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The Three Worst LSAT Mistakes (And How to Avoid Them)

I’ve been teaching the LSAT for ten years now, and I often see students make three terrible mistakes.

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Online LSAT

I’ve been teaching the LSAT for ten years now, and I often see students make three terrible mistakes. Here’s what you really need to avoid:

  1. Underestimating the time needed to prepare

There’s a bit of folk wisdom in the LSAT world that claims the optimal amount of time to study is somewhere between three to four months. Like clockwork, three to four months before each LSAT administration, we see a spike in enrollment in our online course. One of our first lessons dispels this notion: for the vast majority of students, three to four months is not enough time to study.

What began as a marketing tactic from old-school test prep companies has morphed into industry standard pedagogy. What a shame. The fact is that the LSAT requires you to develop skills that will rewire your brain. The Reading Comprehension section, for example, tests your ability to read for reasoning structure. Most college-level courses don’t test for this, and most of you are not reading for reasoning structure when you read casually. If you’ve ever seen a Logic Games section, meanwhile, you know that it’s only superficially written in English. The actual underlying language is conditional logic, which you’ll have to learn to manipulate masterfully. This is a skill in which most students have no formal training.

Other skills include parsing convoluted grammar, evaluating causation logic, and identifying and describing flaws in arguments. These skills, like all skills, have to take root and grow. You need time to train. There is simply no substitute.

I tell our students to play the long game. After all, we spend four years bolstering our GPA, yet the LSAT is weighed more heavily in law school admissions. From that perspective, spending a year or two to prepare for this test feels a bit more proportional, doesn’t it?

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  1. Setting an unrealistic schedule

Even when people give themselves enough time to study, they sometimes set unrealistic schedules. It’s far better to recognize, embrace, and plan around your limitations than to expect that poor study habits or fleeting motivation will change overnight because of the LSAT.

Let’s look at an analogy, which is another skill the LSAT will test. I have a problem with snack foods. I know that if they’re within reach, I will eat them all and lick the wrappings to boot. Just as I don’t stock my pantry with potato chips and expect myself to summon a miraculous and unprecedented discipline, so you shouldn’t expect yourself to pull off a heroic study schedule—especially if you’ve never done anything like that in the past. Above all, the Sage Socrates warned, know thyself.

If you are in school, recognize that it’s going to be difficult to study for the LSAT. Plan on something light, like four hours a week. Same if you’re working full-time. Study first thing in the morning, not late in the afternoon or evening when you’re exhausted. This requires you to draw out your study schedule to a year or two. I know that’s bitter pill to swallow, but it’s better than the alternative: underperforming on test day.

If you are fortunate enough to be able to study full-time, do not study more than thirty hours a week. You need to give the new ideas and concepts time to percolate. You also need time to relax—burnout is a real phenomenon.

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A student who sets out a realistic year-long study schedule begins with the fundamentals covered in our Core Curriculum (e.g., logic, grammar, causation, argumentation, the scientific method). She practices those skills on problem sets from pre-PT 35. Finally, she starts to take timed, full-length PTs—proctored by an app like the free one we’ve made for iOS and Android—and she reviews her tests rigorously using a method like 7Sage’s Blind Review.

  1. Wasting irreplaceable LSAT PrepTests

To date, the LSAC has only released eighty or so PTs. Only three more are released each year. If you exhaust all of those PTs, you have nothing left to train with.

This realization is important, because the key to improvement is to do timed, proctored, full-length PTs, followed by blind review. You need to be frugal in your consumption of PTs.

Under no circumstances should you spoil the recent PTs by using them to learn fundamental skills. You should indeed learn the fundamentals on officially licensed LSAT materials, but not on the recent ones!

We help our students avoid this mistake by stocking our Core Curriculum and problem sets with LSAT questions from the 1990s. We keep every test from PT 36 (December 2001) and above pristine, so you can take each one under timed conditions.

A related mistake is to take too many PTs in quick succession, without mining all the information each one has to offer. It’s kind of like weight training: you can’t hit the bench press everyday and expect to gain strength. You need to give your muscles time to recover. Similarly, you should not take a PT everyday. You needs to give yourself time to process what you’ve learned.

What PT “burn rate” is right for you? That depends on a whole host of factors, but the minimum is probably one PT every two weeks, while the maximum is three PTs a week. When in doubt, take it easy. Our online discussion forums are perpetually peppered with posts from folks who want feedback on their personal circumstances and appropriate study schedules. Come and join the discussion.

J.Y. Ping is the co-founder of 7Sage LSAT Prep, which is dedicated to making law school accessible to everyone through high quality and affordable online LSAT prep. He is also the co-founder of PreProBono, a non-profit that helps economically disadvantaged and underrepresented minority pre-law students acquire and utilize law degrees for careers in public interest law. He graduated from Columbia University in 2007 and earned his J.D. from Harvard Law School in 2011. 

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