Just Not Improving

bastod13

Over the past month and a hlaf, ive done ~2 hours of drilling every day, WAJ for drills, Preptests once a week, and over 6 preptests Ive basically gotten a 158-162 on every single one of them. Starting to get very discouraged at the fact that Im just wasting 2-3 hours of my day every single day to not improve.

LSATmakesmeLSAD

don't think of your study time as "wasting time". It's an investment! part of doing well on the test can depend on the mindset that you have when studying. As a pessimist, I will say that I have seen some improvement from just going into pts and drills with a positive mindset. You are at least in a decent scoring range and your score would suggest that you do have a grasp the foundational concepts of the LSAT. I think at this point for you, you need to really scrutinize your mistakes. Are you getting certain question types wrong consistently? are you losing the most points towards the end of a section? How often are you changing correct answers to wrong answers? These are some of the things to consider to really weed out your weaknesses. It's easy to get lost in the score sauce, so it's critical that you trust the process and make note of the small wins you make each time you study. Hope this helps a little!

bastod13

@LSATmakesmeLSAD said:
don't think of your study time as "wasting time". It's an investment! part of doing well on the test can depend on the mindset that you have when studying. As a pessimist, I will say that I have seen some improvement from just going into pts and drills with a positive mindset. You are at least in a decent scoring range and your score would suggest that you do have a grasp the foundational concepts of the LSAT. I think at this point for you, you need to really scrutinize your mistakes. Are you getting certain question types wrong consistently? are you losing the most points towards the end of a section? How often are you changing correct answers to wrong answers? These are some of the things to consider to really weed out your weaknesses. It's easy to get lost in the score sauce, so it's critical that you trust the process and make note of the small wins you make each time you study. Hope this helps a little!

It's definetly mindset dependent at some point, but that doesn't affect me too much. For the types of questions I get wrong, its usually the classic, the hard SA/NA/Weaken, and APs that i've gotten much better at. But the strength of questions I get wrong went from my first couple of tests being 1 star: ~95% accuracy, 2 star: ~90% accuracy, 3 star: ~90% accuracy, 4 star: ~65% accuracy, 5 star: ~25% accuracy; and i realized oh man my 5 star accuracy is really bad. So i changed how I went about the test, I try to go through the first 10 questions in 10 minutes, and I do this pretty well, to give me 25 minutes to do the harder 15, but this hasn't really helped me cumulatively, its helped my accuracy on 5 star Q's go from ~25% to 50%, but i've seen a decline in my 2 star and 3 star answers. I feel like theres some sweet spot between giving myself extra time for the 5 stars, without undercutting my 2 and 3 star questions that Im just not finding. And my RCs are just sitting ~ -6/-7, I'll get 2 passages 1 question wrong, and 2 with 6 or 7, or just 1 RC where I get rocked and miss 5/6.

What I don't understand is that it's not a nervousness thing either, I practice with the questions I'm bad at, and hard versions of them, and get ~9 out of 10 right consistently with good timing, and on RC Ill drill 2 hard passages, answer the questions faster than pace, and either go flawless or make 1 or 2 mistakes. Its just been rough for me to see that qualitatively I believe im improving, and im only 50% of the way through drilling from first PT to first test day, and 33% of the way from first PT to second test, and that theres a lot of time left, but to doing very well and not being seeing any improvement whatsoever is rough

L up North

Not sure if this is helpful, but it may be worth doing some drills just for accuracy, meaning untimed/less questions, and making sure you're following each step for each type of question every time. For me, I would do only timed drills and PTs over and over again, but would miss some easier questions and still had a hard time on harder questions. Turned out, I needed to step back and make sure my brain was doing each step accurately for every question. I noticed a couple of steps I wasn't doing all the time on the easier questions which meant I didn't have a good foundation when it came to harder questions. I might have been able to get away with skipping a step or two on shorter drills when my brain wasn't tired or when I wasn't rushed, because I was generally good at the test, but when I was moving quickly on timed full sections or on multiple sections in a row (like a PT), my brain would default to being sloppy because it was tired. Doing a high volume of timed drills and sections can reinforce unhelpful habits, so instead of volume and timing, accuracy might be a better thing to focus on until you start getting really consistently good results on untimed question sets, then integrate in more timed drills. Maybe start with sets of 10 questions, one question type, * to *** questions, and really think through each step you're doing one each question. Eventually those steps will become easier to go through quickly. Then start adding in the harder question, and then add in some longer timed drills to build that accuracy endurance up. Also, it is WAY easier to stay motivated when you see a bunch of correct *to *** questions that you know you've done perfectly with one or two harder questions you've missed- then the harder questions you've missed seem easier to approach and understand why they were wrong. Bottom line, you may get more out of studying less questions slowly, and spend less time overall studying, and harder questions get way easier when you have those foundational steps down accurately for easier questions. Sorry for the novel. Your situation sounds similar and this it was helped me. Hang in there- you're already scoring better than most people who take the test!