How to Structure Your Logical Reasoning Prep

Unfortunately, many people study for several months with no progress. This can happen due to a myriad of reasons, but one of the most common reasons is a lack of structure. Students are often lost on what they should focus on and how to plan things out. Unfortunately, many prep companies focus solely on teaching the concepts without explaining how to learn them, so in this post we will discuss effective study techniques to help you propel your score that are backed by science and experience.

Accuracy, then speed, then endurance

Learn to walk before you run. Learn to run before joining a marathon. This makes intuitive sense, yet so many people don’t do this on the LSAT. Too often, I see people taking practice test after practice test when they haven’t developed the ability to complete most questions under timed conditions. Others will take multiple timed sections each day, hoping the accuracy will come eventually.

Don’t think about the LSAT backwards. Completing all the questions under timed conditions means nothing if you get them wrong. Focus on accuracy first. Even when you take timed sections, don’t worry about completing all the questions. Instead, focus on getting 100% accuracy on the questions that you do complete. Once you consistently have a high level of accuracy and confidence on those questions, then you can start to focus on speed. Here’s how to handle each of these three phases.

Phase 1: Accuracy

During this phase, you are focused on mastering individual skills rather than trying to learn the entire test. If you try to learn everything at once, you will likely feel overwhelmed or you will have difficulty recognizing the patterns within individual concepts and question types. Here’s how it works:

1.      Learn a specific concept or question type through a course, book, or tutor

2.      Drill questions of that type untimed. Start with easier questions and work your way up to the harder questions until you reach a high level of accuracy and confidence. Make sure to review your mistakes

While targeted drilling is important, studies suggest that getting mixed practice is beneficial because it trains you to adapt to various situations. Once you feel comfortable within that question type, take a practice test or section. If you struggle with getting through all the questions, it’s okay to do it untimed at this stage. It is also okay if you haven’t learned all the strategies yet. Seeing unfamiliar questions will force you to adapt and will help you see the relevance of future concepts, allowing you to learn them more efficiently.

Phase 2: Speed

You are ready to begin this phase in your prep if you have a high level of accuracy (-3 or less) on untimed sections. This is where you can begin incorporating more timed sections and timed practice tests into your routine. I recommend doing two timed sections twice per week, with review on the remaining days. At this phase, review not only questions you got wrong but also questions that took a long time. If there are question types that you are consistently having difficulties with, it will be beneficial to drill those as well.

If timing is a major issue and has drastically affected your performance, try the following:

1.      Take your time completing a section and see how long it takes

2.      Take additional sections with one less minute than the initial time until you feel comfortable

3.      Reduce the time by an additional minute and repeat the process until you have reached 35 minutes

Phase 3: Endurance

Now that you have the timing and accuracy component of the test down, it’s time to focus on developing the stamina to sit through the entire LSAT. At this stage, we should reduce the number of sections we take and focus more on taking full length exams. Aim for 2-3 practice tests per week, with review.

Burnout can start to negatively impact performance at this stage. If your score begins to decline or if your ability to focus gets worse, don’t be afraid to take a couple days off.

How you plan out the remaining days of the week depends on overall performance. If you are only missing a few questions and there aren’t any noticeable patterns in your mistakes, you won’t need to spend much time reviewing, so you can focus on drilling full sections. But if you are missing a large amount of questions, the remaining days will be better spent on drilling along with additional review.

Throughout all three of these phases, it is beneficial to have a “review day” once every few weeks where you go back and redo questions you struggled with months ago.