Here’s a common dilemma for LSAT preppers: You studied long and hard for the LSAT, but something went wrong. You either didn’t end up taking the LSAT, or you took it and it didn’t go very well. Now you’re set on retaking or rescheduling, but you’re worried that you may have run out of study materials — mainly practice tests — on your first run.
Worry not.
Ideally, you want to have about three new practice tests in reserve. But even if you have zero, you’re still going to be okay.
It’s completely fine to retake and redo old practice LSATs. Sure, you’re going to remember a question or two or three, but this isn’t really a problem. If all you remember about a question is that the correct answer choice was C, that’s not so great. However, most people instead remember the reasons why C was right and the reasons why A, B, D, and E were wrong. That’s actually great. The reason this is great is because the LSAT, as a standardized test, is pretty much designed to reuse the same logical structures and traps over and over. The more of these you become familiar with, the better you’ll perform.
You’ve also probably forgotten a lot of the details for any given question you may have seen before. So, you’ll still have to carefully reason out every answer choice anyway. And that’s great practice.
Sometimes, redoing LSAT questions is ideal. If this is your second or third shot at the LSAT, I think one of the best ways to improve on the LSAT Logical Reasoning section is to keep redoing about 30 to 40 of the tough questions until you have them more or less memorized. If you do this, there shouldn’t be any surprises on your actual LSAT.
Now, taking a practice test you’re familiar with probably won’t give you a completely accurate measure of your current LSAT abilities, but it’ll be close; you’ll probably score about 3 points too high. However, I do think you will keep improving if you retake practice tests, and that’s really the only important thing.
Finally, while you may be familiar with the most recent batch of practice LSATs, you probably didn’t really get into the LSATs from the ’90s and early 2000s. These are slightly different from the modern LSAT, but the differences are minor, and these older LSATs are still great practice.
So, don’t worry about running out of practice tests. It’s not a big deal, and the law school application process is stressful enough without an additional thing to worry about.