones they missed, and in doing so they deprive themselves of learning opportunities.
• This is related to the prior point, and the issue is taking a bunch of PTs in very short order, like 3 in 3 days. That doesn't allow you to get max value from the time you are spending.
• Not taking enough practice tests. While it is possible to take too many PTs in a short period, one problem students sometimes have is that they don't take enough PTs. You must take timed tests in order to get acquainted with the feeling of time pressure, and you should take at least 6-8 of them, minimum (hopefully more!).
• Not using a timer regularly during your studies. A timer should be an integral part of your study approach, and you should use it more than just on PTs. Sometimes you should use it for individual games, or certain HW sections such as a section of 5 or 10 LR questions. In other words, use the timer to vary the pace and approach of your studies, which will help keep things fresh and help calibrate your sense of how time passes when you are solving questions.
• Giving up on a technique before you work through all the material. This one occurs to varying degrees, but I run into people who tell me that a certain method or technique didn't work for them, but when I ask them about it they will tell me (sheepishly) that they only tried it a few times, or that they didn't quite understand the explanation. As I like to say, you need to give each technique and method a full run-through before deciding whether to keep or discard it, and that is especially true for methods like the Assumption Negation Technique, which require some practice to become proficient at. I once had a student tell me that Assumption questions were super hard and that the Assumption Negation didn't work for them, but upon further examination I fond that they didn't really understand how Negation worked and so they discarded the approach early on in their studies. when we walked through the idea and worked with it for a bit, she became quite good with the approach and turned Assumption questions from a weakness into a strength. Having difficulty with techniques when first studying is the norm, not the exception, and that's one of the reasons why we have this Forum—to help students get better at using the various techniques we invented.
• Using so many sources that you get confused. This is related to the prior point, because what often happens is that students will get a bit frustrated and then jump to a different approach. Now, I'm all for using multiple sources and comparing them, and then choosing the ones you like the best. But, in order to do that as efficiently as possible, you have to really know the techniques in question. In other words, if you don't really understand a certain method and then decide not to use it, you are robbing yourself of the possibility of having a tool in your arsenal that could be quite effective. And making choices becomes much harder when you have a bunch of different books open at the same time, each of which addresses ideas in a slightly different way. So, if you really want to use different sources that's ok, but make sure you go all the way through each one in order to really understand how they work. Full disclaimer: I would of course prefer you stick with our system since I often run into students who are in trouble because they tried to use conflicting approaches, but if you really feel like you want to use someone else's books, at least let us know so we can best identify why you might be having problems
• In LR, Overdiagramming. This mainly applies to conditional reasoning (which we've talked about recently, Lathlee!) but one danger when you learn conditional reasoning is that it makes everything looks so clean and simple that there's a desire to then diagram everything. That quickly leads to trouble because conditionality is everywhere, but usually it's not important to solving the problem at hand. Thus, the key is to learn how the LSAT uses the idea so you can recognize when it will play a primary role, or at least be helpful in solving the question.
• In LG, rushing to the questions before getting inferences. I see this a lot, and many student diagram the rules and then jump right to the first question. Stop for a moment, consider how the rules connect, and look for inferences both direct and indirect! they can often be the key to solving the game much more quickly.
• In RC, skimming or just reading quickly and superficially. Solving RC questions requires knowledge. So, definitely read fast, but pick up enough to get the main ideas and the basic structure of the passage. Otherwise you will find yourself re-reading the passage constantly, and that is death in the RC section.

Ok, that went slightly beyond just bad study habits, but that's ok I think! And yes, you are correct, I did go to Duke, and this is one reason I am an avid basketball fan

Thanks!

[lathlee]

Hi. David, Thank you so much for the last reply. It was tremendous help as always. Anyways, I want to clarify some misunderstanding that I seem to have with your post.

"Taking a practice test and then not studying the questions sufficiently. I see this happen all the time, and the real value in taking a PT is in going through the questions and learning from them. Some students fail to do that, or they only go over the ones they missed, and in doing so they deprive themselves of learning opportunities. "

" they only go over the ones they missed, and in doing so they deprive themselves of learning opportunities."


After i get any LSAT incorrectly, I practice the wrong ones over and over again until I am so sure I got it but do not go over the correctly got questions cuz test psychology stats show any test takers have at least 85% chance of getting the same question or same question with minor variations correctly even correctly got questions involved the process of making a choice based on some uncertainties in their mind if one got the question correctly in first place.

Also, it is entirely up to you to comment this opinion of mine and have to mention about it cuz things just unfolded it the manner it unfolded last night: at this point, I think Stephen Curry will have the better shot at overtake or coming close to the greatness of MJ than Lebron James due to age factor etc.; they both still have shots of such feat; I don't see Stephen Curry nor LBJ will not overtake MJ for the record. You probably know this cuz as far as I know, you are little bit older than me and thus have a better memory of MJ's heydays: MJ clinched when he needed to and wanted to regardless of the circumstances (eg: when he was suffering from food poision/ flu game in 97 Champion Final and in 98 in game 6 Championship final, Scottie Pippen was outed due to the injury, MJ still decided the outcome of the game and the series in his hand) especially in important moments but LBJ and Curry already have the history of letting the victories falling out of their hand.

[Dave Killoran]

Hi Lathlee,

If I understand you correctly, the reason we recommend going over correct answers is that one pass through on an LSAT question is never enough to get all the info. By studying correct problems, you can learn how you could have done it faster and in a more definite way.

On the subject of MJ, I never thought anyone would ever even come close to matching him. But Lebron James is certainly in the running, which by itself is a monumental achievement. I personally think Lebron has a more versatile game and can do more things on the court, but a large part of that is his physicality. In their own ways, they are each the greatest (one as a shooting guard and the other as a forward), but overall I think Lebron is the more complete player (it's just the championships holding him back, but seriously he often has arrived at the finals with a weaker team; when you compare performance in the earlier rounds, Jordan was markedly worse than LBJ. It's just that once Jordan got to the final round, he never lost)). I like Steph Curry and have followed him since he was at Davidson, but he's not in the same league as either player in my opinion, and I think time will show that KD is better than Steph, especially as KD amps up his defense.

Thanks!

[lathlee]

Hi. David

As I was reading your answer, I found it very interesting cuz I use what I learned from you to over the information asymmetric situation between you and I. When I said Correct question do not needed to be not repeat, I also meant and assumed that you would see it as one got the question correct under the reasonable time limit as in consumed like 1 min 10-20 seconds. which was my assumption, unstated fact. (I learned from you)

My definition of correct in practice in above meant in the same situation as the LSAT performance standard.

Yep you are right and my bad, if I got the question correct let's say wasting 3 minutes for 1 questions, then I need to go over that question again regardless of whether I got the question correct or not because I won't have such time privilege in actual lsat.

[1800-HELPME]

Hi Lathlee,

the reason we recommend going over correct answers is that one pass through on an LSAT question is never enough to get all the info. By studying correct problems, you can learn how you could have done it faster and in a more definite way.

Hi Dave,

I'm guilty of going over only questions I've missed, so maybe that's why I'm having trouble increasing my LR score. When going through questions I got right, what exactly could I do to make sure I'm faster on similar questions in the future? Could you elaborate?

Should I think through why I crossed out all the wrong answers, focus on the structure of the stimulus, or just go through it in general because I'll pick up on patterns that way?

Also, does this count for RC as well?

Hope to hear from you soon!

I always learn something new when I go through this forum, so thanks a lot

[Dave Killoran]

Hi 1-800,

The standard I use when reviewing questions is: could you teach me the question, including a full analysis of the argument structure and a discussion of how this question operates, why each answer is attractive and what they were trying to do in each, and even how it might compare to other questions that are similar? This test is all about patterns, and the past is prologue, so the better you understand each past question, the more prepared you are for the next one.

Most students glance at a question, see they got it right, and then quickly move on. That approach misses a huge opportunity to really understand how this exam works.

Please let me know if that helps. Thanks!

[1800-HELPME]

Hi 1-800,

The standard I use when reviewing questions is: could you teach me the question, including a full analysis of the argument structure and a discussion of how this question operates, why each answer is attractive and what they were trying to do in each, and even how it might compare to other questions that are similar? This test is all about patterns, and the past is prologue, so the better you understand each past question, the more prepared you are for the next one.

Most students glance at a question, see they got it right, and then quickly move on. That approach misses a huge opportunity to really understand how this exam works.

Please let me know if that helps. Thanks!

Thank you Dave! That helps. I'll try that strategy.

I hope I get to recognize the patterns soon. I've been studying since April (planning to take in September), and I'm afraid of either burning out or forgetting everything or worse-- both! I took a PowerScore course (My diagnostic was a 140, and now I'm in the low 150s) and I am now going through all the Bibles. I alternate between taking timed practice tests and untimed practice tests every week and review them afterwards. I'm aiming for a 160-165. Do you think this is a good approach?

I think that maybe I'm studying "hard" but not "smart." However, I am keeping a positive attitude that I will get it in time.

Thanks again for taking the time to reply to my message. I really appreciate it. I've also read a lot of your blog posts on test anxiety, keeping a positive attitude, etc. and it's all very inspiring.