LSAT preparation: Crunch Time

Everything else
1

Given the sizable community of lawyers on Qt3 I thought I’d bring this up.

The Law School Admission Test rapidly approaches. I’ve scoured books and websites and endured a number of practice tests. Each night I pray at the altar of “WHICH OF THESE ARGUMENTS, IF TRUE, WOULD MOST WEAKEN THE GIVEN CONCLUSION,” make sacrifice of my social life in lieu of a first-born, and prepare for Him the offering of totally burnt out neurons. Naturally, this piety is a small price to pay for my future reward in the Kingdom of Legal Heaven, or at least more employability than a bachelor’s degree.

So far my experience has been one of oscillation between panicked recognition of the drastic impact this could have on my future and a contemplative calm as I remind myself that losing my cool will only decrease my test performance, both states regulated by application of Battlefield 1942 and cheap wine. As far as I can tell, this isn’t a bad approach, since all the guides tell you to be conscious of both those impulses. My experience on practice tests has been pretty typical: The Reading Comprehension is a breeze, the Argumentation sections are doable with a few tricky ones thrown in there, and the Games are a fucking bear. I’m doing well, but with occasional big deviations if I get some easy games or some impossible ones.

So it is with the utmost humbleness that I come before you, grand sages of the intarweb. What do you remember? Any interesting stories? Any advice? It’s one thing to get the dope from Princeton Review, but I’d like to hear from a more trustworthy source.

2

That’s about all I remember. I recommend something like a Kaplan LSAT course. It will teach you the tricks and give you more practice.

3

My Ole Miss sorority girl college ex-girlfriend passed the LSAT with flying colors and got her JD. Just enjoy your wine and BF1942. :-)

4

Cripes, it was almost 20 years ago that I wrote my LSAT. I feel as old as Jeff 'Imhotep" Green.

But my simple advice is this – do as many practice tests as you can, in environments as close as possible to the actual test environments – although it’s a drag, do as many as you can sticking to the time limitations imposed by the actual test. Running out of time is a problem if you’re not used to the limitations. Once you get used to the patterns of the logic games, they’ll get much easier.

Interestingly, with hindsight, I do think the LSAT is actually a pretty good judge of how well you’ll do in law school, and as a lawyer, even though it seems (and is) extremely artificial.

5

If you have the money and you need to get your scores up buy a Kaplan course. I used to work for them while in Law School and IMO they do a pretty good job. They teach to the test but they try to teach you what the test is expecting rather than focusing on “gaming” the test. The strongest part of the Kaplan presentation is also the part that most students have the toughest time with: logic games. There are actually a few basic logic game techniques that will apply to 2/3 or 3/4 of the questions on that section of the test, and if you learn them you may see a big score boost.

If you cant afford or dont have time for the course, then buy a Kaplan book. Its better than nothing and the practice questions tend to be pretty good.

If you just want free advice (worth every penny!) then here are my big 3 tips:

1)BE FAST - Most important thing: time management. The LSAT is a massive racehorse exam - you have to a read a ton. So learn how many minutes you have for each section and budget yourself. Try to memorize a simple formula (like mabye 90 seconds per question - I forget the specifics now) and check your watch every 10 minutes or so to check your pace. Don’t check your watch every question. But keep a sense of time and make sure to finish every section.

2)BE AGGRESSIVE - answer every question. When I taught there was no penalty for a wrong answer (check your books to see if this is still true). That means you should put an answer down for every question. If you get down to the wire: use the “eliminate the crap answers and hope for the best” approach. Its often fast to throw out 2 bad answers but discriminating between the last two can be hard. Don’t overstress: read the question carefully, eliminate the crap, and pick what looks like the best answer. Also, don’t second guess yourself - spend your allotted time on each question, pick an answer and MOVE ON.

3)BE COOL - Stay calm :). Easy to say. How do you do it? Eliminate all uncertainty that you have control over ahead of time. VISIT THE SITE where you take the test - learn where to park, where to enter, where the bathrooms, coffee machines and snack machines are. Don’t stress out the night before - sleep early and try to stay cool. Games are good :0. Get there early (better safe than sorry) and STICK BY YOUR NORMAL MORNING ROUTINE - if you are not a coffee-holic don’t OD on caffeine for the test. If you are, make sure to have some. Just keep the attitude that you know what’s on the test, you know how much time you have and you know what you have to do. There are no surprises.

Lastly on logic games, they generally fall into 3 categories. Two of these can be diagrammed and dealth with easily. 1)The first category is “other” which I cannot help you with :). 2)The second category is “Relationship” puzzles, example " Bob is heavier than Sue and Sue is lighter than Joe, who is equal in weight to Betty and Diana.". The tip on these is that the relations are relative - try to diagram this using lines to link up the relations but think of the lines as spring - the connection can squish down and be very very short or can stretch and be very very long. In the above example, both Bob and Joe are heavier than Sue - normally you might draw lines and show Bob and Joe as equal – but the question didnt say that. All you know is both are heavier than Sue, you know nothing about how they compare to each other - the lines connecting them to Sue could be short or could be long. You have to make the comparison using other info in the puzzle. For example, if turns out that Bob is equal in weight than Diana then you know that Joe is heavier than Bob b/c Joe is equal to Diana plus Betty. Eh, its hard to explain in text :). But most relationship puzzles can be diagrammed using the spring concept to show relative values. 3)The 3rd type (I forget the name) can be diagrammed using a grid. This works for puzzles where the information is not relative but is specific. Sadly my memory fails on the details :). Buy the book.

Fat lot of good I am,

Dan

6

Youngster!! My LSAT was so long ago it was in pictographs! :)

Which means I’m not much help to the first poster as I understand the test has changed a lot.

But I would urge him to relax as much as possible, you should take the attitude that you’ve been taking tests for years, this is just another one.

Same attitude will help for the Bar Exam, in time…

7

The LSAT isn’t “passed” - it’s a standardized entrance examination for law school. You’re probably thinking of the bar exam.

8

I can’t add a lot of advice other than what’s already been given. The “time management” tip is probably the best one–the test is designed to measure how well you manage time, as well as how well you reason through questions (as are most law school exams and the bar exam, come to think of it, at least in CA). Also, I’d stress the “don’t change your morning routine” tip, which is good for the day of any big test.

Instead of advice, I’ll give you two stories, and then tell you that I did fine on the LSATs anyway, and hopefully that will make you feel all warm and relaxed inside. First off, I got all prepped for the exam before I went–new box of pencils, mini Snickers bars, extra watch, etc. I get to the exam site and get in line and I’m looking in my bag and suddenly realize that somehow–I have never figured out exactly how–I lost my box of pencils and have nothing to write with. I figured they would just flunk me out immediately: “Oh, you forgot to bring a pencil? Yeah, maybe law isn’t for you. Step right through that door. Thanks.” I’m searching through my bag, I’m looking on the ground, I’m wondering if maybe someone stole all my pencils to sabotage me like I’m in “The Paper Chase,” etc. I finally asked the guy in front of me for a pencil and he gave me one.

Then I took the test. As you probably know, one section of each test is fake–it doesn’t count for score, it’s just put in there so they can get a sense of how hard it is, so they know whether to tweak it or how to evaluate it. But you never know which section is the fake one. It’s kind of like “The Mole,” except that it can give you a heart attack. My fake section was a games section, and it was SO HARD. It was the second section on the test. I was going through it, and I swear I did a 50/50 or a 33/33/33 guess on every single question. I was sweating, I wanted to barf or just get up and leave the room and stay an insurance adjuster for the rest of my life. I figured everyone else there was probably zipping through this section. I expected to totally fail the test. I tried not to let it psych me out and just finish the rest of the thing as best I could, and then the last section was games again which gave me some hope that maybe the first games section was fake. (Which I assume it was, since I didn’t totally botch the LSAT.)

Despite those hitches, I did just fine. So I’m sure you will do fine, too. It doesn’t pay to over-psych yourself for the LSAT. It’s a test, and I agree with Stefan that it’s a pretty decent test for what it does (unlike, say, the bar exam). If you’re relatively relaxed and have done some practice tests, I’m sure you’ll do fine. It’s a test that you can’t do a lot of intensive preparation for, because it’s more about how you think than memorizing stuff. So just take a deep breath and do your best. And double-check that you have your pencils before you leave.

Good luck!!

9

Pray they don’t put your logic games at the end. I was killing on my LSAT, and then fatigue kicked in at the end of the day – my scrambled head ensured that I totally fucked that section. I’m not sure what the point of these all-day tests are.

10

Last week, I had a day where I started at 9am and ended at 2am. Aside from lunch, I was actively working on legal matters at the client’s office. The last seven hours were even televised! An all-day test is merely prep for stuff like that.

11

I’ll just jump on board the prep course bandwagon. I can’t remember whether I did Kaplan or Pinceton Review, but I remember it helped a great deal when it came to the logic puzzles. Without a time limit, you’d probably be able to solve all the puzzles without too much of a strain. What the prep course gave me was an architecture for approaching the puzzles with speed. If you can get the hang of diagramming the things, you’re 70% of the way there.

Other than that, I can offer only this small, back-handed bit of comfort. The LSAT is like a gentle back rub compared to the face sanding that is the New York bar exam.

OK, one more thing. You’ll do fine. Seriously, it won’t be as bad as you think.

12

Is there any past LSATs on the net? I’m interested to see how they stack up in comparison to our national College test.

13

Not specific to the LSAT (which I’m thinking about taking in Dec.), but I find that the best preparation for standardized tests is to take a lot of practice exams. Practice practice practice.

  • Alan
14

1,9, baby, 1,9 :D

15

Ha!
2,0.

16

Post mortem!

After acceptance at Oregon, South Dakota, and Iowa, as well as rejection from Minnesota, Vanderbilt, Wisconsin, and Colorado-Boulder, I confirmed today with University of Denver, home of the 2004 NCAA hockey champs, and now, me.

Naturally, in my last semester, when grades no longer matter vis-à-vis the law school application process, I made the best marks of my life, with straight A’s and an appearance on the Dean’s List.

This thread was full of good advice, with the stuff about time management being the most pertinent. If there’s anything that will hang someone out to dry during that test, it’s wasted time.

My LSAT experience, despite all the conscientious preparation, still sucked and caught me off guard a lot. Consumed by anxiety, I was up until 4 a.m. the night before, and felt just awful during the session. Even though I had a whole box of pencils at the hip and a stopwatch and all the nerdly paraphernalia of standardized tests, I somehow neglected to go to the bathroom before the test. It didn’t really cost me any time, but boy did it make me feel silly to have to leave the room for that.

LSAC played hardball, and decided to make my fake section another “logic games.” I did what I could, but on the one that turned out to be real I ran out of time and had to fill in about 7 dots without reading the questions. Looking now at the answer sheet, none of them were right.

However, once we finished the third section and took a halftime break, things started looking up. By acing Reading Comprehension and one of the Argumentation sections, I kept my score fairly high. Of course, I didn’t get to find that out until the end of the month.

In retrospect, I wish I had taken a Kaplan course, especially since it seems to be most effective on the section at which I suck the hardest. On the day scores came out I spoke to another student who told me something pretty shocking. On his ACTs he scored a 19. That’s equivalent to about a 920 on the SATs, low enough to keep you out of most colleges. He took a Kaplan course and pulled a 170 on the LSAT, which amounts to 99th percentile on a much more challenging exam. To be sure, the college entrance and law school entrance exams test for different faculties, but usually the correlation is a lot stronger. He said he had Kaplan to thank.

For anyone planning to take the test, the most essential stuff is all in this thread. Practice, practice, practice…it may not make you perfect, but it’ll definitely give you a leg up. Some of the kids in that room looked absolutely terrified, a few even fled at intermission. I didn’t ask, but I’ll bet those were the ones trying to wing it.

From a macro level, this whole thing was a nasty drag. The test, though not all that masochistic as far as difficulty, is so important that it taunts you. A single point difference is huge, especially where I was. Though I’m more or less happy with my score, the fact that a minor boost would have totally changed the constellation of where I could end up almost talked me into retaking the stupid thing. The application process, despite being really nicely streamlined through a central, fully online clearinghouse, is still a pain. Acceptance, particularly at state schools, is a totally arcane and impenetrable matter of hoodoo: I spoke to people with higher numbers than mine who were rejected at schools I got into. My stats were well above the norm at Wisconsin, and yet they rejected me out of hand. Some schools ignore you for months without contact and then offer you piles of money, others string you along with sweet talk and then knife you in the back–I’m looking at you, Minnesota. On the other hand, it’s a good experience, like surviving pneumonia or something, and I’m glad to be one step closer to a law degree. I’m very happy with how it has all shaken out. GO PIONEERS!

17

Congratulations!

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First, congratulations on your acceptance. Despite the FSW decree around here, let me say, “You have taken your first step into a larger world.”

This is just to prepare you for that same feeling during the Bar exam. The Bar still reigns supreme in my life as the three most hellish days ever. Most of that feeling, like you noted with the LSAT, is because you realize all of your eggs are stacked up in one sadistic basket…

19

just out of curiosity, rywill, why is the bar not good at what it does?

20

It depends upon the jurisdiction, but generally the bar exam consists of a few days of tests on various “major” areas of law (property, criminal and crim pro, business, civil litigation and procedure, labor/employment, family, trusts/wills). For one thing, it’s just very artificial to determine if you’re qualified to advise people on a particular subject on the basis of a 3 hour open or closed book, multiple choice exam.

Secondly, since lawyers specialize (unless they work in a small town or work in a single person or very small firm) in a particular area of practice, the bar exam doesn’t do a very good job at determining whether or not you’ll be good at the type of law you’ll actually practice – since that “section” is only dealt with very generally in the bar exam.

For instance, as a corporate lawyer, the law that’s relevant to me includes contracts/business organizations/securities law/general and corporate tax/commercial law/debtor-creditor and bankruptcy law – all of those areas of law are typically crammed into a single 3 hour 'business law" portion of the bar exam. On the other hand - every single other section of the bar exam was completely useless to me, and no indication whatsoever of how I’d be as a corporate lawyer - they might as well have thrown in stone masonry, since it would be no less irrelevant. Similarly, if someone wanted to be a criminal lawyer, everything except that section of the bar exam would be useless.