Step 5, the rule: "What would you do differently on the next one?"
A review that ends in understanding is a review that didn’t end. It has to end in a sentence you write yourself, in the future tense, stating the rule that would have saved this point. That’s the second half of step five. A rule copied from an explanation is a costume. A rule you wrote because you found the skeleton is a bone, and you’ll keep it.
On a call, I can’t write the student’s rule for them. I can ask for it, and I do, at the end of almost every exchange that went well. This chapter also covers two other things I do. I define what deserves a full review in the first place, and I don’t let right answers off the hook.
On the card. Step 5, the rule. It’s the other half of step 5’s 3 minutes. Output: one sentence, your words, future tense, with a trigger attached. Out loud: “What’s the biggest takeaway?” And if the answer is a fact about this question, “What would you do differently on the next one of these?”
Is this your broken step? Yes or no, from your last week of reviews.
- My last takeaway had no answer letter in it.
- Each of my rules fits in a text message and says when I’ll use it.
- I wrote my last rule myself, and didn’t copy it from an explanation.
A second “no” makes this your chapter. Do “Your three questions, step 5 (the rule)” before anything else.
The four questions
The clearest version of the review I’ve given came in Priya’s first session. She’d just worked a comparative passage question where two descriptive choices both seemed partly true, and she asked, in effect, what a proper review of it would look like. I told her:
“We engage in a deep review to look at: what was your initial approach, and upon reflection, what may you have missed? So what might have made the wrong answer choice tempting? What ultimately makes it wrong? What makes the right answer choice unappealing? What ultimately makes it correct?”
Four questions. Why the wrong one tempted you, why it’s wrong anyway, why the right one repelled you, why it’s right anyway. Line them up against the written protocol and the first is the deposition, the second and fourth are the rebuild and where-the-point-died, and the third is the why-chain’s favorite hiding place. The reason a right answer repelled you is almost always a belief about arguments you didn’t know you had.
Then I ran it on the question in front of us, and the key turned out to be one word. The question asked about the author’s attitude, and the tempting choice called it skeptical. We’d been circling it for ten minutes. So I asked the student to define the word.
“What does it mean to be skeptical, literally, if we get super specific on it?”
She defined it and saw the problem as she did. A skeptic leans toward no. This author wasn’t leaning anywhere. The author was noncommittal, a different attitude with a different choice attached. Her rule, in her own words, was that a noncommittal attitude isn’t a doubtful one, and that attitude words in choices get taken literally. That rule holds on every attitude question she’ll ever see.
What deserves twenty minutes
The method costs about twenty minutes per question, and students who take it seriously hit a wall fast. There aren’t enough hours. So the first decision in review is which questions get reviewed. Hannah asked me this directly in her third session, after spending nine hours reviewing one practice test.
“Reviewing everything is just prohibitively time consuming, and so instead I would recommend: what you got wrong, what you had difficulty with, and what you guessed on and got lucky but could have easily gone the other way.”
Three categories. Misses, obviously. Questions you got right but struggled with, because the struggle is data. And the third one, which most students never review, because a right answer feels like a closed case.
Sometimes I split it four ways for the journal: misses, guesses, slow corrects, and shaky corrects, because all four fail under pressure. The limit runs the other way too. If you got it right for the right reason and it was easy, don’t spend more time there.
Twenty minutes is the target. Ten is the floor:
“A good rule of thumb is that you spend at least 10 to 20 minutes for every single question worthy of review.”
Most of that time goes to Logical Reasoning questions numbered fifteen and up, because that’s where the hard ones sit.
I’d make that trade every time, fewer questions and deeper on each. 20 honest minutes with 1 question beats 2 polite hours with 50.
Sidebar: “I don’t have twenty minutes per question”
Twenty minutes is for troubled questions only, and the three categories I gave Hannah cut the pile hard. An easy question you got right for the right reason gets nothing. Ten minutes is the floor on the rest. And a skeleton you’ve already logged doesn’t need the full dig the second time it shows up. It gets the five-minute rerun from chapter 9.
Sofia got the sharpest version of the guessing point, in her second session. She’d been down to two choices on a parallel flaw question, picked one, switched, and ended up right by a coin flip.
“You were very close to having it down to A and E. I know that you were considering A initially, then you switched it. Really common. I could say go with your gut, but there are going to be times where you are down to two and you guess right. My bigger advice here would just be to review every question that you guess on, whether you get it right or wrong, because of course it could have gone the other way.”
“It could have gone the other way” is the whole case for reviewing right answers. A guess that landed is a miss that hasn’t happened yet. The skeleton that made the two choices feel equal is still in there, and the only reason it didn’t cost a point is that the coin came up heads. Review the guess as if it had come up tails.
The confidence audit, live
I call it the confidence audit. For a right answer, write one sentence on why it wins and one on why the trap is wrong, precise enough to convince the version of you from three weeks ago. If the second sentence comes out fuzzy, it’s a troubled question and gets the full twenty minutes. The version I give students is blunter:
“What was your confidence level in the answer choice that you picked when you got it right? If it wasn’t 10 out of 10, then maybe in a different attempt, you would have gotten it wrong.”
Live, the audit is the question from chapter 3 pointed at a right answer: “tell me why.” It has a second half I use when the first answer sounds right but I’m not sure it’s understood. I ask for an example. Daniel, second session, after explaining a right answer cleanly:
“If you’re not clear on whether you get it, then a lot of times bringing up examples can help you really be certain of it.”
An example is a test you can’t pass by recitation. A student who restates a principle may have memorized it. A student who comes up with a fresh instance on the spot, with different subject matter, has the skeleton. Asking for the example takes about thirty seconds.
Sidebar: “What about the ones I got right?”
Most of them you leave alone. A right answer gets the audit only if you got it by a coin flip or at less than ten out of ten confidence. If the audit comes out fuzzy, give it the full twenty minutes.
Ask for the takeaway
The last thing in a review, after the rule, is the question that checks the rule exists. Maya, first session, after a long stretch where I’d modeled how to paraphrase a dense paragraph and make abstract language concrete:
“So after having gone through this here, what would you say is the biggest takeaway or insight that you got from our approach on this?”
She named two: use real-world examples for abstract language, and paraphrase twice, simplifying each time. Both are hers. I’d demonstrated them and she’d pulled them out. Because she said them out loud in her own words, they went into the log as rules and not as a memory of watching me.
I’ll say the uncomfortable part. Asked for the takeaway, a lot of students give you a fact about the question. “The answer was D because of the second sentence.” That’s not a takeaway. That’s a receipt. When I get a receipt I ask again in a different form: what would you do differently on the next one of these? That version forces the future tense, so the answer comes out as a rule.
Vague rules fail the same way receipts do. I tell students:
“If your takeaway was be more careful next time, don’t fall for traps, or stay focused, these are lovely sentiments, but they’re also completely useless. You need testable, repeatable rules. Something you can do on the next question, something you can write down, check against, and say, yep, I applied that here.”
And I tell them to keep it small:
“You’ve got to turn the root cause into a rule that you will use on the next question. You keep it to one line only, short and concrete. If the rule is longer than a text message, it’s not a rule that you would actually use. Now you add a trigger so the rule shows up when you need it. For example: if I catch myself rereading the stimulus once with no clearer idea, I pause for ten seconds and I write the must sentence.”
The rule is what you’ll do. The trigger is the moment you’ll notice to do it. The students in this book who improved fastest, Daniel and Hannah especially, wrote both without being told to. The ones who stalled had rules like “read more carefully,” which I’ve compared to eating fewer carbs after burning your toast. Not wrong. Just not about the toast.
What exactly did I learn from this one?
The best question in this chapter came from a student. Daniel, second session, stopped in the middle of a review and said, roughly: what exactly did I learn from reviewing this one? He’d caught himself finishing a review with understanding and no rule.
That question should end every review, and students should ask it of themselves out loud, because a receipt can’t answer it. “The answer was D” doesn’t survive it. “I treat necessary assumptions like sufficient ones” does.
In a later session Daniel told me the method was helping him go deeper. By the last one he brought his own written review notes to the call and explained each flaw before I spoke.
Sidebar: “I’m already at 170”
Daniel had sections at zero or one wrong, and he still wrote his rules down. Up there, there’s rarely one big thing you’re missing. It’s a lot of very small distinctions, and a small distinction you understood once and never wrote down is gone by next week. Chapter 13 has what I told him when he asked for the one big insight.
The check-in
One more rule, for carrying rules into a timed section. Kevin, eighth session, told me some sets went perfectly and in others he’d miss a large number. He’d traced it to zoning out: answering fast, switching answers, not going back.
“You just ask yourself, check in every question. What did I read? What’s the conclusion? What’s the method of reasoning?”
That’s the rebuild compressed into a three-second ritual, run on every question under time. It’s what the written rules turn into once you’ve written them enough. A student who’s done forty reviews doesn’t open a log mid-section. They ask those three questions in their head before they commit.
On the card it’s the Check-In, step 0 on test day. Nothing else in the method runs inside a timed section.
In Kevin’s first session I told him what I thought the method was worth:
“With a standard approach, you might improve one point for every exam that you take. When you study more efficiently and you review in sufficient depth using the Socratic Review Method, for example, you should be able to improve two points for every exam that you do.”
That number is my experience talking. Kevin went from fifteen right on his weakest section to all of them in five sessions, and what changed in between was what he did after each miss.
Out of your head
A rule that stays in your head isn’t finished. I tell students:
“The key element of the Socratic Review Method framework, the key element that makes it work, is that you articulate your thought process whenever you don’t understand something in an LSAT question. It’s not enough to do it in your head.”
“In my experience, the students who try to do this in their head get to a far less sophisticated place in their understanding than those who actually take the time to write it down.”
I see it whenever I ask a new student to send their three to five hardest recent questions before a session. Most send question numbers. A few send notes, and the notes are what I need:
“I want to see your thought process behind the question”
If writing stalls you, talk. Speech edits itself less than writing does:
“There’s less self-editing that goes on when you simply speak the words that you’re thinking of right in the moment.”
A voice memo counts. So does explaining it to anyone who’ll sit still:
“If you have no one willing to listen to you, talk to your dog or house plant. It doesn’t matter. The point is that you are getting out of your own head and articulating exactly what gave you trouble about a question”
Why it has to be yours
I’ve never once written a student’s rule for them, and I’ve been asked plenty of times. A rule I write is about how I think, and the student doesn’t have my errors. They have theirs. Ben’s rule about necessary assumptions, that the strong choice is usually a sufficient condition in disguise, would be useless to Kevin, whose problem on the same question type was mistaking helpful for required. Same question type, different skeletons, different rules. If I’d handed them both my rule, I’d have handed them both the wrong one.
So the rule comes last, it comes from the student, and I only ask for it. The method is the questions. The rule is what’s left when the questions run out.
Your review, reviewed
The thing I most often review with a student isn’t a question. It’s their review. Session after session I’d open a student’s wrong-answer spreadsheet and find the same problem. All the analysis for a question sat crammed into one cell, so a necessary assumption entry might be a third the length of a principle entry and nobody could tell what had been skipped. The fix I gave every time was columns. One for the question type. One for the stimulus. One for the stem. Two for the wrong answer, covering what made it tempting and what makes it wrong. Two for the right answer, covering what made it unappealing and what makes it correct. One for the rule.
“I just want to make it foolproof for you, like a checklist, so that you’re actually going to hit each of these points, and it will be incredibly obvious if you missed one which one you missed.”
Those columns are the written template. Each column is a step. An empty cell tells you which step got skipped before I ever have to.
That’s the Eight Columns, one row per troubled question.
| # | Column | What goes in it | Step |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Question type | The type, read off the stem | 3 |
| 2 | Stimulus | Evidence and conclusion, in your words, badly | 2 |
| 3 | Stem | What the question actually asked you to do | 3 |
| 4 | Wrong answer: what made it tempting | What you were thinking when you picked it, written before the key | 1 |
| 5 | Wrong answer: what makes it wrong | Where it fails the text, or the words it needs that aren’t there | 3 |
| 6 | Right answer: what made it unappealing | The belief that pushed you off it | 4 |
| 7 | Right answer: what makes it correct | The lines that support it | 2 |
| 8 | The rule | One sentence, future tense, no answer letter, with a trigger | 5 |
The forecast from chapter 7 goes under the row, and so does the rematch date. Chapter 9 gives those their own page. The free companion workbook at unpluggedprep.com/books has a printable review page built on the same six steps.
The fake version
The Receipt dies here. It’s a takeaway that’s really a fact about this question, “the answer was D because of the second sentence,” and the future-tense question breaks it every time. The Costume Rule is sneakier, because it looks like a rule. It’s about the topic, or copied out of an explanation, so it protects nothing. The next question wears a different costume, and you never found the bone yourself.
Your three questions, step 5 (the rule)
Same three questions. For each one, answer in writing: what exactly did I learn from this one? One sentence, future tense, no answer letter, short enough to text. Then add the trigger, the moment on the next question when you’ll notice to use it. If the sentence won’t come, the review isn’t done. Usually you stopped at “I see why D is right” and never asked why you’d picked B.
If one of the three was a right answer you weren’t sure of, audit it first, with one sentence on why it’s right and one on why your near-pick is wrong. A fuzzy second sentence means it was troubled all along, so it gets a rule too.
Then copy all three rules into the eighth column, with each forecast from chapter 7 under its row.
