Taking the Law School Admission Test (LSAT) is a major undertaking; it requires a properly planned study strategy that takes into account your strengths, weaknesses, and available time.
Make a schedule and stick to it.
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First Steps
The first step is to assess your strengths and weaknesses. Think about what you’re naturally good at and what you’re not as good at. Reflect on your previous academic history. Maybe you’re good at logic but struggle with reading comprehension. More explicitly, you’ll need to use practice exams and questions to determine where you need to improve. The very first thing you should do is take a diagnostic that establishes your baseline. Essentially, if you don’t where you’re coming from, it’s going to be difficult to know where you need to go. That being said, for most people the answer is everything. You’ll need to study everything 😀
After figuring out what you need to work on, look at your schedule. If you’re not clear on your schedule then I suggest you start keeping one. The calendar on your email app (I use outlook) can be a very good friend. Consider all the obligations you have, such as school, work, or family commitments and map out a what a typical week looks like. In an ideal world you’d be able to focus just on the test. But, we don’t live in an ideal world! Then, look at your daily and weekly schedules to see when you can fit in study time. You should aim for consistency and quality – try not to study when you’re tired and distracted. But every bit of study time counts!
Balancing LSAT preparation with other commitments can be difficult. That is why it is critical to create realistic study goals. Make your main goal a set number of tests and prep material (study books/tests, exercise sets) to finish. Then, break that into smaller, attainable goals. This makes the procedure less intimidating and less overwhelming and also allows you to track your progress. After setting your goals, you need to figure out how long and when you’ll study. Like I mentioned, consistency is key – cramming isn’t going to work, this is a skill test, not a knowledge test. Also, you need to study when you’re at your sharpest; how you study is going to be how you perform (there’s actually cognitive science to back me up here). I usually tell my students to think of studying for the test as a part-time job, so think 15-20 hours a week. And, keep in mind that having fun and taking breaks from studying are equally necessary. Make time for things that relax and recharge you. Physical activity, being social, unwinding with a book or movie, etc, these are all very important.
Overall Structure
Ok, so what’s your studying going to, a bit more concretely, look like? Basically, you want to learn the material first and then take practice tests. Go through your study materials and learn the concepts, questions, variations, etc first in an untimed environment. The actual concepts that underlie the test and questions aren’t terribly difficult, the issue that I’ve found with my students is that there’s a lot of them to learn and some of them are used in unconventional ways. If you take your time, have good materials, and approach studying correctly you should be able to understand the underlying framework of the test. More specifically, take your time to clearly understand the concepts, do exercise sets to put that understanding into practice, review the exercise sets until you clearly understand what you got wrong, and work your way through all of the areas of the test that way without focusing on one area to the exclusion of others. I generally follow the following sequence with my students: first the fundamentals of logical reasoning in a verbal context, then a breakdown of the reading comp section, followed by the games, and finishing with the arguments. The logical reasoning sets the foundation, the reading comp doesn’t have a lot of complex material but improvement generally comes from reading and reviewing a LOT of passages, and the games helps with more subtle logical concepts that come up in the arguments. And as my students work through the material they’re constantly doing exercise sets that cover what they had already learned.
When it comes to taking practice tests, it’s not just about getting through as many as you can. It’s also important to review. If you got a question wrong, try to figure out why. However, if you’ve done the studying properly you’ll find that most of your mistakes when it comes to the tests will be execution mistakes. You’ll run out of time, you’ll use your focus, etc. And that’s precisely the point of taking tests – to work on your execution. There will certainly be questions you won’t understand, but the point of taking tests isn’t to learn the material, it’s to develop your execution. You’re taking tests so that you develop your capacity to apply what you know under test conditions.
Another important step in the process is keeping track of your progress over time. Keep track of your performance on each exercise set and each practice exam – your grade/score, the number of questions you properly answered, and the amount of time it took you to finish (for the tests). Monitoring changes over time might help you stay motivated and highlight your success.
Actually Studying
With respect to the nuts and bolts of an actual study session, essentially you want to use active learning techniques. These methods involve interacting with the material, so you’re not just passively reading, but actively processing the information.
A big part of what you’re training is your ability to stay focused and by far the most important thing I teach my students with respect to developing fundamental reasoning capacities is how to use summarizing. Giving yourself a summary of an argument/paragraph/etc after you read it is a very handy trick to train you to be focused. If you’re diligent about giving yourself a summary then pretty soon it’ll get tedious to go back and skim so what you’ll start doing is you’ll start engaging your imagination/visualization more and you’ll then summarize by simply describing what you’ve imagined/visualized as you read the paragraph. And that’s actually the goal, not the summary. If you’re actively imagining/visualizing as you’re reading then you’re engaged and focused.
Summarizing more broadly is incredibly important and useful. Don’t just read a chapter explaining some part of the test like conditional reasoning or causal reasoning but instead engage with the material by rephrasing it to yourself at natural break points (end of a section, end of a paragraph, etc) and making an outline on the basis of your summary. Often students get lost in the weeds of annotating and end up skimming just so that they can find the ‘best’ sentence to highlight.
Teaching others is also a useful technique. Explaining LSAT concepts or strategies to a friend or a study group can actually help you learn better. When you teach something, you’re not just repeating what you’ve read. You’re putting it into your own words and making sure it makes sense. And related to that is discussion groups. By discussing with others, you communicate what you know but you also expose yourself to different perspectives and solutions. You might find a new way to approach a question, or better understand a concept through someone else’s explanation.
Self-Care
Studying for this test is stressful, but it’s important to remember that taking care of your well-being is just as important as mastering logical reasoning or reading comprehension. Developing the ability to manage stress, learning plateaus, cultivating a positive mindset, and dealing with setbacks is really really important.
By far the best thing in my experience for dealing with stress and the more psychological/emotional obstacles is cultivating some sort of mindfulness practice. I do 30-min meditation sessions regularly but even as little as 5min a day can make a difference. There are plenty of tools online for meditation but simply sitting and focusing on your breath and bringing your focus back to it is really all you need. What you’re doing there is you’re training yourself to re-center, so that when the negative emotions come you can, over time, develop the ability to observe them more dispassionately and prevent yourself from getting stuck in negative loops. Related to that is developing a positive mindset and attitude. Once again, there’s plenty of info out there how to do that but the key thing, in my experience, is to practice re-framing your situation from a more positive perspective: challenges are opportunities for growth, mistakes are opportunities for learning, etc. Speaking of which, setbacks and plateaus are simply a part of the process. You’re not uniquely incompetent because you’ve hit a plateau, it happens to everyone and is simply a consequence of a test this complex that requires this much time and effort. A good strategy is to re-evaluate if you’re maybe a bit burned out and need some rest and relaxation. Likewise, setting short-term milestones and celebrating small wins can provide a boost and help you maintain momentum. And remember, every practice test, every question answered, is a step closer to your LSAT goals.
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