5 LSAT Test Tips to Help You Get Into Law School

Hi, my name is Irene Kim and I'm an LSAT teacher for Kaplan. I'm also a law school graduate and I practice law in civil litigation. Today, I'm here to share with you five tips to help you perform well on the LSAT to get you into that law school of your dreams. Now, tip number one is, did you know that the LSAT is designed as a test to not be finishable? Say what? What does that mean? That means that those who actually invest time rather than race to try to finish as many questions as possible are the ones who are going to get more points. What does it mean to invest time? Choose the questions that you will spend time on, that you will invest time in, that you are more likely to get right. But how do I know which questions I'm more likely to get right? Okay, that takes us to tip number two. Review, review, review. For all those practice questions that you are doing to improve your skills on the test, review every question, even the ones that you get right. Why? This is so that you can see, hey, I did this right, I want to do it again, or hmm, I don't want to do that next time, I want to change that to do better. And also, you will see your own pattern of your strengths and the places that are challenges, so that by test day, you will know clearly which questions you are more likely to get right, and therefore, you should invest time in. Now, the other part about LSAT, and I'm sure you've all experienced this, if you've even taken a look at one question, is the language is not user-friendly. Often, the language on the LSAT is convoluted, it's definitely not the way we use the English language on an everyday basis, and that's because the LSAT is testing a very lawyerly skill, which is to take language that's a little bit more complicated, harder to understand, even vague, and interpret it to simply get out of it what you need to solve the problem. And that is why a key to success on the LSAT, and to being a lawyer, is to paraphrase. Paraphrase, paraphrase, paraphrase. What does that mean? Take the meaning of what you read and say it in your own words. Make the language user-friendly for you, the problem solver, so that you can use that information effectively to answer the question without getting bogged down by the way that it's expressed on the LSAT. Let's go to our next point, which is about patterns. Now, the LSAT, yes, is new every single time. They don't recycle questions, but you know what gets recycled over and over, it's been decades now, is inherent patterns on the test. That mysterious looking logic game section that seems so new and innovative each time, that is not a creative art. It is the pattern that constantly repeats. Even the way reading passages are organized, or the way they organize those little short paragraphs in logical reasoning, have patterns. Wrong answers have patterns. And therefore, as you practice, instead of just looking at each question and situation in isolation, look for the patterns, learn the patterns, and use your knowledge of the patterns to save time and raise your accuracy on the LSAT. Finally, let's talk about reading comprehension. You know what reading comprehension is about? Location. Yeah, it's about location, not about memorization, or even in-depth mastery of the material. When you read that passage, you gotta read it quickly. But you know the good news is, it's still there when you're answering questions. It's an open book test. So when you read that reading comp passage for the first time, you want to locate the information. Oh, here's where the author makes the really strong point. Here's a big long example and definition for it. Here's the overall big takeaway. When you mark the location of the information, rather than try to memorize it en masse, by the time you get to questions, you can efficiently go back and research the places you need to look in order to answer the questions correctly. Those are your tips. Tag your fellow friends who are studying for the LSAT and leave any questions for me in the comments below. You got this. See you soon.