Ahh! Four weeks from Saturday! The October LSAT is less than an official month away. For those of you who will be nervously assembling your pencils and tearfully parting ways with your cell phones/girlfriends/boyfriends/over-eager roommates, there’s something else you should be struggling to part ways with. It’s called The Super Pile. 

The Super Pile was bestowed its name by a tutoring student of mine who resisted it for months. We’ll call her Rhoda.

Rhoda would come in with her practice book dog-eared all over the place. These folded down corners pointed at questions she’d struggled with and wanted to review. Ninety percent of these questions I’d end up suggesting she do again later. “Add them to the pile,” I’d say, and she’d say sure, sure, right.

A few weeks into this I asked how the pile was developing. She confessed she hadn’t made it. It took too much time to make! I insisted and she agreed that if she did nothing else that week, she’d assemble the collection of questions that had been challenging for her. The next meeting she came in with three copies of a stack of photocopies from Kinko’s stapled. “Not one Super Pile, but three!” she announced. The name Super Pile was born. And of course, then she had to do them.

The Super Pile has been with me since my own LSAT studying days. I believe very strongly in it. The rules are simple:

1. As you encounter difficult questions, add them to the pile. You can make new copies or print them from the website. Or if you are too lazy for either of those, fine, just dog-ear your book. But always be accumulating new questions.

2. Wait a few days and re-do them. Was that one still challenging? Put it at the bottom of the stack to re-do when it resurfaces later. Do this again and again until it’s a piece of cake for you. Then it can be removed.

3. Continue adding to the stack. The Super Pile will always be growing. It will also always be shedding questions as you master them. It’s an evolving, friendly little creature.

4. Keep the Super Pile with you until test day. It’s a great tool for the final few weeks/month before the exam. It’s also a great source of 2-3 warm-up questions to do on test day before you head out.