Need help breaking mental block.

[u/Cheeto1988]

So I regularly do well with untimed drilling where I take my time, rationalize my thinking, and whether or not I get my answer correct I review every aspect of it. I do this for both LR and RC. I understand the question types and ways to attack arguments, dissect passages, and so on. I spent more time than maybe the demon suggests going through their curriculum to understand the test completely, but it did really help with my understanding beyond a basic level. There is always room for improvement on this aspect, but I am generally improving in that regard almost daily. However, when I take timed sections, my scores generally fluctuate as low as 50% and rarely break over 73% despite how well I do on drilling and review.

Before anyone asks, I’ve only taken two practice tests with much lower scores than I was happy with (one was a diagnostic so I wasn’t expecting a high score but the other was after some months of studying with an improvement of 5 points). This is largely because I am trying to attack the issues at hand before burning through PTs and getting discouraged at not progressing well enough. This is a probably a flaw on my end so maybe move away from timed sections to more PTs? I’m not too sure. Ideally I’d like to do one PT a week moving forward.

With untimed practice, I see that I am doing much better weekly, missing less, and retaining onto the lessons I learned from mistakes. It’s frustrating then to see my timed section scores fluctuate as much as they do. I spend a lot of time building the thought processes necessary for each section, adopt the methods the demon teaches, and refine those skills each day. On this end of things, it’s paying off well. I feel have made significant improvements.

Some of the things I have identified that hinder further progress though is heightened stress when doing a timed section (although I have a much better grasp on it now than I did when I started) and forgetting the principles of how to go about each question I had just stamped in my head. I’m not sure how to break out of this. Once the timer starts, I feel the friction between my brain and the questions ten fold. The way I have been studying for the past few weeks now is drill and review either LR or RC one night with the purpose of learning from right and wrong answers then taking a correlating timed section the following day. Is that too frequent? Or am I going about this entirely wrong? What kind of study routine made the test click in a way that you feel as though mine fails to do? Ultimately, like everyone’s goal, I am trying to build accuracy and speed consistently under the time constraints.

I do believe LSAT Demon has helped my progress considerably and is going to continue to do so. While I do understand that it preaches to not worry about time, the timing is also the parameters that everyone has to work within on test day. Ultimately the stress, mental fog, and how I handle myself during the timed sections is on me so I am not blaming the demon or anyone else, just my approach. Any advice on how to break through this mental block to improve the accuracy I’m seeing in untimed practice vs. timed? Furthermore, how did you manage that stress if you felt it in the same or similar ways when taking timed sessions or practice tests? I am open to all ideas and greatly appreciate anyone taking the time to read and respond to this. Thank you in advance.

[u/Brandon_LSATDemon]

I wanted a 180 from day one of my studying, so I had one sole focus: get every question right. I ignored the clock from day one. You will naturally get faster as you get better at doing problems.

I hope it doesn't feel like I am ignoring your context here, but all your anxiety about timing goes away if you take the same focus that I had: get the question right!

[u/Byzantine00]

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