Scenario A: It’s 6:00am: time to study for your LSAT. No one is up yet in your house, so you get to grind fresh coffee beans and gather your toast in peace before sitting down for a short period of intensely focused test prep before class.
The forums of the internet runneth over with bad advice, much of it given by people who have never actually taken the LSAT, let alone leveraged it to get into a top law school. Here are some glimpses of the perspectives of people who’ve been there (and lived to tell the tale):
Getting a 180 is one hell of an emotional victory, even for those of us with the most even-keeled, relaxed perspectives on the whole test-taking fracas. That alone—proving to yourself that you can do it—is reason enough to try your hardest for a perfect score.
I remember doing my first night of CivPro homework as a 1L with zero lawyers in my family. I called my parents weeping: “I studied French, Latin, and ancient Greek, and I still have no idea what any of these phrases are supposed to mean!”
Self-study and private tutoring are excellent companions. Struggling with the questions on your own teaches you intangibles about your unique way of thinking and the test-taking process, while tutoring gives you the precise tools you need to compete with other smarties in the standardized exam Hunger Games. They are often pitted against each other, but the truth is that self-study and private tutoring are like peanut butter and jelly—successful separately but even better when combined. (If you don’t like the combination of peanut butter and jelly, I’m sorry to say, you can’t be helped.)
There’s no shortage of advice on how to improve your LSAT score. A fair number of score improvement methods tend toward the draconian, from “take two practice tests every single day” to “create a Kafkaesque reward-punishment system” to “start studying four years before we started having this conversation.” That sort of attitude might work—I have no idea, and I will, thankfully, never need to find out.