[fari]

Hey Mike,

I am planning to take the LSAT in June 2018. before I share my inquiry, I wanted to let you know that I got enrolled into the LSAT prep course provided by my school which will start from February.

This gives me a one month period to prep and develop my understanding before I start those classes (completing the LSAT trainer book). Therefore, my question is would you advice me to go for the 4 week study schedule or should I take it slow and do the LSAT trainer while I do the Prep course?

Best,
Farheen

[Mike Kim]

Hi Farheen,

Thanks for trusting in the Trainer and nice to have you here —

The Trainer study schedules are designed to combine your Trainer work with additional drill problems and practice tests from outside the book —

If you have the time, you can certainly try to fit all that in before your course, but my recommendation would be to either

a) Study the entire Trainer by itself before your course begins, but without using a corresponding study schedule or doing extra outside practice other than maybe just a diagnostic test to get acquainted with the exam.

or

b) Study the first 15 lessons of the Trainer (again, without much other work), which lay out the basic fundamentals of the LSAT, before your course begins, and then combine the rest of the Trainer with your coursework.

I think either would be just fine.

Then on the other side, you do want to make sure that either during or after the course, you have plenty of time to get in lots of drill work and practice tests — basically, you study for the LSAT by getting to know about it and how to best attack it, and then practicing effective methods again and again until they become habit — so, you want to plan according to that model, and make sure you

a) don’t spend too much of your time learning about the test at the sake of not getting enough practice afterwards

and

b) don’t rush into too much practice without enough instruction.

HTH and good luck with your studies — if you have any follow-up or if you need me along the way, just let me know —

Mike

[fari]

Hey Mike!

Thank you for your suggestions. I just wanted to follow up with what you suggested. I would like to proceed with your first suggestion that is finishing the entire LSAT trainer and then starting the course.

I see you mentioned in the suggestion that I shouldn’t do extra practice other than the diagnostic test- I therefore needed clarity. The study schedule for the 4 week- suggest to do a practice exam 72- so do you want me to replace them with the diagnostic test instead? or did you mean I should do what the study schedule says and then do the diagnostic test for extra practice?

Sincerely,
Farheen

[Mike Kim]

Hi Farheen!

You can follow the study schedule, in which case 72 will be assigned as your diagnostic, but my suggestion (and sorry if I wasn’t clear on this) would be to not follow a study schedule (which includes lots of extra practice), but rather just finish the book + take a diagnostic — for that diagnostic, you can use whatever test you’d like — 72 will work fine — another suggestion for the diagnostic is the June 07 Exam, which LSAC offers for free here —

https://www.lsac.org/docs/default-source/jd-docs/sampleptjune.pdf

A nice advantage of using the June 07 as your diagnostic is that you can access many free explanations for the problems — for example, you can find free video explanations of the Logic Games from that exam on my YouTube channel —

HTH clear things up and let me know if you need anything else — MK