Don’t panic, but there’s exactly one month left before the October LSAT. Being four weeks out from test day is a frightening prospect, no matter where you’re at or where you want to be. We get that, but we also get that some students (you know who you are) psych themselves out a little extra around this time in their studies. Our goal here is to calm those neurotic perfectionists, and maybe also light a fire under some other folks’ bums.

With a month to go, you want to be near a mastery of the fundamentals. Within the next week or so, you should assess your diagramming, your RC annotating, and your skill at Grouping, Ordering, and Combination games. It’s important to spend a good amount of time drilling in these next couple weeks to hammer out any imperfections in your skills.

Going forward, I always recommend that my students take an untimed test. Not a leisurely test with breaks, mind you, but a test where you more or less eliminate time as a factor in your getting questions wrong. Why? Because this will show you where you most need work: if you’re missing Sufficient questions when untimed, for example, then you need to go back ASAP and review the concept.

It’s really only once you’ve mastered the skill in an untimed setting that it’s productive to try to go faster. Otherwise, most students end up reinforcing bad habits and cutting corners — or, at best, being quite wrong quite quickly. Get an untimed test in soon so that you can go back, truly master those basics that need work, and then practice on getting your speed up.

Questions or ideas? Did a different four week approach work well for you? Comment below!