The Benefit of Redoing Questions During LSAT Study

At this point, you’re hopefully well on your way to crushing the October LSAT. If you’re like most people, the 6000 or so questions released by LSAC will be more than enough to get you to an awesome LSAT score. But sometimes people end up doing all 6000 LSAT questions and still need more. If this has happened to you, maybe you just studied a lot harder and faster than you thought, and ran out prematurely. Or maybe you took the LSAT, bombed it, and are now retaking it, but are quickly running out of unseen questions. For whatever reason, this is a pretty common thing that happens to people, but isn’t as much of an actual problem as you might think.

First of all, think about that number – 6000. That’s an insanely huge number of questions. The fact of the matter is that you’re simply not going to remember all of them, especially if it’s been more than a few months since you did them the first time. When redoing problems, they’ll often seem to be brand new. Even with the ones you do remember, this “remembering” is more just a vague recollection of the subject matter, as opposed to recalling the key characteristics of the logic. There are actually very few questions that you’ll really remember, and remember well enough to affect the likelihood of you getting it right. And even for those questions, they’re far from useless.

Practice is practice. Even if you remember how a certain argument works in an LR problem, you’re still getting practice recognizing parts of an argument, looking for assumptions, and paying attention to logical force. Even if you remember a key deduction for a game, by actually going through all the operations and doing the game again, you’ll really be solidifying the concept in your head. And even with RC passages that you remember, you’ll still be answering questions that require you to analyze the passage in a depth that you almost certainly don’t remember from before.

The one thing that really can affect you is taking whole tests that you’ve taken before. This can still be a great exercise, and will definitely help you improve, but it might be the case that your score will be somewhat inflated. The more recently you took the test, the more likely this is to be the case. So if you’ve already done a lot of material, and think you might have to redo problems soon, make sure you save a handful of virgin tests for the week or two leading up to the actual LSAT. That way you can be absolutely certain that those PT scores are representative of your true abilities.

Whether you’re doing problems for the first or second time, however, make sure you’re doing buckets and buckets them. 35 days is a lot of time to see big improvement, so get back to the books.