Welcome to the latest installment of Law Admissions Q&A, a monthly feature of Law Admissions Lowdown that provides admissions advice to readers who send in questions and admissions profiles.
If you have a question about law school, please email me for a chance to be featured next month.
This week, I will address questions about challenges test-takers face when preparing for the LSAT.
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Dear Dan: After two months of studying for the LSAT, I find that I am still struggling a lot with the reading comprehension section. I have been able to make significant improvement in the logic games and logical reasoning, but reading comp continues to give me trouble. I have taken many practice reading comp sections at this point, and I’m at my wit’s end. What can I do to improve my score on the reading comp section? -Not Improving
This is a common problem those who study on their own encounter: What do I do other than practice, practice, practice? It sounds like you have been able to naturally improve your performance on the other two sections, which is great, and likely means that your time is best spent focusing on improving your reading comprehension score. Here are three strategies to do so:
— Review the questions you got wrong: Other than taking lots of practice tests, reviewing questions you got wrong is the most important aspect of self-preparation. Spend as much as five minutes figuring out why your answer is incorrect and why the “credited response” is the best answer of the five available. Ask yourself: How does this answer choice fit in with what I know about the passage from my reading? Very often the incorrect answers will either conflict with the passage or will not be addressed in the passage. Identifying trends in these wrong answers will help you.
— Break down the process: Instead of doing section after section, try doing a bunch of untimed reading comprehension passages. Break each passage down into pieces, spending as much time on each step as necessary.
First, read the passage and do your best to understand the main point and structure. Then, begin to answer the questions by eliminating answer choices that are inconsistent with your understanding of the passage. For each answer choice you eliminate, try to identify why you want to eliminate it by pointing to both specific lines in the passage and your general understanding of the passage.
Finally, choose the correct answer from among the remaining answer choices. Again, look for both general and specific support for that answer in the passage.
— Read editorials and op-ed pieces from high-quality newspapers: Although it is impossible to find exact replicas of passages used by the LSAT — they are generally adapted from academic papers and other long publications — editorials and op-ed pieces in newspapers are good sources of outside practice. As you read an opinion piece, try to identify the author’s thesis, how he or she supports it and the structure of the piece as a whole. Practicing these skills in a context outside the LSAT will help you implement them on the test.
[Erase three common LSAT preparation myths.]
Dear Dan: I am preparing for the June exam, focusing my study time primarily on the logic games, which is my weakest section. My approach has been to work through all the published logic games, starting with the games from the oldest tests and progressing to the games from the more recent tests. I have noticed that my score on games sections has dropped as I hit the tests numbered in the 30s. Is there a reason for that? -Logic Games Changer
There is a reason! An important thing to remember about the LSAT is that it is constantly changing in response to the skills and preparation levels of those who take the test. Although the reading comprehension and logical reasoning sections have not changed much over the past 20 or so years, with the notable exception of the introduction of the “comparative” passage in 2007, the logic games have changed a lot.
Logic games from recent tests tend to have more straightforward setups, fewer rules and fewer deductions to be made from those rules. In other words, there is a lot less to understand about the game before moving on to answering the questions. The tradeoff for this is that answering the questions tends to be a bit more difficult and open-ended than in older tests.
[Learn to identify and address three types of LSAT logic games.]
What you’re experiencing in the tests in the 30s is what I call the “high-water mark” of complexity on the logic games. Games from that period tend to have very complicated setups and lots of interaction among rules, which means that you can end up spending a lot of time up front understanding the game.
I recommend to my students that they focus on the more recent tests, as they are more representative of the games that are likely to come up on tests in the near future.
If you start working through games from tests numbered in the 50s and 60s, I expect your results will bounce back up.
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Improve LSAT Logic Games, Reading Comprehension Prep originally appeared on usnews.com
