Not sure how and what to do now Forum

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fire_fried_rice

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Not sure how and what to do now

Post by fire_fried_rice » Thu Jul 12, 2018 2:08 am

I took the LSAT in June in as an international student. Before the actual test, I was doing BR average of 173ish with occasional dip to as low as 165. The actual test that I sat for came up with a score that I am really not satisfied with and I plan to retake it this October.
The problem, I'm not sure how I can consistently bring myself to score in the high 170s. I know the different approaches to the types of questions and about 80% of the time, I can correctly guess what do look out for and what the expected answers would be. Thus, it seems that I do have basics pretty much covered, but I still get questions wrong because 1. I wasn't able to completely comprehend what the stimulus wanted to say 2. The answer choices were worded in a way that I found it hard to connect back to the stimulus. For example, I feel pretty confident about questions such as identify the flaw, and even times when I cannot immediately spot the flaw, I can still do POE and find the correct answers. But there are times when even when I know what the flaw is, I cannot pick the right answer because the way answer choices are written. If we are to categorized certain questions difficulty level as easy, intermediate, and hard, it's the hard questions that pull me down. What should I be doing to overcome that? Some would say to do the drills, but I feel drill at that point doesn't really help me solve the similar questions on other PTs.
I would really love to have advice on this problem. This has been the most frustrating part of studying LSAT and I would love to see at least some light into this problem so that at the very least, I can see that there is a solution to the problem.
P.S. Sorry for the jumble, the frustration builds up as I wrote and looking back, I'm not sure if I made any sense at all! :(

empiricish

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Re: Not sure how and what to do now

Post by empiricish » Thu Jul 12, 2018 11:57 am

Not sure how helpful this'll be, it's very general, but:

Every time you take a practice test (and you should be taking full, five-section PT's, IMO--throw in a random section from an old test to make it realistic), you should obviously go back over it and see which questions you got wrong. But you should also mark during the test, and go over afterwards, the questions that you found difficult but got right. This will give you an idea of what kind of thinking leads you to the right answers most often, and which kind of thinking trips you up. Think hard about why you missed or got each difficult question, and how you would tackle a question like it if it happened again.

The returns from this strategy are marginal, obviously. You're still going to miss questions. I don't know if "consistently in the high 170s" is possible for you--that's a pretty difficult thing to be consistent at. Focus on improving your scores, and take a lot of PT's to make it consistent.

Good luck!

DerKatze

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Re: Not sure how and what to do now

Post by DerKatze » Fri Jul 13, 2018 12:44 am

fire_fried_rice wrote:What should I be doing to overcome that? Some would say to do the drills, but I feel drill at that point doesn't really help me solve the similar questions on other PTs.
I typically don't post advice on studying for the LSAT (because I don't know much about studying for it--so take this with a grain of salt), but I disagree with this statement. There are only so many ways to word an answer. I understand the sentiment. That said, drills (for any test, not just the LSAT) don't just include doing the questions then looking up the answer--they involve figuring out what went wrong too. If the way the answers are worded is tripping you up, then try to figure out and analyze why you are getting tripped up. If you get confused by the logical structure of the answer choice... there are a finite number of ways to structure a sentence in English, so you can figure out and learn how answer choices on the LSAT tend to be worded.

On the other hand, if the problem is that you are getting tripped up by the denotative or connotative meaning of specific words, I don't think there is much you study to make up for that, other than increasing your vocabulary.

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