• Contact Us
  • Student Login
  • My Cart

LSAT and Law School Admissions Blog

You are here: Home / LSAT Prep / LSAT Progress: Learning from Your Mistakes

December 15, 2014

LSAT Progress: Learning from Your Mistakes

LSAT Progress: Learning from Your Mistakes

People who decide to go to law school, and thus prepare to take the LSAT, tend to have some personality traits in common. They tend to be driven, confident, and prone to blowing any perceived failure completely out of proportion. I’m not putting anyone down. In fact, it should be fairly obvious given my profession that I’m talking as much about myself as anyone else. But, if in addition to myself, I’ve also described you, consider this: you’re not going to progress as quickly as possible unless you learn to not only accept failure but also embrace it.

Now, I’m not saying that you should be happy that you’re missing questions. But you should make friends with your failures. Spend time with them. Learn about them and learn from them; your mistakes have a certain logic.

Find the Pattern

Don’t just generalize, get specific. Take stock of the questions that you miss. Can you identify any particular patterns? Take into account the question type (e.g., Strengthen, Assumption, Must Be True, Weaken etc.), the kind of logic that leads to the conclusion (e.g., causality, conditionality, formal logic, etc.), the use of language in both the stimulus and the answer choices (e.g., qualifiers, modifiers), and other considerations that you can add to your list over time.

As you begin to focus more on the detail of the language and the specific features of the questions that you tend to miss, you’ll discover that you start to notice more categories of information to watch out for and identify the more difficult elements of questions before they trip you up. You’ll be surprised how many pitfalls you can avoid when you start to see them lit up like Times Square on New Year’s Eve.

Use Mistakes for Good

So, don’t make enemies of your mistakes. Don’t avoid them or be ashamed of them. Recognize that your mistakes have a certain logic. Your past mistakes, when properly categorized and analyzed, can help you avoid future mistakes. Make friends with your mistakes, and they’ll start coming around less often.

FacebookTweetPinEmail

Posted by PowerScore Test Prep / LSAT Prep / LSAT Prep, Mentality Leave a Comment

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Attend a PowerScore Webinar!

Popular Posts

  • Podcast Episode 168: The 2025 US News Law School Rankings
  • Podcast Episode 167: April 2025 LSAT Recap
  • Podcast Episode 166: LSAT Faceoff: Dave and Jon Debate Five Common Test Concerns
  • Podcast Episode 165: February 2025 LSAT Recap
  • Podcast Episode 164: State of the LSAT Union: 2024 Recap and 2025 Preview

Categories

  • Pinterest
  • Facebook
  • YouTube
  • Twitter
Share this ArticleLike this article? Email it to a friend!

Email sent!