Valerie, 146 and working toward 162: a live LSAT coaching session
This is what LSAT Unplugged coaching looks like. Valerie came in at 146 to 147, aiming for low 160s (162 and better) on the August 6th LSAT. Steve Schwartz coached her live for about 21 minutes on Logical Reasoning, and the whole session and transcript are below.
The numbers here are where Valerie started and the goal we set together in this session. Individual results vary.
- Student: Valerie
- Score when recorded: 146 to 147
- Goal: low 160s (162 and better)
- Target test: August 6th
- Situation: Studying about 20 to 25 hours a week for 7 weeks, using the LSAT Trainer plus Steve's videos and live classes, about 3 weeks left before test day
- Focus: Logical Reasoning
- Worked on: flaw
What we fixed in this session
Most students who say I'm just bad at the LSAT aren't actually bad at logic. They're bad at timing.
Steve Schwartz
This is one session, in the middle of the work. I've been coaching the LSAT since 2005, and every session runs the same way: find the real problem, fix the process, reset the plan.
I pinpointed that her score not matching how confident she felt after a section is normal LSAT trap-answer behavior, not broken instincts, and gave her a way to check herself: did she actually break down the argument and predict the answer, or just vibe with something that sounded smart.
I found she was averaging 43 minutes per section, about 8 minutes over the 35 minute limit, and reframed this as a timing problem rather than a logic problem, recommending she solve the first 10 questions in about 10 minutes to bank time for harder ones.
The plan: I gave her a concrete process for flaw questions, prephrasing her own prediction of the flaw before looking at the answer choices. That matters because she was picking wrong answers described as not committing the actual flaw.
Where the session landed: Valerie commits to making the next 3 weeks her top priority, considers adding one-on-one coaching for personalized feedback, and agrees to focus first on flaw questions and pacing in logical reasoning before reading comp.
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In Valerie's words
I feel pretty good in the sense that I'm understanding it, but what is frustrating is I take a test or I do a section and I'll feel really good and then I see the score and it doesn't match how I was feeling.
Valerie
I'll do a section specifically of logical reasoning and I get like the first 12 to 14 all of them right and then I get like six wrong and then it's like right wrong right wrong. It's promising but it's also frustrating.
Valerie
I don't know. I can do this, right?
Valerie
Questions people ask about LSAT Unplugged coaching
What happens in an LSAT Unplugged coaching session?
The coach finds the specific habit that's costing points, fixes the process, and sets the plan for the weeks ahead. In Valerie's case: i pinpointed that her score not matching how confident she felt after a section is normal LSAT trap-answer behavior.
Who runs the sessions?
Steve Schwartz recorded this one. Every LSAT Unplugged coach scored 170 or higher on an official LSAT, and students are matched to a coach on learning style and weak areas.
Where can I see finished results?
On the student reviews page at unpluggedprep.com/reviews, with video interviews and official scores.
Learn the fixes yourself: flaw questions, prephrasing, Logical Reasoning timing.
Student reviews and finished results.
Full session transcript
Recorded November 2025.
Steve: I'll say a couple things. One is that getting faster is a function of getting better, just by deepening your understanding. You get faster at anything by getting better at it and becoming more familiar. One reason I can solve LSAT questions faster than a lot of other people is because I've been doing this for 20 years.
This is Valerie and she's looking to go from a 147 to the low 160s in the next 3 weeks. My name is Steve Schwartz and I've been teaching the LSAT for the past 20 years. Today, Valerie is going to bring me her biggest LSAT challenges, and I'll help her address them as she looks to improve by 15 points. Hey, Valerie, how are you?
Valerie: I'm good, how are you Steve?
Steve: Good, thanks. Great to meet you, thank you for taking the time to chat. I saw from your application you're at a 146, is that right?
Valerie: Mhm, yeah, the highest score I've gotten is a 147.
Steve: And you're looking for the 160s, 162 and better?
Valerie: Yeah.
Steve: How many hours per week can you put into your prep?
Valerie: I think what I've been doing has been at least 20, maybe up to 25.
Steve: Good, that's solid, a good amount of time. How long have you been studying?
Valerie: I think it's 7 weeks.
Steve: How's everything been coming along with your prep?
Valerie: I feel pretty good in the sense that I'm understanding it, but what's frustrating is I'll take a test or do a section and feel really good, then I see the score and it doesn't match how I was feeling. I just feel like I'm at this plateau and I'm not pushing past it.
Steve: I hear you, you're feeling kind of stuck. This is one of the most frustrating moments in LSAT prep, you finish a section, feel good, hit submit, check your score, and it slaps you in the face. Just because you feel good about a section doesn't mean you did well. Your instincts aren't broken, the LSAT is designed to mess with your instincts, you can feel confident and still fall for a perfectly engineered trap answer. The good news is you can train your instincts to match the test's logic. One of the first shifts we make with students is helping them slow down after the fact, walking through why their right answer wasn't actually right, not to shame them, but to show them exactly how the test makers tricked them. Once you see the trick, it loses its power over you, and your gut reaction gets reprogrammed to only fire when the logic is actually solid. So next time your score doesn't match how you feel, get curious: did I actually break down the argument, did I predict what the right answer should say before looking, or did I just vibe with something that sounded smart? That's how you close the gap between confidence and performance. What kind of resources have you been using up to this point?
Valerie: I did the LSAT Trainer with its accompanying study guide, I'd do a drill and then go Google other videos, I watched a lot of your videos, and that's when I looked into signing up with you and thought, let's pivot, let's add something different. To be honest, I'm enjoying it, but what's frustrating is I'll watch the live classes or read and think, I get that, that makes sense, and then I go to a question and feel like I'm constantly falling for the trap answer. I'll do a section of logical reasoning and get the first 12 to 14 all right, then get like 6 wrong, right wrong right wrong. It's promising but also frustrating.
Steve: I hear you, it sounds like you need some more personalized feedback and support to get into exactly what you're getting wrong and why. A lot of students fall into what I call study material worship, they buy a giant prep textbook or enroll in a course and feel married to it, even if the explanations don't make sense, thinking "this is what everybody recommends, so it's got to be me." But if a resource isn't helping you get better, you don't owe it anything, you're allowed to drop it. The light bulb moment usually comes when students hear a different explanation or try a new review method and a stubborn question type starts to make sense. It's not magic, they just found the right fit, like exercise, some people love running, others need to lift weights or do Pilates. The LSAT doesn't care how you got good, it only cares that you did. If you're not sure what's working, try a totally different approach for a week and compare your performance. Do you notice any trends with regard to certain question types?
Valerie: I noticed on the last few sections that I'm missing flaw questions. I'm not sure what sections are doing this, but after the weekend update on the LSAC website, when I'd review, it had why this was wrong or why this was right.
Steve: Yeah, they just made a change to LawHub over the weekend, some explanations in there now.
Valerie: But not on every section, so I have to find those. A lot of the wrong answers I'd get would say "this is not a flaw," and I'm like, how am I not connecting the dots here?
Steve: With flaw questions, the wrong answers are wrong just because they're accusing the argument of having committed a flaw it did not commit. If it had been guilty of that flaw, that would be bad, but that's not the particular crime it's actually guilty of. One strategy that helps is prephrasing, predicting your conception of the flaw in your own words before looking at the choices, so you're laser focused on your prediction. It also helps to have a baseline familiarity with the most common types of flaws, and of course some are unique to that particular question. So we want to work on first improving your ability to predict the flaw, then improving your ability to match your prediction with the choices.
Valerie: Okay.
Steve: One thing we could do in the live sessions is focus more on flaw questions for you. Let's talk about one of the biggest mindset traps: the idea that if you just had more time, everything would click. Time alone is not the answer, precision is. If you keep doing the same 50 question drill sets without reviewing them deeply, you're just repeating mistakes faster, like playing piano with the wrong fingering over and over, you don't get faster, you get better at doing it wrong. So we focus less on piling on more practice and more on making every minute count, spending 30 minutes dissecting one logical reasoning question instead of rushing through 20, or reviewing a missed reading comp passage and asking not just what's the right answer but why was I tempted by the wrong one. That's precision, and that's how your score jumps. Ask yourself, am I studying more or am I studying smarter? How long do we have till your test?
Valerie: I'm taking it August 6th.
Steve: So we've only got a couple weeks. Have you been able to join the live sessions? Do you expect you'll be able to join those consistently? Good. One thing that might be helpful since we have limited time, have you ever considered more personalized support in a one-on-one context?
Valerie: It's definitely not something I'd rule out.
Steve: The reason I'm bringing it up is you're looking for a relatively larger score increase in a really short period, 15 to 20 points in about 3 weeks. It could be that just joining every live semi-private session, four nights a week, gets you there. But what would maximize the likelihood of getting you there faster in this limited time frame, if you really want to make it happen for August, is setting you up with personalized one-on-one support you can schedule at your convenience, later in the evening or on the weekend if 6 p.m. isn't ideal.
If you've ever said "I'm too tired to study," you're not lazy, you're human, burnout is a system flaw, not a character flaw. Most students build a schedule around guilt and pressure, start strong, crash a few weeks later, and haven't opened a prep test since. Sustainable systems beat willpower. Treat your LSAT routine like a gym routine, build up gradually, a section or two a day instead of full exams, review days mixed in, studying when you actually have energy, and sometimes a real day off. Burnout isn't solved by pushing harder, it's solved by a plan that honors your actual life.
Valerie: The other thing I feel like I'm struggling with is timing.
Steve: Time allocation and pacing?
Valerie: Yes.
Steve: Is that specifically in logical reasoning, reading comp, or across the board?
Valerie: Across the board. When I first started, part of the study plan was to take a practice test pretty early on, and I was fine within the time constraints, didn't love the score, but now I don't know if I'm just not fast enough. I'm sitting around 43 minutes for a section.
Steve: That is a bit much, roughly 20% more than the time you actually have, about 8 minutes beyond the 35 you're allowed. Let's clear something up: most students who say "I'm just bad at the LSAT" aren't actually bad at logic, they're bad at timing, a totally different problem with a totally different solution. Give the average pre-law student all the time in the world on an LR section and they'd get 20 questions right, maybe more. Give them only 35 minutes, suddenly it's chaos, second guessing, rereading, checking the clock. LSAT timing is a skill just like argument structure or flaw types, and it can be trained, but not just by doing full tests and hoping for the best. We break timing down into layers: how long are you spending reading the stimulus, are you previewing the question stem, are you eliminating answers in your head or crossing them out, do you linger after picking your answer to double check. Learning when to slow down and when to move on is the secret sauce, because sometimes the smartest thing is to say this question is a trap, flag it, skip it, and keep going. That's not quitting, that's strategy. You're not bad at the LSAT, you just haven't trained your internal stopwatch.
More exposure means the patterns are more apparent. The more you expose yourself to the most common methods of reasoning and the most common traps, the more prepared you'll be when you see something new. In the context of flaw questions, which you mentioned as an area of concern, if you're super solid on classic fallacies like confusing necessary and sufficient or correlation causation, meaning you've seen countless examples, then on test day you'll recognize a new situation faster because you can relate it back to those prior examples.
Valerie: Okay.
Steve: That's a function of getting more exposure, more reps. A couple other tips since you've only got three weeks: time allocation within logical reasoning, the questions are in a general order of difficulty, easier ones earlier, harder ones later. If you speed up on the easier ones, you develop a time bank for the tougher ones later in the section. A general rule of thumb for anyone scoring in the 160s is to solve the first 10 questions in roughly 10 minutes, less than the average allotted time, so you have more time for the tougher questions. On that first set of 10, trust your gut, no second guessing, just go with it.
Everybody gets nervous on test day, that's normal, but there's a difference between butterflies and a full-on mental shutdown, your mind blanking the second the timer starts. That's test anxiety, and it's predictable, manageable, and trainable. If you only practice in ideal conditions, you're preparing for a fantasy version of test day. We replicate pressure on purpose, timed sections, strict conditions, even fake proctors, treating test anxiety like a muscle. Learn to recognize the signs of spiraling early, rapid breathing, panicky thoughts, losing track of time, and build a reset routine, box breathing between sections or go-to warm-up questions. Stop thinking of test anxiety as a flaw, start treating it as a variable you can train.
Then for reading comprehension, how are you currently allocating your time between the passage and the questions?
Valerie: I'm trying to keep the passage to around 3 minutes, I'm not sure what specific time I need for the passage.
Steve: Focusing on the questions makes sense, I find a lot of students overindex on the passage, spending too much time there and not enough on the questions. Knowing where you're allocating your time is the first step to knowing where to change course. As a general rule, max 3 minutes on the passage, ideally 2 and a half to 3, not getting bogged down in details, focusing only on the big picture: what's the main idea, what's the author's opinion, if they could leave you with only one main point, what would it be. There's typically a main point or main idea question, and knowing the big picture helps you solve main point, primary purpose, author's tone, author's opinion, and passage organization questions, all global stuff. The details and examples you can always go back to when you need them. I think you're right to focus more on logical reasoning since it's 2/3 of the test, so any gains there get doubled across the two sections. My recommendations at this point: get crystal clear on flaws since you mentioned those as an area of concern and they're one of the most common LR question types, then work on your pacing in LR, with RC as a third thing.
Valerie: On the LSAT, when I signed up to take it, it said something about submitting a writing sample, is that something I still need to do? Do I do that before the LSAT?
Steve: Good question, you will need to do it, but it's unscored, not nearly as important as the scored portions. I'd recommend not even thinking about it until you've taken your official LSAT, then a couple days later do the writing sample.
Valerie: Perfect, good to know.
Steve: What else? Any other questions you wanted to cover?
Valerie: I don't know, I can do this, right?
Steve: It sounds like you're really committed and willing to put in the time, that's the most important thing. We do have a limited number of weeks, so if you can make this the biggest possible priority over the next 3 weeks and put other things on the back burner, you can pick those up afterward. The LSAT's the biggest factor, so I'd recommend giving it your all in this last push.
Let's talk about something almost nobody teaches in LSAT prep, confidence. Most people think confidence is a magical state that shows up once you get enough questions right or hit a certain score. But real confidence isn't just a feeling, it's a system. The most confident students aren't necessarily scoring the highest yet, but they have systems, they know how they're reviewing, when to pause and dig deeper, and why they're getting things wrong. That's what builds trust in yourself. Confidence is walking into a timed section knowing you've built your pacing strategy already. Confidence is reviewing a logical reasoning question and immediately spotting, oh, this is a causation trap, I've seen this before. And confidence is knowing that even on your worst day, you have a fallback plan that keeps you from spiraling. You build it by showing up every day with a smart system that helps you learn from mistakes without shame. If you've been feeling like you don't have confidence, ask yourself what systems you're following that help you trust yourself under pressure. If the answer is none, that's great, that means you know exactly where to start.
Valerie: I know I can take it again, but I also feel like if I were to take it in September, I don't know if much would change in how I study between August and September, just because mentally I've been so focused on August and I'm so intense on it that as soon as it's done, the things I've put on the back burner I can start to focus on. That's why I felt like, let's invest in this, let's give it our all.
Steve: That's the move, right? Let's give it your all for this final push for August, see what we can get you. If we get you to 160, that's great. But you may hit 160 and still see more potential, another 5 or 10 points, in that case, if you want to push for September, we can focus on September too. For now, since you've already got August locked in, let's try to make it happen for that.
Valerie: Awesome, okay, wonderful, thank you Steve, I appreciate it.
Steve: Of course, it was a pleasure, Valerie. Have a good one, take care.
More coaching sessions: Zabdi, 141 to 155, Abigail, 147 to 160, Leah, 153 to 170, Dominic, Alina, 157 to 170. Student results and reviews.
I've written free explanations for every question in LSAT PrepTest 159, 158, 157, 156, 155 and 154, with the right answer and why each wrong answer fails. All LSAT explanations are here.
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