Pushing Through the Food Coma: LSAT Studying After Thanksgiving
Now that Thanksgiving is over, all of you are hopefully a little happier, a little more rested, and a little closer to adult-onset diabetes after you ate all of those whole pies. Don’t worry about that – you’ll be able to afford Luxury Insulin once you’re a lawyer. What’s important is to make sure that you do actually become a lawyer, so it’s back to LSAT studying. We’re 12 days away now, so you’re getting into the home stretch. More improvement is definitely possible, but if you’ve yet to crack the LSAT books, it’s time to start exploring alternative legal careers at the DeVry School of Bailiff Science. But if you’ve been doing your studying like a good boy or girl, just keep on keeping on. Lots of studying, lots of practice tests, lots of review, and some rest in between to keep you sane.
Next week you’ll actually start winding down a bit (yes, really), but for now I just want to talk about this, the penultimate week of LSAT study. This is going to be a busy week.
First of all, you should be working on any areas that you really don’t have all the way down yet. Next week will be too late to really work from the ground up on anything, but right now you’ve still got time to master concepts of which your mastery may have been thus far elusive. Still unsure how to set up a combo game? Trouble differentiating all the types of flaws? Go back to the lessons where you learned them, review the concepts, and do some more targeted practice. You can still see substantial improvement in specific areas.
Even bigger than that is building endurance. During the last week you shouldn’t be doing insanely long marathons, as you’ll be winding down right before the test, but now you should really be working on the stamina. All this week, whenever you sit down to do some practice you should be getting up only once your ass is asleep, because you’ll have been sitting there for hours. The LSAT is many hours long, and so should be your study sessions (and practice tests, of course) this week. People often see the biggest increase in their test-taking abilities during this period, but only if they take a lot of tests, and treat the practice problems in the same way.
So if you can, kids, clear the calendars. You shouldn’t be doing any ten-hour stretches, but you should be studying as much as you can. If you were thinking of taking some days off from work/school, don’t save them all for next week – this week is just as, if not more, important.