Three Common Sense Tips to Improve Your LSAT Score

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.

Here are three common sense tips to improve your LSAT score without becoming your own benevolent dictator:

No, all, some, many, much, fewer, more, only, may, must, exactly, never… These are a few of the words you should never blow past when you’re reading an LSAT question. The LSAT is written by and for word nerds. When was the last time you found a mistake on an LSAT practice test? You may have never seen one. So, it’s safe to say that, if you see one of these magic words, it’s there for a reason. In fact, if your answer choice isn’t somewhat reflective of one of these words when it’s present in the passage, you probably have the wrong answer. Does your passage say the words may and could? Then your answer probably doesn’t have the words cannot, all, or must in it. Using this simple rule—as much an art as a science—can have a huge impact on your performance.

This applies to both your studying process and the questions themselves. Test prep can be incredibly stressful. One study found that 76.5% of test-takers in an experiment felt stressed before an exam. So walking away from a particularly frustrating practice test is obviously good if it helps you reduce stress, a known destroyer of good mental and physical health. The bonus here is that some types of “walking away” also allow your brain to learn efficiently. According to Johns Hopkins Medicine, napping between 30-90 minutes can boost your memory and cognition. Calm down, meditate your way into a nap, then get up and try again. Don’t do this everyday, though—the last thing you want on exam day is a sudden, overwhelming urge to grab a pillow.

Much of what’s stressful about the LSAT disappears once you put the clock away. Unfortunately, the clock is very much there and not at all willing to be put away, so saving time in the problem-solving process is essential. Read the question before you read the passage. We read differently depending on what we are hoping to glean. If you know you’re looking for a weakness, you will spot the weakness the first time around, and you won’t have to go back to the passage a second time. If you know you’re looking for a conclusion, you won’t get too caught up in premises, and so on. Reading a passage and answering a question related to it isn’t a linear two-step process; it’s an evolving holistic judgment of the logical circumstances in which the test places you.

There you go—it’s (partly) that simple. Take these three common sense tips, stick ‘em in your back pocket, and rest assured that, should you run into trouble on your LSAT test-prep journey, you’re already armed.

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