The review you were taught
Somebody taught you how to review, even if all they handed you was an answer key. The advice I see on students’ screens comes in four versions. All four sound responsible, and they share one blind spot, which I’ll get to once you’ve seen them.
Redo it untimed
The first is to take the section again without the clock and compare the two scores. The gap is supposed to show how much of your trouble is time and how much is knowledge.
I’ve told students that the untimed number doesn’t help me much, because the clock is a big part of what makes this test hard. The bigger problem is what the redo skips. You see the question a second time, notice you were off, pick something else, and feel better.
“If you’re not actually analyzing why your first choice was wrong, you’re just guessing more cleverly.”
And the bill comes on the next test:
“I’ve seen students redo entire sections or exams only to make the same mistakes again in their next practice test.”
The redo measures how you do with the pressure off and the question half-remembered. It can’t tell you what you believed when the wrong answer felt safe, and that belief is coming with you to the next section.
Read the explanation and nod
The second is the one almost everybody runs. You check the key, read why the right answer is right, and move on because it clicked.
“Most students look at the explanation, they nod along, and then they move on. But that’s not review. Real review changes what you do tomorrow.”
The nod feels like learning because the explanation is good. It’s supposed to be good. Somebody wrote it with the answer already in hand, and that’s exactly why it can’t do much for you:
“That’s someone else’s supposedly perfect way of solving the question when they already had the hindsight bias of knowing the correct answer.”
An explanation can tell you why C is right. It can’t tell you why you picked B, because whoever wrote it wasn’t in your head when you clicked.
Keep a list of the numbers
The third looks like discipline. You keep a running list of the questions you missed, by test and number, maybe sorted by type. Before a first session I ask new students to send me their three to five hardest recent questions. Most send question numbers.
A list of numbers tells you where the points went. It doesn’t say why, and the why is the only part you can carry to a question you haven’t seen yet. Sorting the list by type doesn’t fix it. You’ll meet a student in chapter 6 whose one belief about arguments cost her points on two question types, in opposite directions. A list sorted by type splits that belief into two piles, and you’d never see it.
Write why the right one is right
The fourth is the most serious of the four, and the hardest to argue with. For every miss, you write why the right answer is right and why each wrong answer is wrong. Students who do this fill notebooks. One sent me a review sheet so thorough it read like a published explanation. I told him that was good, and that something was missing:
“I would also look at what was your thought process going in initially and then again upon reflection, what could you have done differently?”
Every sentence in a notebook like that can be true and still miss the point. Owen, in chapter 3, reviewed a flaw question on his own and came out with a correct sentence about the flaw. The same review hid a false sentence about Owen, that he could spot that kind of flaw under time, and the false one was what kept costing him. Claire found the same gap from the other side. When I asked her why a wrong choice was wrong, out came the misreading that had sent her there. “Why is the right one right” would have let her say something true and never touch it.
What the four have in common
All four are reviews of the question. They ask what the question was doing, and some of them do it well. None of them asks what you were doing.
The Socratic Review Method is a review of you. It starts with what you believed at the moment you clicked, before the key can rewrite it, and it keeps going until it reaches a belief about how arguments work that you’ve been carrying into every section. The question is just where you happened to catch it.
Daniel could explain every miss he’d ever reviewed, and months later he was still missing the same kind of question.
None of this is your fault. Explanations are easy to print and easy to sell, because one explanation fits every reader. A review of you can’t be written ahead of time. Nobody knows what you believed when you clicked except you, so the only review of you is one you run yourself, and most prep never shows you how.
The four fake reviews
A review that goes wrong tends to go wrong in one of four ways. I’m giving them names so you can catch yourself in the act. Each one has a step in the method that’s there to stop it.
The Nod. You read the explanation, agree with it, and move on. It feels like learning because the explanation makes sense, and three weeks later the same skeleton takes the same point. Step 1, the deposition, kills it. You write down what you were thinking before you see the key, so the explanation has nothing to overwrite.
The Receipt. Your takeaway is a fact about this one question. “The answer was D because of the second sentence.” It’s true, and it’s useless, because that question is never coming back. The rule in step 5 is built against it. A rule is written in the future tense and has no answer letter in it.
The Band-Aid. Your takeaway is a feeling. “Be more careful.” “I rushed.” “Careless.” I’ve called these emotional band-aids for years, because they cover the miss without touching what caused it. The why-chain in step 4 won’t accept that. It isn’t allowed to stop at “careless,” because there’s always a gap in your process hiding behind that word.
The Costume Rule. You wrote a rule, but it’s about the subject matter, or you copied it from the explanation. “Watch out for science passages” is a costume rule. So is a perfect sentence lifted from somebody else’s write-up. A rule about the costume won’t fire when the same skeleton shows up in different clothes, and a copied rule describes the writer’s thinking, which was never your problem. Step 5 kills this one too. The rule has to be in your words, and it has to be about the skeleton.
You’ll run into all four again. Most of the step chapters name the fake review that step is built to stop.
Which review are you running?
Pull up the last question you reviewed. Not your best review ever, the most recent one. Answer these six with a plain yes or no.
- Did you write down what you were thinking before you checked the key?
- Can you say the argument’s conclusion in one sentence, in your own words?
- Did you decide where the point died, in the argument, in the question it asked, or in the choices?
- Is your takeaway free of answer letters and facts about that one question?
- Is your rule about how arguments work, and not about the topic?
- Did you write down a date to try that question again?
Count the yeses.
Zero to two. Start at chapter 3 and read the steps in order. Right now the key is doing most of your reviewing for you. If you’d like someone to run the questions with you the first time, bring your last three troubled questions, each with the honest sentence about what you were thinking, to a free LSAT tutoring lesson at unpluggedprep.com/start. The coach will start from those three sentences and ask you the questions in this book out loud, in order.
Three or four. Look at where your no’s landed. If they were on questions four and five, read chapter 8, the rule, first, then go back to chapter 3 and read in order. If they were anywhere else, start at chapter 3.
Five or six. You’re already running most of it. Skim Part 1 for the questions in each step, then go to Part 2, which covers what the method runs into over weeks, and chapter 15, which is for the person asking the questions.
Keep this page. Every no above is a line on the card in the next chapter.
