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Practice Exam #2: The Takeaways

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It’s finally here, the moment students in our spring course have been awaiting for weeks – Practice Exam Two. You’ve been studying like crazy, so you’re probably going to see crazy increases in your practice test score, right?

Well, maybe not.

The majority of students don’t see much of a change at all in their scores from the diagnostic exam to Practice Exam Two; some scores may increase, but it’s also not uncommon for your score to drop a couple points.

There are a few reasons for this. For one thing, the course hasn’t covered timing at all yet. That’s intentional – we want you to focus on being able to consistently answer questions correctly before you start worrying about how quickly you’re answering them. But it means that your pace at this point is still relatively slow, which is going to trip you up a bit when dealing with a timed exam.

Secondly, although you’ve (hopefully) learned a lot in the last few weeks, there’s still a wealth of untapped LSAT-related information that you haven’t covered – like, several textbooks’ worth. You should be able to answer the question types that you’ve already learned (more on that in a minute), but there are still going to be a lot of questions that you’re not totally sure how to tackle, and that’s totally fine at this point.

So the second practice exam is starting to sound like a pretty big waste of time, right? Why are we even bothering with it, if your score isn’t going to improve and I just finished telling you how much you still don’t know?

There’s one thing that you should review very carefully after taking the practice exam, and it’s this: how well you scored on the question types that you have learned. If you did well on Must Be True questions but totally botched the one-to-one ordering game, it means you should take some time to beef up your Logic Games knowledge before moving on in the course. If you really struggled with the Reading Comprehension passage, try to figure out what went wrong and how you can avoid similar problems the next time.

Simply put, use the second practice exam as a check-in to see how well you’ve absorbed the skills you’ve been learning, but don’t stress about your overall score. It might come up a few points, but if it doesn’t, that’s very normal and is not a cause for concern. Most students don’t see big score increases until much later in the course; until that time, keep on truckin’ with full confidence that your efforts will eventually pay off.