Timed PT's

[VendelaG465]

How far into my studying should i start taking timed Practice test??

[ohthatpatrick]

You should take an initial one right away to make sure you have a good contextual sense of what taking an LSAT looks like and feels like.

You wouldn't expect your score to change much over the first month of studying, so if you were inclined to take a test during then, feel free, but don't get your hopes up. Do it only for the sake of experiencing the long, often-fatiguing feel of a full test. Focus on breathing, pacing, and attitude.

I think you should do at least one 35 minute section per week, though. It's important to keep reminding yourself what timed LSAT thinking feels like. It's nowhere near as thorough, relaxed, and exact as our thinking can be when we're doing and reviewing individual questions.

As you continue studying LSAT, you are hoping that your "untimed mind", which thinks deeply about the stimulus and fully vets all the answer choices until you are convinced that you are right, will come closer to converging with your "timed mind", which has to bail from questions when they're tricky / which has to aggressively seek and find answers when you have a strong prephrase / which has to prioritize doing easier questions that are more likely to lead to points over harder stuff.

In short, when you're taking timed tests, you have to take shortcuts. You don't have the luxury of fully thinking through all the problems, so you have to practice a constellation of "scrappy skills" that let you approximate your ideal "untimed mind".

So I would roughly say schedule out tests kind of like this:
- INITIAL TEST - before studying
- 2nd: 4 weeks later
- 3rd: 3 weeks later
- 4th: 2 weeks later
- 5th thru 10th: 1 per week

But make sure you're doing at least one timed 35 minute section each week, and as you get closer to test day, it will probably be more like doing one of them per day.

Enjoy the ride!