Two Major Mistakes

Practice tests show you where your skills are right now. 

Does taking lots of them lead to the fastest improvement?

Practice Tests Are Best for Measuring Progress

A practice test gives you valuable information: a realistic score you might get on an official LSAT.

But once you have that information, your next study session is better spent reviewing the weaknesses the test exposed.

If you’re scoring in the 150s, taking four practice tests in a week is likely to give you four different versions of the same result. You’re spending hours confirming that you’re a 150s scorer instead of developing the skills you need to be a 160s scorer.

You don’t need another measurement. You need to improve what you’re measuring.

Practice Getting Questions Right

Spend most of your study time drilling individual questions and taking timed sections.

During drilling, forget about the time it takes to solve the question. Do everything you can to solve each question correctly, one at a time. 

Read carefully. Understand the argument. Make a prediction. Read every answer choice. Pick an answer because you understand why it’s right.

Timed sections let you practice those same skills under time pressure without committing to an entire test.

The goal isn’t to complete as many LSAT questions as possible. It’s to get better at solving them.

Stop When You Miss

When you miss a question during drilling, stop.

Don’t glance at the correct answer, scan an explanation, and move on. Instead, figure out exactly what tripped you up.

Maybe you misunderstood the passage. Maybe you failed to see an important assumption. Maybe you didn’t engage with the passage enough to make a strong prediction. 

Whatever happened, keep working until the question makes sense and you understand what you should have done differently.

That might take five minutes. On a difficult question, it might take thirty.

It might feel like that time is slowing down your LSAT progress. It’s not. It’s actually the most valuable LSAT study time you could have.

Review While the Mistake Is Fresh

Drilling and timed sections make it easier to learn from mistakes because you can review them immediately or very shortly after you make them.

If you miss a question while drilling, the reasoning that led you to the wrong answer is still fresh. Review the question and figure out where your understanding went wrong.

A full practice test can put hours (or days) between a mistake and your review. By the time you return to a question, it may be harder to remember what you were thinking when you picked the wrong answer.

Keep the feedback loop short. Solve questions, identify your mistakes, and learn from them while you still remember what you were thinking when you made them.

Blind Review Before You Check the Answer

When you miss a question, don’t immediately look at the correct answer. Try to solve it again. The Demon won’t show you the right answer until you ask for it. 

Once you’ve committed to an answer, check the right answer. Then use the written and video explanations to figure out where your original reasoning went wrong and what you should have done differently.

If you still don’t understand the question, use the Ask Button. Tell our tutors exactly where you’re stuck and they’ll help you make sense of it.

Missed questions are opportunities to learn. Make the most of them.

Don’t Practice Missing Questions

Until you’re consistently scoring in the 170s, spend much of your time reviewing mistakes.

Suppose you take a practice test and miss twenty questions. Then you take another test two days later and miss another twenty. If you haven’t learned from the first twenty mistakes, you’re repeating the same process and hoping for a different result.

Slow down. Do fewer questions. Learn more from each one.

Practice solving questions correctly instead of pulling the slot machine lever on practice tests over and over again.

Use Practice Tests to Check Your Progress

Practice tests still matter. You just don’t need to take them constantly. 

Drill, take timed sections, and review your mistakes carefully. If you complete individual sections from the same test in LSAT Demon, you can merge them to get a raw score. That gives you another way to check your progress without sitting down for a full practice test every time.

Then, every once in a while, take a practice test to see whether those skills translate to a full LSAT.

Use the result to see where you're at, then go back to building your skills.

Your practice test score is an outcome of your LSAT skills. Stop trying to improve the outcome by measuring it over and over. Build the skills that produce better scores instead.

 

Questions? ​ daily@lsatdemon.com

Start studying: https://lsatdemon.com

Scholarship Estimator: https://lsatdemon.com/scholarships

More LSAT Demon resources: https://linktr.ee/lsatdemon