About
“I didn’t think the LSAT would be so hard for me.”
Sound familiar? Me too.
I’m Laurent, and I’m a 180-scorer and LSAT instructor. I can tell you, though: that 180 did not come easily. Before my first practice test, I thought, “I’ve taken tests before. You study, and you keep studying until you get it, and then you take the test. Nothing new.”
I was wrong. I worked through one of the popular textbooks from cover to cover, and then I bombed my first practice test. And the next. And the next. I understood the concepts and could handle untimed practice just fine, but I couldn’t even come close to completing a timed section. I started to think I was inherently incapable of handling the LSAT. I was surprised and frustrated, because I’d done well in university and had a Master’s degree in mechanical engineering. I’d taken hard tests before. So why was this so hard? What made the LSAT so infuriatingly different?
Part of it is that the test seems to want you to fail. It lays traps everywhere—in the stimulus, in the reading passages, and in the answer choices—and hopes you won’t notice. You need to read with a level of precision that most of us have never had to do. (People usually don’t try to write in a way that tricks the reader! The LSAT does.)
The other reason the LSAT is so hard is that it’s one of the most aggressively timed tests in the world. Thinking that fast, let alone thinking clearly, is hard, even for very smart, very experienced students.
I learned that intelligence isn’t enough if you want a competitive score on this test. To break into the 170s, you can’t just be smart. You need to be agile. You need to spot the traps coming and be ready to dodge them. And when you encounter those extra-tough, curve-breaker questions, you need to know how to pivot, adapt your analysis, and adjust your approach to the answer choices depending on the time available.
This is the approach that got me to 180, and it’s the approach I teach my students: an agile mindset that combines solid fundamentals and disciplined reasoning skills with a flexible methodology for reacting to the test’s thornier spots. It’s not a set of quick “test hacks,” and it takes real practice to perfect, but for those students who are committed to their law school goals and don’t intend to compromise, the effort pays off.
I love teaching this test. Before starting Agility LSAT, I taught for one of the major test prep companies as a one-on-one tutor, group instructor, and curriculum writer. I decided to create my own tutoring service in order to teach the method that really worked for me and my students, without tacky buzzwords and without dumbing things down.
When I’m not being a professional nerd, I love hiking, growing veggies on my balcony, watching Japanese superhero shows, and drinking too much coffee.