I posted this on it's own thread, but of course this is a good place for it too:
How I got a 178
I've gotten some PMs asking about my study methods so I thought I'd share. I definitely feel that I was lucky to get the score that I did, as I walked out of there feeling like I had missed at about 5 questions and hoping that the scale would give me a 177. I'd be embarassed to tell you which ones I did miss, because they were a couple of the easiest questions on the entire exam, in LG which I normally ace. Both were at the beginning of my first section, and I'm pretty sure I was a little thrown off and distracted by actual test conditions (having people around me, etc.)
I didn't take any prep course. Normally classes like that make me feel like I am being talked down to at least some of the time, which makes me bored and frustrated and keeps me from paying attention when they get to the part that matters. That's just a matter of personal experience though; I am not in general against prep courses, and probably some courses are not like that. Historically I also have had good luck studying for standarized tests on my own from books, so I didn't feel that it was necessary to spend the money.
The very first thing I did was read every word of the "preparing for the LSAT" pdf from LSAC. I worked through all the problems therein, untimed, and was pleased to discover that I got them all right. I thought this would bode well for my future.
Second, I took a Kaplan diagnostic (using their software) and got an appallingly bad 156. Then I worked through the lessons in their software, and took the two additional practice exams therein, scoring 152 and 165. It's not clear that the practice tests in software have very good diagnostic value, though, because they are on screen which makes a lot of the problem types harder to manage. At this point I was very confused about the difference between inferences and assumptions -- it seems silly now -- but the software helped a bit.
My worst section at this point was LG -- like most people early on in their LSAT practice, I would run out of time well before finishing a section. After finishing the Kaplan software, I worked through the LG bible; then took all the LG sections from 1 to 34 under timed conditions; if I ran out of time I would note where I had stopped and then continued to finish the section; I also noted how much time I spent on each of the 4 problem sets, though it's not clear whether or how this information helped.
During the time that I was working through the LG bible, I also did about 3 full modern LSATs per week, starting with #35 and going forward. After finishing each one I would study all the problems I had missed, and try to figure out how to better set up the games to save time.
At this point my LG performance was really solid -- generally I could finish the games in about 20 minutes, and have 15 minutes left to rework anything that seemed hard or confusing. My LG and RC were both averaging around -2 per section (helps to have kept taking a few practice tests while studying LGs, because I had a good idea of my relative LR and RC performance at this point). Since -2 LR per section is -4 per test, I decided to move on to the LR bible. I read everything in the bible, but skipped the problem sets because a lot of them contain the problems from modern tests, and I did not want to spoil those tests' practice value. Now I was trying to do 5 full tests per week.
(BTW I disagree with the LR bible on one important topic -- I do better if I read the question stems first. There's an example that should be famous, of an LR passage where the stimulus has statements from two people but the question only asks what person #1 thought -- to this day I have never read what person #2 said. That's an extreme example, but in general I think it's easier to focus on the relevant information if you know what you are looking for; and often the question will be one of a few standard choices, which you can recognize at a glance. However, on the RC passages I read the passage first, because it's too hard to remember that many questions and also take in the passage. Anyway, back to the study plan.)
Finally my LR was down to an average of -1 per test; meanwhile as I moved forward with the full length practice tests my RC scores were getting worse, settling around -4 per test, so that my overall average per test was a steady 175. I later found out this probably had something to do with RC getting slightly harder as you move forward from #35 to the present.
All that was left to do was to shore up my RC score. I went back through all my previous tests and studied all the questions I had gotten wrong. I added an extra RC section (from the premodern tests, working backward from #34) to each of my practice tests as an "experimental" section. For a while I tried Voyager's method of writing down a short summary of each paragraph as you go but this did not seem to help and I eventually gave up on it. I did find it helpful to, as he says, box every name and every term that is defined, and underline words that indicate a point of view or a transition. I also put a star next to anything that sounded like a main point or conclusion. For passages that had 4-5 paragraphs, if any questions asked about a paragraph by number, I would write the paragraph number next to each one to avoid stupid mistakes. If the passage was easy for me (I'm a science person) I would do very little underlining and try to get through the passage and questions quickly, so that I would have more time to work through the more difficult passages.
There aren't any shortcuts, or at least I didn't come upon them. Just practice practice practice, under conditions as close to the actual test as you can manage.
The most important thing that helped me was improving time management. I learned to work very quickly on questions that were easy, to try and save up some time to go back to the tough questions after the end. As you read in the bibles, the questions get harder as you go through the section, and if you get cocky because you made it through the first 10 questions in 12 minutes you can still very easily run out of time by the end. I was trying to make it through the first 15 in 15 minutes. Any time I thought I had the right answer but wasn't completely sure, I'd draw a box around it; and if a question was taking too long, I would mark my best current guess and then draw a box with a star in the corner and move on (after 2 minutes you should to move on from any LR question; and after 10 minutes you should move on from an RC passage or game, unless it's the last one and you don't have anything you badly want to recheck). On the actual test I had about 10 minutes left at the end of each LR section to go back and rethink all the hard questions, and a similar amount of time on the RC. My first section, the LG, is where I made my two scored mistakes, I think because the unfamiliar conditions distracted me and slowed me down.
If I could do it again, I would at least once want to have someone "proctor" the test, where they keep time for me, so that I would get used to starting and stopping my timer when someone else was keeping time (stupid I know but I only properly used my timer on 2-3 sections of the actual test); and at least once do a practice test in a public place like a library or bookstore, to get used to ignoring the distractions of people around me; alternatively it might've helped to practice with a news broadcast running behind me, though that might've been too extreme. I believe if I had done this I'd have aced the LG section too and made a 180 -- not that I'm too upset, but don't get me wrong, those two questions will definitely haunt my dreams if I don't get into my top choice school.
Followup: someone asked how long this took -- it was about 2 1/2 months, probably around 40 hours per week. Sheesh.
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