How a LSAT tutor can help you improve — even after a LSAT lecture course didn’t.

Every year, we work with hundreds of students who took one of the LSAT classroom or online prep courses and came out of it showing dissappointing improvements.

We also work with many students who are currently taking a prep course, but realize relatively early on that they are either too advanced for the class or are falling behind in one or more areas.

Here are the top 5 frequently asked questions we hear from students already taking a prep course.

1. Will I be confused by different methodologies?  Students are often worried that they’ll be shown two different ways to do things. While that’s true, one thing prep companies rarely admit is that while there are a few important differences in methology, most differences are cosmetic. Further, we encourage students to test two different methods and pick the one that works best for them.

Also, please keep in mind — the methodologies you already learned didn’t work for you. Maybe it’s time to try something different. Doing well on the LSAT is much more about understanding logic than it is about memorizing a certain “method.”

 2. Do students show improvement after a prep course? Yes, all the time. Of course, this requires a commitment by you to really focus on your studies. However, for students who buckle down, we routinely see double-digit score improvements even after the prep course.

3. What will be different about working with an LSAT Tutor? Quite a bit. If you find that you aren’t picking up the material in class before your instructor moves on, this will be a breath of fresh air. Instead of moving at one pace through pre-set material, you’ll have the opportunity to really deep-dive on areas where you’re having trouble. A tutor can show you multiple ways to work through a particular problem type until you really understand it.

4. Is it worth the extra investment? This is a frequent question; many of our students already invested $1,000+ in a prep course and didn’t get any improvement. This is really a classic example of sunk cost. If you already invested in a prep course and it didn’t work, you’re at the same place you started — you want to raise your LSAT score, and you value professional help in doing so.

5. Can a LSAT tutor help while I’m still taking a prep course? Yes. We work with hundreds of students each year while they are taking a prep course. Generally they figure out fairly quickly that the prep course isn’t particularly helpful. What a tutor can do in this situation is start with a review of your current performance. Your tutor will then jump in to focus on your weakest areas. In fact, since so much of the highest-value homework is doing real practice exams, often a tutor can help you with the specific homework you’ve been assigned for a class (so you don’t have two sets of homework that don’t add value to one another).

All that said, every year we hear over and over from students that they wish they had started with a tutor and ignored the prep courses. If you’re making this decision, survey 10 of your friends who used a tutor — I bet they’ll say the same thing.

Next Step Test Preparation provides complete courses of one-on-one LSAT tutoring  for about the price of a crowded lecture-style prep course. Email us or call 888-530-NEXT (6398) for a complimentary consultation.

Image credit: InstantJefferson