My LSAT Study Schedule

Once I finally decided to go to law school, my first step was to begin studying for the LSAT.

Cue the scary music.

It's a big task to take on, and I sat down to figure out how I would go about it, mainly through a search on Pinterest and Google. Unfortunately, it seemed to me that if I wanted to do any guided studying or take a class, I would have to shell out a ton of money for it. Because I planned on paying for everything on my own, I knew I wouldn't be able to go that route.

My Materials

After signing up for the LSAT on the LSAC website, I noticed that there was a collaboration between LSAC and Khan Academy for free LSAT practice, so I immediately hopped on that opportunity. Following a practice test to see where my baseline was, I set my goal score and scheduled an hour of practice questions to go through every day. There is also a section on the Khan Academy website with lessons to go through, from written ones to video walkthroughs of questions.

When I first began using Khan Academy, I really liked it. Depending on where you are in your studies, you can change the difficulty of the questions, and it puts the question types that you need to work on the most at the top of your list, which is really helpful. After answering each question, whether you get it right or wrong, explanations for why an answer is correct or incorrect. That's one of my favorite parts of Khan Academy because I can see exactly where I went wrong with my thinking.

I also like the lessons as well, especially the video ones. Most of them were narrated by different people, so you could see various ways to go about solving the problems.

While I do like some aspects of Khan Academy, my one issue with it is that after you've been using it for a while, it can become repetitive. Once you learn the answer to a question, you can usually remember it later on. This complaint might not be warranted, though, because I have been using it since June, and that might make it inevitable to always receive new questions.

In addition to Khan Academy, I have several books of LSAT preptests and the three Powerscore LSAT bibles. Like I mentioned above, I'm trying to to this on a bit of a budget, so I wasn't expecting to have this many preptests to do. But, I was lucky enough to borrow them from a friend of mine and a friend of my mom's who is going to law school as well.

I think that the Powerscore books were monumental in how much I've improved over the past few months. They all do a great job of explaining test-taking strategies. I was most nervous about the logic games section when I first started studying, but I'm much more comfortable going through that section now.

Putting It All Together

With all of these elements, I began to feel overwhelmed. How was I going to go through all of this, and where would I even start? The best way for me to begin was to sit down and look through it all, and then put it all into a calendar.

I was lucky enough to find a printable calendar off Pinterest (aka my lifesaver) and sat down at the island in my kitchen to get to work.




I scheduled around two practice tests each week because I learned that the best way to prep for the LSAT is to take tests. Following the practice tests, I looked through my Powerscore bibles and figured out how many chapters I should go through each day in order to finish them off before the test, while also giving myself time to review just in case I wanted to go over anything more than once.

After I got all that together, I put it into the calendar printables I found and, now, they're hanging on my wall. I've been crossing off one day at a time, and it's kind of hard to believe the LSAT is in less than three weeks.

How did you decide how to study for the LSAT?

xoxo,

Rachel