Taking the LAST practice cold

Johncodu · 03-10-2008, 10:31 PM

Hey I was just wondering how much people generally improve after taking a practice test completely cold. I took a practice Kaplan test at my school having done no research on the lsat and knowing nothing about it and I received a 149. Since I took it cold, does this mean I have a lot of room for improvement?

Thanks

bluedevilmike · 03-10-2008, 10:41 PM

Varies extensively from person to person. Ten-to-fifteen point improvements are often pretty common; larger ones can happen -- but so can smaller ones. My rule of thumb has always been that it's related imprecisely to your SAT Math+Verbal.

SAT/21 + 101 +/- 5 should give you a rough expectation of where you might end up. Again, all predictive formulas are imprecise by nature.

futurenyustudent · 03-11-2008, 12:56 AM

Don't worry about it. I got a 143 the first time. I'm going in next week to take another one. Hopefully this time it'll be in the high 150's/low 160's.

And yes, I'm going to do some studying before I go in.

marny1 · 03-11-2008, 08:07 AM

fyi- it is also not uncommon for your scores to dip a bit once you start the studying process. After that point, your scores should hopefully be on an upward trend.

my d kinda panicked as her score went down from her diagnostic at the early stages of studying for the LSAT. I told her I read on these boards (or maybe one of the other law boards) that it was not uncommon for the scores to go down a bit. She actually felt better once I told her that it was not uncommon for scores to go down.

Her score improved about 15 points from diagnostic to actual LSAT score.

futurenyustudent · 03-11-2008, 09:26 AM

Unfortunately, I'm expecting myself to improve 36 points. I know, I'm setting myself up for failure.

wolfpack12 · 03-11-2008, 10:24 AM

good luck with that.

bluedevilmike · 03-11-2008, 10:34 AM

Here's a theory. Never seen any data, not even anecdotal data. I'm just theorizing. Take your expected score from SAT projections (160-170 for FNS) and add fifteen to your diagnostic (158 for FNS) to see whether you should expect to be on the low end or the high end of that (160 for FNS).

Again -- I have no idea whether this has any validity.

wolfpack12 · 03-11-2008, 10:37 AM

Do you know of a predictive formula for GMAT scores? Do you think that SAT/2.1 + 101 +/- 5 would work?

bluedevilmike · 03-11-2008, 10:40 AM

Most likely the best formula is just (M+V)/2. But no, I've never seen anything like that.

chocoman · 03-11-2008, 09:38 PM

I'm taking another practice tomorrow after I got a 157 last Saturday

.

I'm going to take this one roughly untimed though (do as fast as I can but not rush to finish, probably about 37 minutes per section).

This LSAT stuff is hard. If I don't start seeing 170's within two months or so, I may very well move my June LSAT to September.

futurenyustudent, aren't you a freshman anyway? If so, you should just concentrate on your gpa for now.

chocoman · 03-12-2008, 04:02 PM

Got a 163 today on Superprep test A. I'll go over all the explanations tomorrow and hope I can continue moving in the direction I want.

Hanna · 03-14-2008, 03:47 PM

"I'm going to take this one roughly untimed though"

IMHO, this is not a valuable thing to do. Doing a million practice questions untimed can be helpful, but an untimed score on a full test tells you practically nothing.

chocoman · 03-14-2008, 05:00 PM

Good point.

I still worked as fast as I could, and I actually finished 5-8 minutes early on 3 of the 4 sections. The other one I went 2 minutes over so I need to work on speeding up my LG. I also need to sure it up, I'm hovering around -3, -4 on the section; I don't think its beyond my ability to hit -0 consistently.

I don't plan on having superstrict testing standards until early May. After that I will probably use the LSAT proctor dvd to simulate testing conditions as much as possible. Maybe I'll even travel to my test site to take it there once.

As for now, I'm just trying to isolate and fix my weaknesses with the practice test to help stamina and see how I'm progressing.

Sachmoney · 03-14-2008, 05:45 PM

Well, six points up is still a pretty good start in the right direction chocoman. Keep it up, and I hope it works for you!

bluedevilmike · 03-14-2008, 07:17 PM

I think untimeds are useful for studying but are not good methods for evaluation, even if you're spilling over by only a couple minutes. You'd be surprised what the time pressure can do to you.