LSAT Advice Please! November or January

[HannahB622]

Hey everyone this probably one of the most repetitive questions you all might see on the forum, but I am hoping someone will advise me. I plan on applying this round to a couple of Canadian law schools in order to start in the Fall of 2020. I haven't written the LSAT yet and it will be my first time but I have to choose between the November and January exams (January is the last acceptable exam). I am hoping to take it once (which might be a long shot I know) as my top 2 schools take the average of more than one score if written more than once.

So, I have been using 7sage and Kaplan. I ran through the curriculum probably in February (a year before I had run through it once but never really PTd) before starting the curriculum my cold diagnostic was135 and I started to just practice some problem sets and RC passages and had to take a break for about a month due to finishing up my courses, I did take a practice test (I do not remember the number) but I got 143. I do try my best to BR and when I take passages and pt's I do time myself. Anyways when I got back to studying early July, I took the February 1997 and got 138 (but I was sort of ill) and I took Prep Test 1/35 and scored about the same. My goal and what I need is between a 160-165.

I usually do really bad on LR (7/25 on each LR), and I find all the inference questions difficult
RC (9/28) which is surprising because when I was practicing RC passages I would get 4/6 or 3/7 (per passage)
LG is my strongest section (20/24).

In August, I re-visited the curriculum, really trying to drill and understand everything and I am almost done (I just need to re-study MSS, Causation and Some/Most). Today I practiced an LR section and got 12/25, its still low but its pretty big improvement.

My question is I have week to register for the November exam and I am not sure if I should, you could basically say that I just started PTing again and January is my last shot, which test do you advise that I should take? I know it depends on how much I study now and can improve as everyone improves differently but I am really confused on what to do. Also right now, I am not in school (just graduated with my degree) and still looking for a full-time job which I may secured. So if I take the January exam I could be working full-time before it.



Thank you! & sorry for the long post

[ohthatpatrick]

It sounds like January is the smarter play, since your schools average scores and since your LSAT improvement feels like it's still blossoming.

I would definitely suggest that you not spend much time/energy on the Some/Most stuff. On most tests, it comes up 0 times.

If you're only getting 7-12 correct on LR, though, you might get a better outcome by only attempting a subset of the 25 questions in each section (I'm not sure if you're already trying this).

Try taking 5 mins to scan through the 25 questions in a given LR section (this is an artificial exercise, not what you'd do on the real test). You're not reading any stimuli all the way through -- just glancing at question type / read-ability / complexity of answers ....
put a or some other indicator next to the 5 questions that look the worst to you (i.e. you'd kinda dread doing them and/or you wouldn't expect yourself to be as successful at them).

Once you've pre-filtered the section, try doing the 35 min section and only attempt those remaining 20 problems. Put random guesses for the other 5, and see if you end up averaging a better outcome in LR sections by trying that.

Try doing the same for RC, but if you're getting 9 out of 28, you could probably frowny-face about 8 questions (find the worst two questions on each passage, for example). Then try doing that 35 min section an attempt only the remaining 20 problems. Put in random guesses for the other 8, and see if you end up averaging more raw points per section.

Good luck!