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Preptest Usage Guide

There are essentially two broad types of LSAT practice– focused practice, and timed, full-length practice tests. For focused practice, we can take parts of the tests and use them for making improvements to a particular skill. Full length practice tests are initially there to measure your progress, but then as we move forward they will be more important for practicing timing and endurance.

PT Usage Guide

PT Usage Guide

OLD PT Range

NEW PT Range

Use for…

1-35

101-111

Use these for drilling and practice.

36-50

112-124

Use these for timed sections.

51-79

125-147

Use these for PTs. (you can use some of these for timed sections to practice A/B passages)

80+

148+

Only use these as directed.

There are no rows in this table

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Terminology Guide

Core Curriculum (CC): This refers to the set of lessons on 7Sage created by J.Y. Ping – you might hear this also referred to as “the lessons” or “the syllabus.” These are self-guided lessons, with videos and practice problems from LSATs 16-35.

Blind Review (BR): What happens when you finish a Practice Test (PT)? You should not immediately look at the answers! Instead, you should go back to the questions that you were a bit unsure about, checking to see if you picked an answer you are still satisfied with. Put differently, BR takes timing out of the equation and just assesses whether or not you understood the question – can you get it right untimed? Your overall score assesses your timing and fundamentals, while BR assesses just your fundamentals.

Logical Reasoning (LR): This is short for “Logical Reasoning,” which is another LSAT section. In this section, you will be asked to answer a series of short questions. Each question is self-contained and will assess your reasoning abilities in a variety of ways: strengthening or weakening arguments, finding conclusions and premises, creating analogies, etc. There are 25-26 questions.

Low-Res Method for RC: This is a way to take notes for Reading Comprehension (RC), where you jot down a few key words/ideas for each paragraph. The idea is to sketch the skeleton of the passage so that you can refer back to it during the questions.

Reading Comprehension (RC): This is short for “Reading Comprehension,” which is another LSAT section. Similar to LG, there will be 4 set-ups (or “passages”) with questions that follow them. You will be given passages about science, art, social sciences, and law – you will then need to answer questions about what you’ve read in those passages.

Practice Test (PT): This refers to the official practice tests that you will take in studying for the exam. You want to take many PTs in order to familiarize yourself with the content of the LSAT prior to taking the real exam.

Drill Bank

This is a collection of drills that can be slotted in, depending on what the student is weaker in. Some notes:

Frequency: Ideally, the student does at least a couple of drills on each non-PT day.

Drills are not uniform. Some might be as short as 15 minutes, while others may take over an hour. In many cases, the duration can also be toggled to meet the student’s schedule.

This guide is broken up by LG, LR, and RC. However, some drills can probably be applied for other sections. Be creative and don’t be afraid to go off the beaten path!

Universal Drills:

Stopwatch Drill : Take a section with a stopwatch (counting up) rather than a timer (counting down). Take the section at a comfortable, but brisk, pace, and only look at the stopwatch after you’ve finished. Focus on accuracy. This is to see what your base time is, and how you perform when you are relaxed.

LR Drills:

Argument Drill: Take a set of 10 questions from an LR section. If you’re still missing 1-3 star level questions, focus on these first. If you have high accuracy with 1-3 start level questions, choose 10 difficult questions. For each one, read the argument and analyze it. Then, go and watch the video on 7sage. If you missed any inferences or assumptions, write it down, take detailed notes, and review later. Then review again tomorrow. Watch the video after reading each argument, and don’t answer the questions until after you have watched the video for each argument in the set.

Pre-Phrasing Drill: Go through a question and try to predict the answer without looking at all at the choices. You can either do this for a particular question type or a mixed set of problems. You can also do derivations of this for particular question types (e.g., NA questions you try to find the gap, weaken/strengthen/flaw questions you try to find the biggest problem with the argument, etc.)

Challenge LR Drill: Design an LR section just of 4-5 star questions. Try to complete it in 35 minutes - it will force the student to effectively utilize time-management skills.

Confidence Drill: Go through an LR section and treat each answer picked as the final answer - no wavering. Don’t be sloppy but go with the first intuition on the answer. Use this to assess confidence.

Content Drill: Self-explanatory. The student should pick a question type they really struggle with and do a problem set from that question.

Wrong Answer Journal Review: Self-explanatory. Go over questions they’ve missed previously.

RC Drills:

Argument Drill: For each passage, read the argument and analyze it. Then, go and watch the video on 7sage. If you missed any inferences or assumptions, write it down, take detailed notes, and review later. Then review again tomorrow. Watch the video after reading each passage, before answering any questions.

Low-Res Drill: This is just about working on the student’s low-res summaries. Go through the passage and focus on getting the “best” low-res summary after one read-through. Quiz yourself afterwards and see how accurate your low-res summary is.

Memory Drill: This one is a derivative of the low-res drill. Read the passage once and have a good low-res summary. Then, try to do the entire question set without looking back at the passage! This is really hard. You’ll need to rely on your low-res summary and memory to do this.

Challenge RC Drill: Design an RC section just of 4-5 star passages. Try to complete it in 35 minutes - it will force the student to effectively utilize time-management skills.

Content-Specific Drill: Self-explanatory. The student will just pick a passage type you really struggle with and do a problem set from that question.

Wrong Answer Journal Review: Self-explanatory. The student should go over questions they’ve missed previously.

Confidence Drill: Go through an RC section and treat each answer picked as the final answer - no wavering. Don’t be sloppy but go with the first intuition on the answer. Use this to assess confidence.

Stop/Start Drill: Do an RC section where they go question-by-question (or, in the case of RC, pausing after the passage) and clock yourself. The student should pause once they have the answer and check if it was right + note what could have made them faster.

Passage Fundamentals: The student should do just the passage and push themselves to squeeze everything they can out of it and write extensive summaries on paper.

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