Navigating that space between excitedly reading John Grisham novels and sitting down for the first time in a 1L Civil Procedure class can be tricky.  In order to make that journey a successful one, here are three big mistakes to avoid.

#1: Underestimating the test

So you sailed through college with an impressive GPA at an impressive school thanks to your impressive SAT score?  Well so did most of the people taking the LSAT.  If you’re figuring that just because you’ve been in the 95^th percentile your entire life, you should be in the 95^th percentile on the LSAT, it’s time to realize that the competition has stepped up.  The pool of test-takers no longer includes slackers and dropouts-to-be like it did in high school.  You’re attempting to distinguish yourself from other well-schooled college graduates who have the desire and aptitude to go after an extremely demanding professional degree.

And that’s not all.  This test is designed to be difficult and challenging for exactly those people.  Sure you might know someone who walked in cold and scored in the 170s, but I know an NFL cheerleader.  That doesn’t mean I plan on taking my pompoms and hot pants out to the field anytime soon.  The reality is that the vast majority of people who walk into the LSAT relying merely on natural aptitude end up sorely disappointed.  Spend the time to understand what you’re up against.

#2: Rushing your prep

Many other students who will consent to prepping for the LSAT treat it more as a side dish than an entrée.  I’ve seen many students walk in four weeks before the test, saying they want to study hard and get the best score possible… as long as it doesn’t interfere with work, school, family, friends, fantasy football or hot yoga.  It just doesn’t work that way.

The LSAT demands a different way of thinking about problems and analyzing data that doesn’t lend itself to cramming facts into your brain over a short period and hoping to hold onto them just long enough to get through the test.  In order to train your brain to think through the LSAT, you really should spend at least two months preparing and making the test a priority in your life.

#3: Hiding behind excuses

Now that you’re coming into the LSAT process more aware of what is required, the excuses have to stop.  Nothing inhibits scores more than an attitude that focuses on the negative.  Time and time again I’ve seen students enter the classroom repeating “I’m not that smart”, “I don’t do well on standardized tests”, “I’m too slow” and similar self-defeating statements.  All those ideas serve to do is to provide excuses to hide behind.  There will be challenging and difficult moments over the course of studying, but the best students step up to those moments and make an effort to fight through them rather than accepting a mediocre fate.

One of my favorite quotes comes from Henry Ford, who once said, “Whether you think you can, or you can’t, you’re right.”  Attitude is huge.  Keep yours in the right place and you’ll avoid these common LSAT pitfalls and be well on your way to that Civ Pro class.

Some hard-nosed season savorers refuse to don cozy sweaters until the first technicolor leaves blaze from the trees, while others curse retail materialism as they abstain from trimming the tree until the day after Thanksgiving (or at least after the post-gorge nap). I do my part by dutifully (and barely) holding out until October 1 to buy and consume (often on the same day) my first bag of Autumn Mix candy: oh, the perennial pleasure of sugary candy corn and waxy, mellocreme pumpkins! This is nothing out of the ordinary for me, though, as I am a confirmed candy fiend- a dessert-first devotee. I must be reminded to eat a good, square meal, but I never forget to cap it off with some sort of cavity-inducing confection.

On Test Day, your treat at the end of the twisting-and-turning, brain-bending LSAT will be the Writing Sample, that final, unscored 35 minutes of argument and evidence. The Writing Sample is the sweetheart of many a test taker, largely because it is a breath of unpressurized air- the fact that this exercise is unscored provides a reprieve from points-obsessed plowing through the objective sections of the LSAT. But don’t make the mistake of treating the Writing Sample as a trifle, like so much marshmallow fluff: this section is a critical measure of your quick-thinking, reasoning ability, and writing skills, an assessment that law schools will see for themselves in black and white.

Paradoxically, flexibility and structure are the meat-and-potatoes of the Writing Sample. You must assess the pros and cons of each (equally valid) option under consideration by a decision-maker with a set of central criteria; these criteria must guide your confident, evidence-based recommendation of one option (not a wishy-washy compromise between the two). Your writing should rest not on your opinion, but on the option for which you can make the best argument: support methodically the best choice for that decision-maker’s needs. To do this best, you must be flexible enough to weigh the pros and cons of each option before choosing which to advocate, as well as to recognize (but then rebut) some strengths of the opposing argument. At the same time, in order to guide the reader strongly toward your favored conclusion, you must also stay organized and focused by designing and adhering to a structured outline before you begin writing; Kaplan provides our students with a template to accomplish exactly this, no matter the prompt.

But the Writing Sample isn’t a completely brittle exercise: the nature of the task allows creativity to sweeten the deal. You can draw upon human experience and common sense to support your case, even if that information isn’t listed in the prompt. Knowledge of semi-universal phenomena such as rush hours, weekends off, and supply-and-demand can add morsels of ingenuity to enrich your essay. Keep it reasonable, though: no venturing off into a fantasyland, just stir in a few bits of everyday life to make your argument more relatable and, thus, more convincing.

It is certainly tempting to give in to a buzz crash at the end of the 5^th multiple-choice section of the LSAT, not giving enough credence to the unscored Writing Sample. But doing this would deprive you of the just desserts of the whole test experience: one more chance to show law schools that you’ve got what it takes to be a successful student and accomplished attorney. Consider the Writing Sample to be the (chocolate-covered) cherry on the top of the LSAT experience, one last opportunity to serve up your sweet lawyering-skills, but with a little personality sprinkled in.

Initially, test takers consider logic games often the most intimidating section of the LSAT, primarily because of their unfamiliarity.  For the majority of students, the time element of 4 games in 35 minutes is the biggest problem.  That is why it is important to become very skilled and confident in diagramming (sketching) the games.  Once a test taker has learned a systematic approach to setting up logic games, LG’s can be a great opportunity to pick up points on the LSAT and to raise your score.

In order to understand how to set up a logic game, first we need to understand exactly what LG’s are and what they are not.  While thinking how to define exactly what a LG is, I find myself thinking of a book I recently read called What the Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell.  By the way, if you are reading this and are not familiar with his books, they are very interesting and have my endorsement.  In this book, Gladwell references national security expert Gregory Treverton. Treverton made a very interesting distinction in Smithsonian magazine June 2007 between puzzles and mysteries.  According to Treverton, puzzles have enough evidence or information given to make deductions and reach the answers.  “They can be solved.”  Mysteries however offer no such comfort.  Treverton’s interpretation on mysteries is that they have no answers.  There is simply just not enough information necessary to reach a definite conclusion.

Ok, so at this juncture, you may be asking yourself how this relates at all to any of the three points in the title.  Here it is.  As an LSAT instructor, I see many students initially perceive LG’s as mysteries, and at some point in diagramming them, they simply give up and try to limit the answer choices to two or three possibilities and chose the best one hoping for luck.  Then, as students learn to diagram and interpret the rules and develop reasoning and deduction skills, they begin to see the LG’s as puzzles.  Each game having absolute answers can be conclusively proven.  At this point is when a student begins to see their LG scores go up consistently and progressively.  And that’s the point; LG’s are puzzles, not mysteries.  Check out our newest course, Logic Games on Demand, to learn how to demystify them.

So why are the LG’s tested and how do they relate to law school.  These games tell you absolutes, but not always blatantly.  Often times, they want to see if you have the deduction and reasoning skills that are necessary to see what is not directly in front of you.  For example  if 1, then 2; and if 2, then 3; so if 1, then 3; and if not 3, then not 1.  The skills tested in that basic example are elementary versions of the skills that are necessary to think through legal issues and complex situations.

By Tom Flesher

As an LSAT instructor, it’s easy for me to be thankful for the test. After all, I get paid to help students learn our methods and get higher scores on test day. Students, though, sometimes ask why they have to take the LSAT or wonder how it’s relevant to their law school career. In that spirit, I’d like to share three reasons to be thankful for the LSAT.

1: It’s predictable.

The LSAT always tests you on three things in fixed proportions. You’ll always see one section of Logic Games, one section of Reading Comprehension, and two sections of Logical Reasoning, plus an experimental section that could be any of the three but doesn’t count against your score. You won’t be surprised with geometry or sentence completion questions, so you don’t have to over-prepare the way that prospective business or graduate students do for the GMAT and the GRE respectively.

The predictability extends to how questions are written. Despite the lawsuit language in the instructions, LSAT questions are not designed to have multiple correct answers. They have one right answer and four rotten ones. Plus, the four wrong answers follow specific patterns, so well-prepared students can make educated guesses based on eliminating some of them. That leads into point 2.

2: It’s coachable.

The LSAT is by far the most coachable of the admissions tests. Many students – future dentists, doctors, and economists – are tested on field-specific knowledge before they’re admitted to their schools. Future pharmacists need to know organic chemistry. Future financiers need to know geometry. Future law students need only to be able to think clearly and efficiently.

Trying to teach a student a semester’s worth of physics in a few weeks will sometimes be a losing proposition. Trying to teach a student how to solve Logic Games or find a conclusion is not only much easier and much more dependent on that student’s ability to think – it’s also a lot of fun.

Finally…

3: It teaches you essential skills for law school.

The LSAT tests your ability to read long passages strategically and understand them, to analyze arguments, to understand logic, and to make deductions about how rules and facts interact with each other. In law school, you’re rewarded for your ability to read long opinions strategically and understand them, to analyze legal arguments, to understand the logic underlying the law, and to make deductions about how laws, opinions, and facts interact with each other. Even though you’ll never be asked to solve a Logic Game in your first-year Property class, you’ll definitely see logical proofs arise in areas like the Coase Theorem and the Rule Against Perpetuities. Students who do well on the LSAT do better in law school not because they’re smarter but because their skills are sharper in the areas that count.

Law school applicants are a competitive lot. They are always trying to get the upper hand. Therefore it is no surprise that I occasionally hear the questions, “Which one of the four yearly LSATs is the easiest? Some LSATs are easier than others, right?” The short answer to this question is, “No, no test is easier than any other.” However, this can be misleading. This does not mean that all tests are EXACTLY the same difficulty, as that is not possible. It is quite challenging to determine if two questions will be the same difficulty to the testing populace, so determining if complete tests are exactly the same becomes a supreme effort. There is also the issue of personal variation and opinion. If you allow one person to take two tests of about 100 questions each and then ask them which one was more difficult, they are going to express an opinion. Factors such as timing mishaps, fatigue, and a few really difficult questions will inevitably lead them to say one test was harder than the other. However, the very next person might feel the exact opposite about the degrees of difficulty. In short, all people do not unanimously agree about the complexity of a given question, and thus the amount of trouble they have with it will vary as well.

Hypothetical situation: Two test takers are completing the LSAT, and we review two particular questions. Both questions are Logical Reasoning, the first being a low difficulty Parallel Reasoning and the second being an ogre of an Inference. The first person is well prepared for the test. She has taken a Kaplan course and spent countless hours mastering the LSAT. She flies through the Parallel Reasoning question getting a quick point towards her score. Though Parallel Reasoning is widely considered one of the hardest question types on the test, she was ready. The Inference question gives her trouble, and it becomes one of the few questions that she misses. This scenario is something the test makers expected. Now our second person did not prepare very well. He has no idea how to answer Parallel Reasoning questions, so he misses one that he could have gotten easily. The monster Inference question comes around and he gets lucky. His goldfish Deloris just won Best-In-Show and he selects (D) as a tribute. Unfortunately, he does not get bonus points for guessing correctly on a really hard one. He only gets a few questions correct, and so his score is far below the first test taker. The moral of the story is this: even if test makers believe that the difficulty of questions on two given tests is virtually exact, the unpredictability of a given day’s test takers is going to create variation.

Due to this potential for unpredictability, the LSAT utilizes a scaled score. Your percentile score is based on how you did in comparison to other test takers on that particular test. For this reason, if a test happens to be marginally more difficult or less difficult, your percentile score would be the same because it will still be based upon your success relative to the others. Assigning the label of “more difficult” to a test just means that that particular test required fewer correct answers to attain a 50^th percentile score, a 151. On average it takes 61 correct answers to achieve a 151. On some tests that number might be 60 and on some tests that number might be 62. It is not an exact science, and student variation will create different interpretations of test difficulty.

The important thing to keep in mind is that though one test might be slightly more difficult in your own opinion, your score would still reflect your capabilities in relation to other test takers. The LSAT is a standardized test, and thus the content is predictable. If you prepare yourself effectively, then you will be ready for any and all questions that the LSAT throws your way, regardless of the difficulty.