Maximize Your Final Month of LSAT Prep

Today’s advice comes from our friends at Blueprint LSAT Prep. Blueprint students increase their LSAT score by an average of 11 points on in-class practice tests, and can enroll in live LSAT prep classes throughout the country or take an online LSAT course from the comfort of their own home.

It’s the final month before the June LSAT. If you’re not quite where you want to be yet, don’t panic: just like Morgan Spurlock, you can do incredible things in 30 days. In fact, most students see their biggest score improvements during the last weeks of prep.

Here are a few ways to maximize your final month of LSAT prep:

Assess your strengths and weaknesses

By now you should have taken some full-length practice tests. Review the questions you got wrong and the ones you got right, but have no idea why. Do you see any patterns?

Find the question types you’re struggling with, and review the basic approach for tackling them. Don’t move onto drilling those question types until you’ve fully reviewed, since drilling is only useful if you’re practicing the correct techniques. A professional quarterback wouldn’t spend hundreds of hours practicing a faulty throwing motion, and you shouldn’t drill questions without the proper fundamental approach, either.

Focus on your weaknesses, but don’t get complacent about your strengths

All too often, a student who didn’t get the score they wanted on test day will tell us “I just had a bad test” or “The questions didn’t line up for me.” Looking back, these students usually missed more questions than average in their weakest areas, either because they guessed worse than usual or because of the pressure of the exam. Since you’re likely to get questions in your weakest areas wrong, working on them during this last month of prep will reduce the variance of your test scores and limit the possibility of one of these “bad days.”

However, that doesn’t mean you should stop drilling questions in your strongest areas. Unless you’re getting every question right every time, there’s still room for improvement in these areas as well. And, more to the point, it’s easy to get a bit rusty if you don’t practice regularly.

Don’t stress about speed… yet

For most students, it’s still too early to worry about speed. Why? Isn’t the test all about performance under time pressure?

Yes: it’s about performance under time pressure. As we said above, it’s essential to work on your weaknesses and eliminate careless mistakes. If you try to work on speed before shoring up these problems, you’ll still miss just as many questions as before because you’re using shortcuts or bad techniques to cut down time. Timed drills are all about ingraining the right habits so that they become second nature; that’s why they aren’t particularly helpful until a few weeks before the exam, when you’ve had plenty of time to lock in your techniques.

Simulate test conditions

If you’re taking your practice tests in bed while listening to music and eating a bowl of Doritos, test day is going to come as a nasty shock.

Sit at a desk or a table. Find an environment that’s quiet, but not too quiet—people are going to be rustling papers, coughing, fidgeting, sneezing, and so on. Take 35 minutes for each section, and the appropriate breaks between them. At least once, take a full-length practice test and include the writing and experimental sections, so you know how much stamina you’ll need. All of this will help you feel (relatively) comfortable on the day of the LSAT.

The last month of LSAT prep is when you should be putting in the most work—there are less new things to learn now, but more to practice. That said, it’s also the most common time for LSAT burnout. Don’t be afraid to take a day off! There is, in fact, life outside the LSAT.

Good luck, and happy studying!

For more study tips from Blueprint LSAT Prep visit their LSAT blog, Most Strongly Supported.

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• All The Advice You Need to Conquer the LSAT
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