We’ve got about a month until the December LSAT. That doesn’t sound like a lot of time. In some ways, it isn’t. If you haven’t really started studying yet, you’re probably better off setting your sights on a later LSAT.

But this blog post is for those of you who have been studying. You’ve been working hard, but you’re not where you need to be yet. And now, holy ****, there’s only a month left.

A month is longer than you think it is.

Think of it this way: you’re cooking up a tasty LSAT meal (I promise, the analogy gets better). At this point, you’ve chopped a bunch of garlic and onions, and maybe diced some vegetables, too. You mixed up a marinade, and maybe there’s some chicken in it, sitting in the fridge. Perhaps you went all out and even made your own stock.

The point is: you’ve done a bunch of work, but you wouldn’t want to eat anything that’s in front of you (unless you’re a fan of raw marinated chicken with raw garlic on top). Even so, all the work you’ve done will contribute to the finished product. Sometimes it takes more work to prep the ingredients than to put it all together.

So too for the LSAT. You’ve been prepping the ingredients of a successful LSAT test day. You’ve learned how to diagram conditional logic and how to recognize logical fallacies. You’re figuring out how to find the structure of a reading comp passage. You’ve covered the common rules in different types of logic games.

You haven’t put it together yet. That’s just fine. For the finished product to taste good, you have to take care with the ingredients. And if all the underlying skills are there, it’ll take less time than you think to get them in action and see your score go up. But for now, it’s important that you apply yourself to learning those last few concepts and refining the ones you’ve learned already. As you get that done, you can transition into drilling timed sections and tests, just as you can start the actual cooking once your ingredients are ready to go.