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<li><p>I would strongly suggest sticking with one method rather than mixing and matching between different companies. Also, I would strongly recommend against using Princeton Review or (especially) Kaplan. Both methods are inferior to PowerScore or TestMasters. </p></li>
<li><p>How much time it takes to prepare depends on what else your daughter has going on. If she’s working full-time, obviously she’ll need to give herself more time. But I think studying for up to a year is excessive in virtually any case. Burning out is a very real possibility. I think giving oneself at most half a year is all one needs to squeeze out the max potential score.</p></li>
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<p>I agree with crnchycereal here. No one should need a year to prepare to write the LSAT, even if they’re working fulltime. Take a diagnostic and see where you are, then take it from there but I don’t know anyone who has needed a year in order to reach their goal score. Every successful law applicant I know, including one of my Ds and a handful of nieces and nephews have been able to do this in around 3-4 months and one of them in one month (she’s clearly the exception but certainly not unique). </p>
<p>I also agree about the Power Score Bibles being, well, the Bible! for preparation. :)</p>
<p>To say that “No one should need a year” isn’t right. It does depend on the person. Even if a year is overkill for some, it certainly won’t hurt. I would rather err on the side of being too cautious.</p>
<p>As for as using one course because it teaches a set style, there is certainly some merit to it. For what it’s worth, my son stuck with Testmasters and also used the Testmaster bible and got little improvement. Maybe others have done better with these.</p>
<p>Test burnout can hurt, pretty severely. More to the point you also have to consider diminishing marginal returns. It’s not as if you’ll gain one point for every week you study. Most of the time a student will improve about ten points and then plateau, and more studying beyond that won’t do very much good. (Nine points took me about three weeks of six-hour-a-day study.) Study hard. Once you’ve seen a good chunk of improvement, start paying attention. If your improvement levels off and you start seeing the same scores repeatedly, you’re ready for the test.</p>
<p>Usually that should take you about three months, six at the outside. I can’t imagine it taking more than that.</p>
<p>quick reply- My son went through this last year, taking the lsat 3 times in 7 months. He thought studying for the lsat would be like the SAT. In fact, he found improvement very slow and difficult; he literally studied 6-7 hours a day/night at our dining room table for 8 weeks before the first try ( 164), 8 weeks before the second try,( 169) and about 4 weeks before the last try. ( went up one point- to 170). He took detailed notes each day on what he had analyzed, discovered, and weak points. burn out was a real danger- the whole experience was very odd.</p>
<p>It was a very humbling experence. He found Powerscore the most helpful and did an online course. He also paid for 4 phone tutorials on a sort of quesiton he had difficulty with. He would being those fully prepared with notes and questions. ditto to the general advice about undergrad college and gpa. My son spent his first 2 years at an ivy lac and wished he hadn’t- his gpa rose at U mich and lsat/gpa is all.</p>
<p>I want to do something very different in the future (go on to medical school!) but this was a very interesting read! :)</p>
<p>I think I burned out slightly and I studied for about four months. The anticipation to finally take the dang thing was brutal. I ended up doing slightly worse than I was hoping for.</p>
<p>As for UVA’s “yield protection,” sometimes it’s pretty obvious with someone above both medians. However, I think a lot of the waitlisting has to do with trying to keep the 40% in-state balance. At the ASW, another student told me that 1/5 in-state applicants are accepted, while 1/40 out-of-state applicants are accepted.</p>
<p>Also, UVA is protective of their medians.</p>
<p>So…I realize that there’s a different GPA scale for law school admissions that incorporate A+s…but I was wondering wouldn’t that hurt students whose colleges don’t do A+s or numerical grades?</p>
<p>Also, my college does A, and then A- while I know my friends’ schools have it so 90+ is an A so if our GPAs were to be compared, mine would be lower at the same amount of effort. Should I even be thinking about this or is there a method that law schools use to make it all comparable?</p>
<p>Most law school admissions offices began emphasized the LSAT more heavily than GPA long before US News and World Report began ranking law schools.</p>
<p>^
Law schools will use the GPA that the LSAT reports; they almost certainly will not care whether someone is disadvantaged because his school does not give A+'s. (By the way, the advantage enjoyed by students who attend schools that offer A+'s is rather insignificant because A+'s are incredibly rare.)</p>
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<p>I find this statement rather difficult to believe. In general, people become better at any endeavor the more they practice. The LSAT shouldn’t be any different.</p>
<p>For instance, Robin Singh, perhaps the best LSAT test taker of all time, has continued to improve over the 15 years he’s studied and taught the LSAT. His early scores actually aren’t all that amazing compared to some people’s, so the reason he’s the best is that he practiced the most. [Perfect</a> LSAT Scores](<a href=“TestMasters Course Creator Robin Singh”>TestMasters Course Creator Robin Singh)</p>
<p>In short, if you want to go to law school, you should start preparing for the LSAT now. That doesn’t mean to take all 60 practice tests right away, but it does mean to familiarize yourself with the test and read a lot to prepare for the reading comprehension section.</p>
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<p>Maybe in some highly complex fields (neurosurgery, NFL quarterbacking) that really do take decades to learn. But the vast majority of things are subject to the law of diminishing marginal returns – every input has a little bit less effect. Every hour spent studying helps a little less, and a little less, until eventually it adds nothing or even harms you.</p>
<p>Compared to something like surgery, the LSAT is a relatively simple game. There’s only so much you can learn. At some point you’re simply going to max out – or, worse yet, burn out.</p>
<p>How much of Singh’s improvement has come since the first six months of his study habits? I’d wager none, since he’s been running a test prep company for years now and has been scoring 180s virtually the entire time.</p>
<p>an interesting item: not one of Robin’s June test scores was a 180…is he just a morning person?</p>
<p>I find it odd that law schools look at the GPA and do not consider the major. I would think they would be more “holistic.” For instance, if your personal statement says you want to be a patent attorney, wouldn’t an engineering major be a plus? Despite the lower GPA (because it’s a tough major.)</p>
<p>1.) Most of the time, law schools aren’t particularly interested in future specialization. There might be some exceptions, but generally whether or not you want to be a patent attorney, a trial attorney, or whatever isn’t a big deal to the law school’s admissions office.</p>
<p>2.) The all-important US News rankings don’t adjust for major, so that gives admissions an incentive not to adjust either.</p>
<p>3.) There are SOME adjustments – in the form of penalizing some particularly unrigorous majors like Criminal Justice or other vocational subjects. But among English, History, etc. it ends up not being a big deal.</p>
<p>4.) The fact that the LSAT is so much more important than GPA sort of functions like a correction for GPA. If one candidate has a couple higher LSAT points but a slightly lower GPA, he wins. That’s obviously not the same, but it does further explain why adjustments aren’t really necessary. If one candidate is really THAT much smarter, you’d expect it to show up in the LSAT as well as the GPA.</p>
<p>Thanks OP. Love this post. It’s very informative. So happy that we made the decision to favor to honors programs at good StateU over the expensive privates.<br>
Also, the transfer comments are so true. My spouse went to “Harvard of the Southeast” Law 
and his classmates were SOO resentful of the transfers. They felt that the transfers “got over” by not having the extremely rigorous first year that they faced.</p>
<p>I don’t think there is a true natural limit on one’s ability to score well on the LSAT. Being a good reader beforehand is an advantage, but overall I feel that one’s diagnostic score is an indicator of how hard and intelligently one will have to work to reach their target score, not indicative of their scoring potential. Studying a year or more can be beneficial if one studies effectively and avoids burnout.</p>
<p>In one extreme example posted on the Top-Law-Schools forums, one person managed to jump about 24 points to get a 180. They took way more that 3-4 months to do it. A relative of mine spent 8+ months studying and went from low 150s to a low 170 on the real thing. I have been studying since December and have gone from a 151 diagnostic to a 169 average over my last 4 preptests. These examples aren’t necessarily common or representative of LSAT takers as a whole, but overall it shows that the potential for great increases is there.</p>
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<p>Sure, 20 points is impressive. But 8 months got him 20 points. Do you think ten months would have gotten him 25? A year would have gotten him all the way up to a 180? I doubt it.</p>
<p>And moreover, I’m betting that almost all of his 20 points came early on.</p>
<p>(Besides, the LSAT has a standard deviation of 3 points anyway, and who knows how much is fluctuation and how much is steady improvement.)</p>
<p>@bluedevilmike</p>
<p>His increases mainly came in three bursts. He plateaued around 161 after about 3 months. He powered through and then plateaued again about 4 months later around 168 and then finally in his last month he started hitting consistent 170+. If he had been willing to take a year off after graduating I honestly believe he could have hit 175+.</p>
<p>I think taking the LSAT is a learnable skill. If you can master the skills involved, such as test-taking stamina, spotting the tricks used to make people pick wrong answers, reading for structure in RC, learning how to set up every LG, etc. then you can get a 175+. I think that is why some people are able to take the LSAT with two weeks of prep and get a 170+. They simply came into the test with the right critical thinking and reading skills necessary to do well. Like any other skill, (quality) practice makes perfect.</p>
<p>Furthermore, studying over long periods, such as a year, leaves room for breaks and greatly minimizes the chance of burnout, something that you seem very paranoid about. Taking a week off and spending time with family can sometimes be a way to help break out of plateaus. Such breaks are impractical if you are abiding by the 3-4 month study schedule you advocate.</p>
<p>You commented earlier that seeing a sizable improvement and then plateauing is an indication that one is ready for the test. I think that it’s an indication to rethink your study strategies. Every time i’ve defeated a plateau it was because I found some new study technique or tried a new approach to a problem.</p>
<p>I took the LSAT many years ago. I’m sure it is changed quite a bit by now. The test that I took would be very difficult to prepare for effectively in any period less than years. </p>
<p>What I recall is that the reading passages were filled with rich, complex sentence structure, and were almost always dealing with an esoteric, narrow subject, or a “fine” point of an everyday subject. The effect of this was that almost no one would be reading about anything with which he had any familiarity. The level of nuance in the writing was high, and the passages were “cluttered” with parenthetical expansions and interesting asides that could easily distract you from the underlying points. </p>
<p>I scored about in the 90th percentile, but that was far below where I usually scored on such tests. I think I was 96th + or so in the GRE, and was typically 99 or so on the SAT science and math areas. I felt the LSAT was by far the most difficult test I’d seen. Not unfair, mind you, but exceedingly difficult. I suspect it may be less so today, in the modern spirit of making things more “fair”. I think that about 600 or so men in my class took the LSAT, and two of them scored 800. I’m not sure what the percentages are today, but the distribution was very spread out back then. </p>
<p>The schools themselves clearly cared mostly for the academic aspects of people. I agree with the OP that grades and the score are the holy grail, and most of the well-rounded parts of things don’t count for all that much. </p>
<p>(This is why many people interested in law school should probably consider business school instead. They are more interested in what you have done outside of the classroom than are law schools.)</p>