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):
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.
“Logic games?! But didn’t the LSAT get rid of those?!”
In teacher Kelly Gallagher’s acclaimed book Readicide (2009), he warns against what he candidly and unsparingly defines as “the systematic killing of the love of reading, often exacerbated by the inane, mind-numbing practices found in schools.” Many of us who grew up in the early-aughts post-NCLB standardized-testing era in America were young victims of readicide (NCLB is short for the “No Child Left Behind” Act signed by President Bush in 2002).