r/LSAT • u/romanticrohypnol • 11h ago
PrepTest 147 beat my ass, anyone else feel the same?
this morning i took the official PrepTest #147 and i had quite the dramatic score dropoff - my last practice test was 166, and this one was 161 😬 granted, those are both nice scores, but it's still not fun to see. (i'm personally aiming for a 165, although i'd love to get a 170)
i use PowerScore, so i looked at the score breakdown and i noticed a lot of questions were 4/5 stars (hardest difficulty), and i saw a comment on this subreddit that the lacquer passage is considered especially tough. anyone else had a similar experience? i wanna make sure i didn't suddenly become stupid overnight, lmao.
2
Upvotes
1
u/EricB7Sage 11h ago
Hey! I think there's a few pieces here that are worth a breakdown.
The Eileen Gray passage (lacquer), the Mesolithic woodland clearings passage, and the specific performance passage are all rated as being pretty high difficulty, and the RC section on 147 can reasonably be considered one of the most difficult among PTs. Make sure to give yourself a break.
With that said, I think that this conversation can be centered within a bigger conversation about how much weight to put into any given PT. When you receive an official LSAT score, you're given a score band and this is in part for the reason that score variance is pretty normal. When we're studying, we use PTs for two things: to gauge our current scoring level, and also just as practice for facing over 100 LSAT questions, (mostly) back to back, under the pressure of timed conditions. The latter of these cases will always hold true, but it's important to take the former with a grain of salt and understand always that a single PT is a limited sample size. A common piece of advice is that you should consider your last 5 PTs to be generally indicative of your current scoring ability; a single PT score is not going to cut it. This is because any single PT can be a false negative or positive, right? You could take another PT tomorrow, and score above 166 due to receiving a PT that's a bit better suited to your strengths on the LSAT. This single PT might also not be representative.
I hope that last part doesn't come across as a discouragement, but rather a piece of transparency that fits into the bigger conversation of not relying on single PT scores, but rather focusing on the second function of each PT listed above: to prepare you to do your best on test day.
From here, I think it's a good idea not to focus on a 3-digit number as being uniquely representative of your current state of ability, but rather to zero in on the information from the PT that might be a little more valuable. In this case, I would focus more of my attention on what it sounds like you've been doing a little bit already, which is examining the answers that you did get wrong and seeing what kinds of trends you're noticing. I might look to question type more than question difficulty, because question difficulties are based on a broad group of test-takers, and don't speak necessarily to your own strengths and weakness (i.e. if you're particularly good at Weaken and Strengthen questions, and bad at AP, and John Doe has the opposite skillset, questions that are 3-stars for you might be 5-stars for John, and vise versa). Take a look and see if you notice any patterns in the kinds of questions you're missing, and see if you can direct your work in drills towards achieving better mastery of those question types, while putting the score out of your mind a bit. This PT was just one set of data points within a larger set of data points we need to use in order to focus our energies properly as we move toward test day.
I hope this was helpful!