My life is pretty boring these days– I don’t have much to post about other than my LSAT preparations. The actual exam is in less than a month, so now is crunch time. I’ve felt less prepared for the LSAT than I remember feeling for the SAT, AP, or GRE, probably due in part to me being out of school and occupied by mind numbing repetitive work for three years. But some of that is also due to the LSAT simply being a hard exam.

The rest of this post is about my preparations and results so far– mainly for my own records and review– so you can stop reading now, unless for some strange reason you’re interested.

I started out about three months before the exam by casually reading through the Princeton Review LSAT book, a couple dozen pages every day or two, as well as the Princeton Review book on Law School Essays to get an idea about what kind of people apply to law school. About 2 months before the exam, I started taking the practice exams. I’d do one section at a time, whenever I had time. I didn’t time myself, and I’d listen to music in the background to keep myself from getting bored. After five of these practice exams, I finally scored 180 on one of them, at which point I decided to start timing myself (and stop listening to music in the background).

Timing makes a huge difference, and my score dropped considerably. During a timed exam, I’d record where I was at the end of time, then finish the rest of the section. At first I’d do pretty well on the questions I did get to, but finish short of quite a few questions. As I sped up, I’d get to more questions, but end up missing more. With my fifth timed exam, I was able to finish barely within the allotted time, although my score still needs quite a bit of improvement. I’ve also yet to do all four sections in one sitting.

I now have about 25 days to do another 25 or so practice exams. I plan to do the next six exams with all four sections in one sitting, then the rest with all four plus the unscored section together. I also plan to eventually start getting up at 7 AM to do the practice exams, since the actual exam is going to be in the morning, and I need to train my head to start thinking in the morning, which it is not accustomed at all to doing.

By exam time, I hope to get my time down to 5 minutes under the allotted time for each section, and my score to at least 175 consistently, but hopefully closer to 180. Below is a table of my practice exam results. The “Date” indicates the year/month the practice exam is from, the “Scores” are, simply, scores, and the remaining columns indicate the number of questions I missed in each section.

Notes:

1998, Sept: For the second arguments section, after time was up, I went back and “corrected” an answer which actually resulted in me changing a correct answer to a wrong answer.

1999, Oct: Did two sections at 8:00 AM before work and the other two at 12:30 PM.

2000, Dec: Did this in a noisy Barnes & Noble bookstore. Started reading through PowerScore books.

2002, Oct: Raw scores were out of 100 total. Finished the PowerScore LG book; didn’t seem to help much.

2003, Dec: Finally broke back into the upper 170s! Then again, this might’ve just been an easy prep test.

2004, Oct: Raw score out of 100, but more imporantly, why am I back to 174? :(

2004, Dec: Raw score out of 99; for once my timed and untimed results are identical; still poor though.

2005, Jun: Raw score out of 99; tough curve, but games have definitely gotten easier lately.

2005, Oct: Raw score out of 100. What’s with all the variance in total possible raw points?