How often should I be taking practice tests and doing drills while going through the content?

adamkmiller2001

I've been making my way through the syllabus but not quite sure how much I should be extending my study outside the questions and focused drills. Should I be aiming for a PT once a week and focusing my efforts especially on the question types I know? Should I just be taking drills with the questions types I've covered? What has been a good strategy for other people?

grtology

In my view, the challenge with doing full practice tests in the middle of your curriculum is that you will very likely encounter question types that you're unfamiliar with during those tests. While this could be a welcome and healthy challenge, it could also be a waste of fresh test questions. Remember that there are only so many published, full-length practice tests, so you (generally) want to try your best to leverage those untouched questions as efficiently as possible. For me, this meant waiting until I had a good understanding of the whole curriculum before proceeding to full tests. Thankfully, the curriculum includes a few practice tests once you've completed the core, so you can jump right in and develop your own weekly prep test routine.

All this being said, I suppose it ultimately depends on your timeline for taking the LSAT and/or applying to law school. If you plan to take the August administration, I say go for it, take both the curriculum and prep tests simultaneously. If you have more time, I'd focus on deeply understanding the curriculum and developing good habits before taking full-length tests. Perhaps as a compromise, you could take a full practice test alongside the curriculum, see how it feels, and calibrate from there. Wishing you the best of luck in your studies.

bertmann

Above comment is correct. A deep understanding is the best thing you can do for your score before jumping into practice tests. If trying to be a high scorer, you need to understand on your own why you got a question wrong (ie the flaws and everything else--just letting JY explain it to where you think you understand isn't enough). Personally, I finished the 7sage curriculum and jumped immediately into practice tests but while I learned the question types and stuff, I didn't feel like I fully had the basics down. Thus, I bought the loophole and it built on my 7sage knowledge perfectly. Also, I did everything the book said (such as making probably 500 flashcards to learn every question stem, their keywords, back up plans, etc and reviewed them constantly for weeks) and by the time I finished, I was still around -5 to -6, but felt like I understood the questions much better on review and within a month or two of practicing got down to -3 LR avg with -2 to -0 being in my wheelhouse (and rarely ever worse than -4). While I'm still working to improve (especially on my RC), it was all about getting the basics down, and then only after doing so, practicing a ton that I really saw the improvement I wanted to see. If your goals are top scores, embrace the grind and do the extra stuff they say to do that you don't really want to. I truly think hard work is the differentiator on this test. Now if you're on the other side of the spectrum of wanting to basically get an average or slightly above average score, I'd also agree with the above comment. You can mix both practice and curriculum. The lower your score is rn, the faster it'll improve initially. I jumped ten points in a few months from my diagnostic with not very intense studying. If that's your goal I'd look to get a baseline understanding of the question types and flaws and continually drill and do a preptest or two a week with strong reviewing. But know that once you hit the 160s, there's a very strong plateau that is hard to overcome because the curve breakers begin to come into play and mastery is required to jump into the high 160s-170s. Anyways, the best thing I can say is to keep at it even when discouraged and review, review, review! Best of luck fellow LSAT friend!