If you’re one of the hundreds of would-be lawyers who woke up this morning, looked at your calendar, and didn’t freak out, you may want to take another glance.
That’s right: The October LSAT is exactly two months from today.
You may be thinking: “But I’m nowhere near ready to take the LSAT,” or “OMG, my LSAT score is nowhere near what I need,” or perhaps “WTF, I’m still way too slow.” My first response is: stop thinking in abbreviations; it’s a little bit weird. But secondly and more importantly, calm down. It’s going to be OK.
You’re not supposed to be ready to take the LSAT now. That’s what the next two months are for. As long as you’re on the task and working hard at it, you’re on the right track.
It’s normal to be slow at dealing with LSAT questions right now. In fact, you should be moving slowly. You should be learning the techniques and ins and outs of every kind of question you might see on the LSAT. Once you’ve covered everything and you know what to do, you can start to work on getting faster. But for now, slow is the way to go. You’re pushing for a depth of knowledge and mastery that’s very hard to get if you’re hurrying yourself.
And since you should be slow right now, it’s not time to worry about your LSAT score yet either. You probably haven’t covered everything on the LSAT yet. The biggest LSAT score gains are likely to come toward the end of your studies, when you put it all together and get the timing down. For now, it’s all about the LSAT question types you’re studying at the moment. You should know the steps you’ll follow for each one, and as you practice you should shoot for the highest possible accuracy.
Use this two-month warning as motivation. You need to be working hard right now, and having some sense of impending doom can help you do that. In fact, if you haven’t started studying yet, it’s now or never; if you can’t jump in right now you might consider December. But as long as you’re hard at work on your LSAT studies and doing things the right way, two months is more time than you think. Keep up the good work, and trust that the results will show when it’s time for them to show.