Studying with Rod: Practice Test 3

  • Reviewed by: Matt Riley
  • BPProd-lsat-blog-pe3You have over 20 weeks until the LSAT. This is the case, of course, if you decided to hit the panic button on the June LSAT and have convinced yourself that October is the better choice. Again, I wouldn’t do this unless you really feel like your schedule or your study habits are going to change dramatically the next time around (clearly there are no commissions on re-take sign-ups here in the Blueprint office). Now, if you took my advice in last week’s post, you are likely packing your bags for New Zealand, where you can take the exam in a month and a half. The rest of us have about two and half weeks until a little afternoon delight with the LSAT. So let’s recap the test dates:

    October 9th: Fearful procrastinators who apparently hate summer.
    June 27th: New Zealand travelin’, sea-turtle high fivin’, Dingo chasin’ bastards
    June 7th: The rest of us

    Almost all of you took Practice Test 3 sometime over these last two weeks, and I really hope that everyone is seeing improvement and keeping a level head. Here are my PT3 highlights:

    Reading Comp: (25/27) 92%

    Admittedly, this is as well as I have ever done on a timed reading comprehension section. If you recall, the first passage was about the new approaches to studying ancient textiles. The second passage was about a Nigerian computer scientist who used the genius of nature as a model for new computer systems. The third passage was about intellectual copyright law and the tangible object theory. Finally, the last passage was comparative and dealt with music and how it makes you feel. It is a good thing that I am an aspiring copyright lawyer who majored in musical theory despite the objections of my Nigerian-born computer scientist father and my archaeologist mother, because these passages were right up my alley.

    With reading comp, I think it might serve as good practice these next two and a half weeks to pick up a copy of The New York Times, The Wall St. Journal, or The Economist every day to practice reading long, dense, boring articles and then test yourself to see how much you understood and whether or not you dozed off in the middle. We’re all close to the finish line, so let’s all bear down these next couple of weeks. It would be really sweet if the reading comp passages were about Lebron James free agency rumors and how much blow Lindsay Lohan has (allegedly) been doing, but on June 7th, you know you are gonna get the passage about the 17th century French poet and how his critics just didn’t understand how great he was. Plan accordingly.

    Logic Games: (17/23) 73%

    Still my weakest section by far, I am going to be doing tons of these for practice between now and test day. Tiered ordering is my Achilles heel, but I am pretty hopeful that I can still improve my speed and accuracy by quite a bit. The one thing I don’t want to have happen is to open up the test booklet to section 1 on test day, and then get rattled early on by a bad performance on Logic Games. Ironically, logic games seem to be everyone’s favorite section, so if you have any tips on how I, too, can learn to love logic games, feel free to call the office and ask for Todd. He will then pass these tips on to me.

    Logical Reasoning: (46/51) 90%

    My logical reasoning game is kinda nice. I am furiously knocking on wood here, because writing a blog about your LSAT strengths, weaknesses, and progress may very well explode in my face (and nobody wants that). I am going to keep chugging along, practicing the more difficult LR questions that are very diagram heavy, but I feel pretty good about this section and I am certainly happy that it makes up half of the test. A special shout out to Question #25 in section four. This Principle question involved a dialogue between Claude and Larissa. You see, Claude is a big-shot at his company and is in charge of interviewing job candidates. Sounds simple enough, except for the fact that Claude explains that he takes points off if a job applicant puts salt on their food before tasting it, because there might already be enough salt on their food. F–k off Claude.

    Until next time…good luck out there!

    -RT

    Leave a Reply

    Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *