After many long, cold nights spent staring at your textbooks, if you’re a student in the Blueprint LSAT Prep live course, you probably are taking your second practice exam right around now. You’re probably expecting to see a pretty significant improvement – after all, you’ve been busting your tail for more than a month, so now it’s time to see that sweet, sweet payoff. Right?!
Hold on there, partner, because unfortunately that’s probably not the case. In fact, the vast majority of students only see a change of a couple points when they take their second practice test – and in some cases, your score might even dip by a point or two.
However, there is no cause for alarm!* There’s a good reason for why your score probably won’t change much. When you took your first practice test, you were blissfully unaware of what was going on. Sure, the scientist probably just conducted his study wrong! Yeah, the blue car probably went through the Burger King drive-thru third – why not?!
Now, you have just enough knowledge to second-guess everything. Did the scientist really conduct the study wrong? And couldn’t the blue car be seventh rather than third?!
All of this is to say that although you know more now, you’re probably also working through the questions more slowly – because now you have actual knowledge to apply, rather than blindly picking whatever answer choice sounds best. Furthermore, although you’ve learned a lot, you still have a lot to go – there are whole families of Logical Reasoning questions that you have yet to learn, and don’t even get me started on Combo games!
So, if your score on the second practice test doesn’t really matter, what does matter? And why are you even taking that stupid practice test? Do we just like to see you suffer?
Of course not! (Probably.) There is a lot of value in taking that second practice test – primarily because it gives you a chance to test the skills you’ve already learned. Rather than focusing on your overall score, take a look at how you did on the question types you’ve already learned. If you had time to attempt seven of the nine Must Be True questions on the test, and you only got one of those seven questions right, that means it’s probably a good idea to go back and work on MBT questions some more before you move on to new question types. Conversely, if you killed it on the ordering games, then you know you’re ready to focus on other things.
I’ll say this again, because it’s worth saying twice:
DON’T stress about your score on the second practice LSAT test.
DO use it as an opportunity to check your progress on the question types and skills that you’ve already learned.
And if the test doesn’t go as well as you hoped, fear not – there are plenty more practice tests in your very near future!
*If your score decreased significantly from the first practice test, you might want to chat with your instructor and/or think about what factors might have led to the score decrease. Even in that case, though, you don’t need to be worried quite yet. It’s normal for scores to fluctuate from one practice test to another.
