LSAT Tips: Make the Material Digestible
Quick Tip
To Push Back or Not to Push Back
Many of you might be signed up for the April or June LSAT. Ask yourself a few questions to make sure this is the right test date for you. And be brutally honest with yourself when you answer these questions.
Is this the last test you can take in order to successfully apply to law school?
Have you spent enough time studying to reach your goal score?
If you push back, can you take advantage of the extra time?
Depending on how you answer these questions, it might be smart to consider waiting until the August or September test dates.
Discussion
Make the Material Digestible
On 7Sage alone, there are 217 hours of Core Curriculum material. This doesn’t include the other material out there or the prep tests you’ll be completing and reviewing. Now, I’m not here to tell you that this isn’t critical. And I’m definitely not giving you an excuse to skimp out on the fundamental skills you must build in order to master the LSAT.
What I’m here to tell you is that if you accompany your fundamental learning with techniques that make this material more compact and digestible, you may experience an overall boost in understanding and morale.
We often see better results when we find ways to deliver content in small, focused chunks. It makes dense material more digestible and easily accessible. Sometimes it can also make it more captivating. I encouraged my students to do this when I taught ESL because it helped them to put difficult-to-understand material into their own terms. Similarly, I tell my LSAT students to make review documents, flashcards, and journals that serve the same purpose. Techniques like this lead to better retention and recall of often dull and easy-to-forget material.
Luckily, the Core Curriculum is already pretty compact. However, some of the more complicated lessons and the accumulation of all the content can be overwhelming. In order to stay more engaged and improve your retention, try these bite-sized studying tips:
Create a succinct review document that encompasses what you’ve learned in the Core Curriculum.
Use flashcards to summarize concepts like valid and invalid argument forms.
Make your own infographics about key umbrella concepts like Logic Game types or Logical Reasoning question stems.
Outline your thought processes when it comes to tackling difficult parts of the test like hard science Reading Comprehension passages.
Create a wrong answer journal that includes explanations that are in simple but exciting terms.
Using methods like the ones above will allow for information to move up to your long-term memory, instead of staying lodged in your short-term memory. As a student of the LSAT, your goal isn’t just to make the material more engaging but to also improve information retention and memory recall. Once we can master this, test day becomes much more manageable.