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Taking Your Second Practice LSAT

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Taking Your Second Practice LSAT
Taking your second practice exam while studying for the LSAT can be a harrowing experience. Your first practice exam, while no-doubt pants-crappingly terrifying, can be laughed off as unrepresentative of your potential to dominate the LSAT. But by the second practice exam, you probably figure you’ve got this whole logic and reading thing in the bag, right?

As Lear once said to Goneril (the best STDesque literary name of all time): That way lies madness. If you’re taking your second practice LSAT with over a month to go until the test, then focusing on your overall score is a terrible idea. That isn’t to say there aren’t important things to learn from the second practice exam, like where your specific weaknesses are on things you’ve already learned, but you really shouldn’t extrapolate anything else. This is because you’re taking a test without knowing all of the methods for every type of question, so it’s not a good representation of your final score. In fact, at Blueprint we’ve found that it’s not infrequent for students’ scores to actually go down on Practice Exam 2 as they begin to use the methodology.

So without further ado, here’s what you can actually learn from the second practice LSAT.

What you can learn:

1. How well you know what you’ve already been taught
When perusing the second practice exam, take note of the types of questions you’ve already learned (MBT, Flaw, whatever it is). If you got those questions right, you’ve done a good job of internalizing the methods you’ve learned thus far. If you got them wrong, figure out why you got them wrong- are you trying to use the method and having issues applying it? Are you not using the method? If you got them wrong, you need to go back and figure out what piece you’re missing. Fortunately, you still have plenty of time between now and the LSAT to review the methods you don’t understand and sharpen your skills.

2. Predicting your score
A big thing for students on the actual test is figuring out, afterward, how they did. It’s a really good idea to start having an accurate gauge of how you do on each of your exams. Before you score any exam, you should take the time to think through the sections and how many from each that you were unsure on. Begin to calculate how many you typically miss of those. Doing this for every one of your practice exams will hopefully give you an accurate gauge when you take the exam for real, which will do wonders for you in deciding whether or not to cancel your score.

3. How to build stamina
You can’t train for a marathon by only running 3 miles- unless your goal is to walk the last 23 miles or so. Practice exam 2, and all the subsequent practice LSATs, will begin to truly prepare you for the endurance test that will come on June 6th.