Note: As of August 2024, the LSAT will no longer have a Logic Games Section. The June 2024 exam will be the final LSAT with Logic Games. Learn more about the change here.

If you’re just starting your September LSAT prep, you’re already learning the joys of Logic Games, sufficiency and necessity. Unfortunately, just showing up for class is not sufficient for a good LSAT score. You’ll also need to do your homework, and you’ll need to do it the right way.

The point of LSAT homework is not just to get it done as quickly as possible. If you’re halfheartedly doing your homework with one eye on a rerun of Scrubs, you might as well not be doing it at all. Instead, the goal of LSAT homework is to make sure you fully understand the concepts you’re covering.

That means that you should take as much time as you need per question. Seriously, don’t mark an answer until you’re fully confident in your choice. This early in your prep, there’s no rush. Eventually, you’ll start working on getting through questions more quickly; for now, if it takes you 30 minutes to fully understand a question, then that’s 30 minutes well spent. It can be frustrating to spend so much time on a single question, but remember that studying for the LSAT requires training your brain to think in a certain way. Your speed will increase naturally as you master that way of thinking, so be patient with yourself and give yourself all the time you need to reach that level of mastery.

You should also be thoroughly reviewing any questions you got wrong or questions that you didn’t feel fully confident about. For any question, you should be able to explain three things:

1) Why the correct answer is right

2) Why the answer you chose (or were tempted to choose) was incorrect

3) What tricked you into choosing that incorrect answer.

This type of review will take a fair amount of time, but it’s time well spent. The LSAT is written so that the incorrect answers look incredibly appealing, but there’s also some factor that makes those answer completely incorrect. The more you delve into the different tricks that LSAC uses to make those incorrect answers look attractive, the less likely you’ll be to be tricked in the future.

Don’t shortchange yourself by giving yourself insufficient time to do the homework or by not thoroughly reviewing the questions. You’ll be cheating yourself out of an important component of LSAT preparation, and it’ll be reflected in your score. Instead, make sure that you giving yourself adequate time to do the homework and do it right.