The Study Plan
Chapter 20 gave you the LASER Approach. The idea, the order, and why it works.
Now you need the plan you actually open on Monday morning.
This chapter is that plan, with a real calendar, real hours, and a week you can copy. The moves in order, numbers attached.
How long this takes
Most people need 3 to 4 months of focused study. That’s the default, and the range comes from what works.
If your first diagnostic test comes in low, give yourself longer. Honestly, 5 or 6 months isn’t a failure. You’re building more skill, so you need more time. A 6-week sprint from a low score puts you on test day with a shaky foundation, and your bad practice scores follow you into the real thing.
If your diagnostic is already strong, you can shorten the timeline some. Keep the order, though. Every phase still happens, you just move through each one faster.
So before you set a date, take 1 full, timed practice test this week. Cold, no prep. That score tells you how far you have to go and how long you’ll likely need. Under 150, plan for 5 to 6 months. 150 to 160, plan for 4 months. Above 160, 3 months can work if you’re consistent.
Write your test date down now, before you start studying. A study plan without a deadline never ends.
Hours per week
10 to 15 hours a week. That works for most people studying alongside school or a job.
Do less than 10 and the gaps between sessions get too long. You forget what you learned, and you spend the first 20 minutes of every session re-learning last time’s material. Do more than 15 and most people burn out by week 6. Burnout kills more study plans than low scores do.
Spread those hours across 5 or 6 days instead of cramming them into 2. 2 hours a day, 6 days a week, beats 6 hours twice a week, even though the total is the same.
And protect 1 day off. Your brain needs it, and so does your motivation.
The LASER sequence, with weeks attached
Here’s LASER turned into a calendar. The phases overlap some, and that’s normal. The order doesn’t change: no speed before accuracy, no full sections before you’ve built pacing, no full tests before that.
Weeks 1 to 3: Learning, no clock. Weeks 4 to 7: Accuracy, still no clock, but now the goal is getting consistently right instead of just understanding the concepts. Weeks 8 to 10: Sections, the clock comes in, but only on full timed sections, never single questions. Weeks 11 to 13: Exams and Endurance, full 4-section practice tests, 1 a week, tapering off in the final 2 weeks so you don’t walk into test day exhausted. Review runs underneath every phase, every session, the whole time: after every set, every section, every practice test, run your Socratic review, the 3-question habit from Chapter 20.
If your diagnostic came in low, stretch each phase instead of skipping one. The order is what protects the score, not the speed you move through it.
Weighting your time toward Logical Reasoning
Logical Reasoning is 2/3 of your scored test. Split your study hours the same way, roughly 2 of every 3, instead of the even 50-50 split most people default to because it feels fair. Reading Comprehension still needs real work. Just don’t let it eat the hours that belong to the section that decides most of your score.
Track it, don’t just feel it
Keep an error log. A simple spreadsheet, or even a notebook, with 4 columns: the question, the question type, why you missed it, and the fix.
Most people skip this and go by feeling instead. They finish a set and think “that went okay” or “that felt rough.” A log beats a feeling because you can scan it for patterns. After 2 weeks, look. If 6 of your last 10 misses are the same question type, you’ve found your next focus.
Check your numbers every 2 weeks rather than every day. Daily score-watching turns a long plan into an anxiety spiral. Your accuracy by question type, tracked every 2 weeks, tells you whether you’re improving. A single bad session doesn’t tell you much of anything, but a 2-week trend does.
One more marker, once you reach Exams and Endurance. Track the gap between your 1st-section accuracy and your 4th-section accuracy on each test. If that gap shrinks over time, your endurance work is paying off. If it holds steady or grows, that’s where your remaining hours need to go.
What to do if you fall behind
Look, you will fall behind at some point. Everyone does. When it happens, don’t skip Review to catch up on volume.
If you miss a week, don’t cram 2 weeks of new content into the next one. Cut the new material and keep the review. A smaller number of questions, fully understood, beats a large number half-reviewed. Volume without review just burns hours.
If you fall more than 2 weeks behind your original date, move the test date. That’s just re-running the math from the start, how far you have to go against how much time you have left.
The plan you actually start Monday
Pick your test date. Take 1 cold diagnostic this week. Block 10 to 15 hours into your calendar, across 5 or 6 days. Start Learning on Monday, untimed, question type by question type. Weight your hours about 2 to 1 toward Logical Reasoning. Review everything you touch, every single day, with the 3 questions: why’s the right answer right, why’s each wrong answer wrong, what would you tell a friend.
That’s the whole plan. It’s specific enough that you can’t talk yourself out of starting.
