PrepTests: Best Friend, or Worst Enemy?
You’ve done this, haven’t you? You’ve sat down at a piano or picked up a guitar and tried to play it. After a couple of notes, you think, “Hey, I sound great!” Then you try to play your favorite song and realize that you sound terrible.
Most of us lose interest pretty quickly at this point. Some people decide to take lessons. But imagine a beginner who just keeps trying to play Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven, or a concerto by Bach, over and over, day after day, hoping that some day she will get it right. She might eventually nail it, but any music teacher will tell you that this isn’t the best way to learn an instrument.
Without realizing it, this could be exactly how you’re trying to prepare for the LSAT. It’s common for people to make full PrepTests the main focus of their prep plan. If this describes you, and aren’t seeing much improvement, don’t be surprised.
Preparing for the LSAT is similar to learning a musical instrument. Playing a concerto or a killer guitar riff requires an array of fundamental skills that allow you to combine individual notes and chords into a beautiful and complex piece of music. To do well on the LSAT, you will also use an array of fundamental skills, like identifying the conclusion of an argument or finding the important inferences in a logic game, to get a beautiful score. You will first need to learn these individual skills, then perfect them through practice, before you can combine them effectively to answer the different types of questions you’ll see on the test.
Taking a PrepTest is like playing an entire song. It tests how well you use your whole combined set of skills, but it doesn’t do much to help you develop those skills in the first place. If you want to see any significant improvement in your score, you need to focus on refining those individual skills.
That’s important, so we’ll say it again: to improve your score, you need to improve the individual skills that are required to answer LSAT questions correctly. Taking a few PrepTests, or even taking many of them one after the other, is not the best way to improve those individual skills.
We’re not saying that PrepTests are evil. They play an important role in your prep plan when you use them correctly. The problem is that many people use them incorrectly. Let’s consider some “Dos and Don’ts.”
DO take a full PrepTest when you first start studying for the LSAT. This gives you an overall understanding of the test and a measure of your current abilities. Without knowing where you are now, you won’t know how much work it will take to achieve your goal.
DO take your PrepTests in as realistic a setting as possible. What constitutes a realistic setting? Take it in one sitting, with only one break between sections 3 and 4, with an experimental 5th section added in, and in a classroom-like setting (the last is the hardest, though libraries work well for this). Timing and surroundings play a role in how well you’ll do, so practice in a setting similar to the actual one.
DO use PrepTests to identify your strengths and weaknesses. When you finish a PrepTest, your first thought is likely to be, “What’s my score?” There are other important questions to ask: “Are there specific types of questions that I tend to answer incorrectly?”; “Are there any reasoning structure with which I struggle?” Our free LSAT Tracker can help you with this (Windows | Mac)
DO review each PrepTest thoroughly. Taking a PrepTest without doing a thorough review afterward is like ordering a pizza with all of your favorite toppings, then just eating the crust. You’re not really getting the full benefit. The review process gives you the chance to deepen your understanding of the concepts being tested and see things you might have missed while working under timed conditions. Use this strategy log to review questions you answered incorrectly (or slowly) questions.
DO NOT take one PrepTest after another without working on specific skills in between. At an absolute minimum, you should thoroughly review each test, identify your weaknesses, and recognize your strengths. Then, consider what you can do to address the weaknesses. It’s tempting to just take another PrepTest and hope for a better score, but that’s not the answer.
The information on this page can help you make your PrepTests realistic and help you review them effectively. The page also contains a link to our LSAT Tracker. The time and effort that you put into a PrepTest is a valuable investment. Make sure you get as much as possible in return.=
Scott Miller is a Manhattan Prep instructor based in Washington D.C. Earning a 173 on the LSAT was not an effortless endeavor for Scott — he worked hard for his score, and he has as much fun helping people master the challenges of the test as had overcoming those challenges himself. Check out Scott’s upcoming LSAT courses here!