There's got to be a better way to decide whether or not to retake the LSAT

If you took the LSAT on June 6^th and were less than pleased with the outcome, then consider attending our free online review of the exam next Monday night (7/11) at 8pm EST.  Two of our instructors will be breaking down some of the harder questions from the exam and offering advice on whether or not retaking in October is a good choice for you.

Speaking of ‘the great retake debate’, here are a few questions you should ask yourself as you begin to make your retake considerations:

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Warm Up Those Medulla Oblongatas!

Yet another sign of my geekiness: I love Tuesdays because that’s when the NY Times has a science section. (And for those who are struggling with science passages on the LSAT, it’s not a bad place to start getting some extra practice – though throw in some more technical material as well). Last Tuesday there was an article that caught my eye: Brain Calisthenics for Abstract Ideas is about research on training kids’ intuitive senses about abstract problems. What the white lab coat folks did is develop a computer program that made kids match graphs to equations. The kids didn’t need to solve anything, they just needed to match them on gut instinct (which here means a general understanding of how equations graph out).

I love it! I used to teach math and I did some of this sort of thing – we’d always work on estimating answers before we learned algorithms (the formal steps for solving something). I think building up a student’s intuitive sense of a problem is essential. The question is how to do it for the LSAT?

One way we do it is through the LSAT Arcade. Our curriculum team came up with a bunch of different games, that work very specific mental micro-muscles and builds your intuitive sense of things.

Another tool in your arsenal is lots of practice! Read more

On To The LSAT!

For those of you who just walked across the stage – particularly those who managed to do so without face planting – we salute you.  Graduation ceremonies are the important culmination of 4+ years of careful study, even if it may have been in the art of carousals, the opposite sex, and parental money laundering.  In honor of all the new graduates out there, we have themed our latest Logic Games Challenge around the pomp and circumstance of the season.

Try out the easy or hard version of our new logic game, submit your best answer explanation to our forum, and you could potentially win a fabulous prize (either $200 off a course, or some books) from us.  Prizes are given to the best answer explanation for both versions of the game, as well as to one randomly selected participant.  So far, only 33% of respondents to the hard version of the challenge have been able to answer all of the questions correctly.  Do you have what it takes?

Early Versions of the Reading Comprehension Section of the LSAT

The LSAT is less than a week away and people are often asking for final tips about test day.  Here’s my best of:

1.  Easy does it (sort of). Don’t take any full prep tests within the last two days. The brain is a muscle, let it rest.  But, you do need to keep it toned. So take a few timed sections each day and review   a bunch of the work you’ve already done. The day before the LSAT re-do sections you have already completed and on the morning of, redo one easy logic game on your way to the test center to get your brain moving.

Caveat: if you know you’ll do better with momentum, go right ahead and get momentumming– go crazy the week before the LSAT.  Some people like to do a six-section LSAT a week before test day to make 5 sections seem easy.

2. Pack-up the night before. Get all your pencils sharpened, print out the ticket (and make sure your printer doesn’t cut off any part of it), make sure you have a passport-sized picture, and find that analog watch your dad gave you years ago. Make sure you know how to get to your testing center – there’s nothing worse than freaking out on your way to the test. Plan to arrive early and to enjoy a coffee outside while you do a warm-up section, a crossword puzzle, or something that is fun and slightly intellectual. Read more

Good Advice Is Hard To Come By

You want to go to law school and we want to help! Why? Because we want you to be the next Atticus Finch! (And your mom called and asked us to give you some advice – and it’s so hard to say no to such a sweet lady). If you have a low score, we can help! But what if you’re done with the LSAT and all you got is a low score and a lousy t-shirt?

We’d love to give you a bunch of admissions advice, but we won’t. That’s not what we’re great at. MY mother said to do one thing and do that thing incredibly well, (and it better not involve gambling, professional wrestling, or reality TV). So, don’t listen to us – instead read some stuff read by people who know more than we do about Law School Admissions. Here’s Ann Levine’s take on low LSAT scores (how low is low?), as well as some ideas about transferring up. I think/hope neither of these will apply to many of you, but for those of you on the fringe of the score spectrum, these are some good ideas  – though, studying and re-taking the LSAT may also be smart!

Listen to your mother, and Ann.

Rule Equivalency Questions are Meant to be Broken

The LSAT is a funny beast. On the one hand it stays very consistent – it’s still paper and pencil, still given simply four times per year, and still requires a number two pencil. But, on the other hand, it keeps throwing us small curve balls, small changes in what it asks of us. And these changes happen in every section: Logical Reasoning no longer has multiple questions about one stimulus, Reading Comprehension now has comparative passages, and Logic Games, around the year 2000, entered the Modern Era (read the intro to our Logic Game Strategy Guide to learn what that is). Excitingly, there’s a new Logic Games curve. It’s the introduction of a new question type – Rule Equivalency questions.

If you’ve taken one of the more recent LSATs, you might remember a question that asks something like “Which of the following, if substituted for the rule that . . . would have the same effect . . .” Some of these were quite easy, some were rather tricky, and they were all novel.

If you have already learned the basics of each of the games, take a look at our White Paper on this new question type.

Don't Get Left Out of the Admissions Equation

Remember the good old days of the SAT exam, when there was no such thing as taking the test too many times?  Didn’t do so hot the first time?  No worries, you could buy books, prep courses, private tutoring and acupuncture until you were where you needed to be score wise. In terms of the LSAT, though, students often ask: “Should I take the LSAT more than once?”

In the LSAT world, the policies of admissions offices are not nearly so cut and dry.  Some schools will indeed take your highest score, while others will take the average of all the LSATs you’ve sat for.  Other admissions offices we called claim to take a “Holistic” approach to reviewing your application (my guess is that this involves lots of yoga and meditation, but perhaps there is a different interpretation!).

Check out today’s post on JD Mission’s blog for a list of the top 15 schools and what their policies are.  JDMission is a law school admissions counseling firm that offers end to end admissions consulting services from a team of accomplished legal professionals and law school experts.

Apparently, everybody is writing a book these days. John Beer, our Chicago teacher-poet penned an award-winning collection of poems. And LSAC released another book of LSATs. These are the most current ones out there (I guess I could be referring to John’s poems, but I’m talking about the LSATs now). The nice thing about this is that all of these tests included a comparative passage in the reading comprehension section. It’s good to get more practice with this passage type. LSAC started using those in June 2007, so there aren’t  too many examples out there.

The other good news is that this is another way to study on the cheap! Since so many LSAT preppers are ramen-noodle fueled college students, let me outline a cheapo method for prepping for the LSAT on your own:

1. Buy some LSATs: 10 More… The Next 10… and, introducing…. 10 New Actual LSAT PrepTests w/Comparative Reading. (Only a lawyer could appreciate these gripping titles.) By the way, you can no doubt get most of these on Amazon for cheaper. Also, you can buy some pretty cool collections of questions from Cambridge LSAT – (if you go this route, you probably you won’t need the first book above, 10 More…)

2. Buy our guides. (And hey, go right ahead and save a few bucks and buy them on Amazon – let’s be real.)

3. Download our syllabus (you get free access to a syllabus and a bunch of online resources when you buy our books). Follow the directions. Stir frequently over medium-high flame.

All in all, this should cost you about $120. Then, if you need to, you can buy recordings of our classes for a couple of hundred. Boom, you’ve got quite an arsenal.

Anyway, congrats, LSAC! I will say that the covers are getting increasingly depressing, but let’s face it, this is the LSAT, not The Master and Margarita (my favorite book).

There's a lighthouse at the end of the tunnel.

Yes, it is time.

Look deep into your heart, young LSAT-geek, and commit!

Start by taking a diagnostic test and seeing how long the road ahead is. If you don’t know squat about the LSAT, read our intro guide, and perhaps attend a free workshop.

If you’re not some super standardized test geek, you’ll need some prep materials. At a minimum, buy some guides and some practice tests. (As you can imagine, we like ours – especially our new Logical Reasoning Guide – a.k.a. the Beast – but apparently there are some other good ones out there).

Along with this more formal LSAT prep, start improving your brain. Put aside your young adult fiction. Yes, set aside Twilight and Hunger Games (and if you haven’t read Hunger Games, you really should, but after the LSAT). Instead, pick up the Economist, Smithsonian, Foreign Affairs (not as sexy as it sounds, sorry), Scientific American, and a few other academic journals. It will fill your head with interesting facts and train you to keep focused as you work through tough texts. Here’s a bit more on good LSAT reading choices.

On your way back from the library, stop off at the gym and start doing that frequently. Study after study shows that exercise helps your brain grow new connections. Here’s a recent NY Times article about walking and your hippocampus.

Now, you’re healthy, you’re carrying some snobby reading material, it’s time for the more formal stuff. Start up a weekly schedule of studying – and I mean actually set a schedule. How many hours on which days. Start easy on the practice tests – I would recommend one every 2-3 weeks for now, increasing to 1+ per week in the last 6 weeks. Remember to study strategies, then implement them with practice sets, then integrate them into practice tests. And review those tests deeply!

But, once again, in answer to your question. Yes. Begin!

MmmmMmm, bacon!

Since many of you will be taking the LSAT this coming weekend, I thought it was appropriate for me to channel my inner Jamie Oliver and make some dietary recommendations to all the February LSAT’ers (if you haven’t seen Jamie’s TED talk,  check out the first few minutes) out there. Truth is, we probably all should heed more nutritional advice from the likes of Jamie O – so why not let the LSAT be the incentive for change in your dietary habits? After all, chances are the exam has controlled every other aspect of your life for the past several months!

While I am by no means a medical expert or professional nutritionist, I do consider myself a highly skilled ‘Googler’, and I took some time to wrangle some helpful pre-exam tips from across the web to keep your mental steam throughout the entire LSAT exam:

Breakfast is essential. Nearly every expert that offered an opinion on what to eat before an exam started with the first meal of the day: breakfast. Some suggestions for a healthy pre exam breakfast are non-sugared cereal with fruit (try raisins, blueberries and/or or bananas), or if you prefer a hot breakfast, go with an egg sandwich with whole wheat bread or whole wheat English muffin. Read more