u/Content_Attention816

▲ 38 r/LSATprep+1 crossposts

Tip from a 180 Scorer: Review Questions You Got Right

On test day, all that matters is selecting the right answer choice. If you get the answer right, you get the same points regardless of whether it was the result of 5 minutes of intense deliberation or an outright guess. To be in the best possible position on test day, though, a key focus of practice should be to select correct ACs and eliminate wrong ones for the right reasons.

Now, not every question you get correct needs to be thoroughly reviewed. But I think a lot of questions, if not most (especially early on), should be. This applies even to high PT scorers. Why?

  1. If you get a question right for the wrong reason, you may have mistaken confidence about your approach on a future question. In my opinion, this is one factor that helps explain large score variance between sections/PTs. This can obviously apply to hard questions where you're between 2 ACs and stumble into the right one, but also to numerous other questions where you simply didn't need a perfect grasp of the relevant concept(s) to get the question right. When I personally redid a few difficult questions from when I just began studying for the test, I actually got some questions wrong that I previously got correct.

  2. An "easy" question can be made difficult by including a more compelling wrong AC or by making the right AC less obvious. By studying the process you used to get questions right, you can build habits that produce a buffer against more difficult versions of questions/questions types. I like to try to think about what could've made a wrong AC correct, or what would've caused me to rule out a correct AC.

  3. Accurate pattern recognition. Each LSAT question has a structure, a skeleton if you will. Understanding at a high level how the structure of the question and the ACs (as opposed to just the content) leads to the right answer will make you better in those inevitable situations where the content just isn't clicking.

A common inclination is to just reviewed flagged questions. Resist it. I have stumbled across numerous questions that I got right (and didn't flag) where I simply overlooked or misread something, or didn't see why a wrong AC was so compelling. Although it sounds somewhat paradoxical, making the LSAT harder for yourself by iterating so much and challenging your own intuitions can actually make the LSAT easier in the long run.

How can you do this? I used 7sage, LSATHacks (free), and powerscore (free) for question explanations, often using all of them for even just one question. One thing I focused on was explaining why I thought each wrong AC was wrong before viewing the explanation and making sure it matched. There were actually a few times where I disagreed with a reason for ruling out an AC or a justification provided for the right one (or a miscellaneous comment made during explanation). That doesn't mean I think the question was bad, but I do think that even published explanations by experts are fallible. Train your brain to test explanations rather than simply accepting them.

tl;dr: don't just focus on getting questions right, get them right for the right reasons.

reddit.com
u/Content_Attention816 — 4 days ago