Vivian, 143 and working toward 155: a live LSAT coaching session
This is what LSAT Unplugged coaching looks like. Vivian came in at 143, aiming for 155 minimum, 160 ideal on the June, her fourth attempt LSAT. Steve Schwartz coached him live for about 26 minutes on review process, both sections, and the whole session and transcript are below.
The numbers here are where Vivian started and the goal we set together in this session. Individual results vary.
- Student: Vivian
- Score when recorded: 143
- Goal: 155 minimum, 160 ideal
- Target test: June, her fourth attempt
- Situation: Non-native English speaker, a social worker with a 3.95 GPA in both her bachelor's and master's, not working and studying 8 to 10 hours a day (sometimes up to 18) with extended time accommodations
- Focus: review process, both sections
- Worked on: Must Be True vs Most Strongly Supported, Sufficient Assumption vs inference family questions, question stem recognition
What we fixed in this session
Small differences on the LSAT can have big consequences.
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 consolidated her 5 column answer choice review (A through E) into 4 columns: why the wrong answer was tempting, why it was wrong, why the right answer was unappealing, and why it was correct.
Clarified the precise wording difference between sufficient assumption stems and must be true or inference stems, since she was confusing must be true with most strongly supported.
The plan: I flagged her 18 hour a day study schedule as a burnout risk despite her enthusiasm, using a past student's crash as a cautionary example, and told her to track energy and build in rest, not just log hours.
Where the session landed: Vivian says the new review process is phenomenal, that rephrasing the stimulus in her own words made her see wrong answers differently than just looking at what she got wrong.
If your prep looks like Vivian's did, that's fixable in one session.
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In Vivian's words
That translation from the paper to the computer made me have another view.
Vivian
I always have to stop and think, it's still not like I go quickly like the other ones.
Vivian
I saw what was wrong already, but it makes a difference than you just look what you did wrong, then you have to process what you did wrong.
Vivian
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 Vivian's case: her 5 column answer choice review (A through E) into 4 columns: why the wrong answer was tempting.
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: sufficient assumption questions, must be true questions, the Socratic Review Method.
Student reviews and finished results.
Full session transcript
Recorded October 2025.
Steve: If you could do nothing else for the next week but drill question stem recognition, that alone might give you 5 points in the next week. This is Vivian, and she's looking to improve her LSAT score from a 143 to a 155 or a 160 over the next 3 months. My name is Steve Schwartz, I've been teaching the LSAT for the past 20 years. Today Vivian is going to bring me her biggest LSAT challenges and I'll help her address them. Let's dive in. When are you taking the LSAT, how far off are we?
Vivian: I'm planning to take it in June.
Steve: Okay, so we've got 3 months. And what's your goal for June, what are you hoping to score?
Vivian: My goal is 160, but with 155 I can already get into the school.
Steve: Okay. And where are you scoring right now?
Vivian: 143.
Steve: 143, okay. So we're looking to go from 143 to a minimum of 155, ideally 160, in 3 months. What would you say is the biggest challenge you're facing right now?
Vivian: Anxiety.
Steve: Anxiety, okay, tell me why you feel anxiety.
Vivian: I don't know, it's a long story. I live in the US, English isn't my first language. I went to college 6 years ago, got my bachelor's, 2 more years I got my master's, and now I want to go to law school. I learned all my English in these last 6 years, all the writing, everything. But my GPA is great, I got 3.95 in my bachelor's and in my master's. It's the LSAT that's killing me. I've taken it 3 times already, it's hard. But I think I'm doing pretty good, my last attempt I was very impressed with, that was done a while ago.
Steve: Well, I'm excited to dig into this and help you out. This June is going to be your fourth take. Being a non-native speaker poses unique challenges, but your GPA is fantastic, I'd love to help you match that with a killer LSAT score. You've joined LSAT Unplugged recently, we've been diving into the review process. Have you ever engaged in a review process like the Socratic review method before?
Vivian: No, I didn't.
Steve: Were you documenting your review in the past?
Vivian: No, my only document was like minus 10, minus 12, minus 7, minus 8, just numbers.
Steve: So you were documenting your results in terms of how many you got wrong per section, but not your thought process with your mistakes.
Vivian: No. I was just reviewing, understanding what I did wrong, and moving on. Yesterday was my first assignment to do the review, oh my god, that took forever to finish. I know some things were missing, I should have written why the wrong ones were wrong too, and I only wrote why on the ones I got incorrect. But the one from today will be better. It was my first one, but at least I know what I'm doing wrong.
Steve: Excellent, I'm glad you're digging into it and adopting this review process, because if you don't learn from your mistakes you're just going to make them again. We make the mistakes now and learn the insights from them so we don't make the same mistakes again. Let's dig into your review document, thank you for sharing it. Can you see it on your end?
Vivian: Yeah.
Steve: I see practice test number, section, question, stimulus, argument structure, question stem, your documentation of choices, and the takeaways. You're starting right from the top with PT 101, and noting the question type.
Vivian: Yeah, that was before, and I put the color, green is the right ones and red is the wrong ones.
Steve: Excellent. You're documenting a lot here, I love to see it. How's this process going for you, do you feel it's helpful?
Vivian: Yeah, I thought it was very interesting because I really had to think about it while doing this. It's a long process, takes a lot of time, and I have accommodations, my test is double time, so it takes an hour to do the test and this review was 2 to 3 hours for each one, thinking about what was right, what was wrong, and what not to do again.
Steve: Yeah, it can be really time consuming, it can take as long to review the exam as it does to take it. And how long have you been doing this for?
Vivian: Yesterday was my first day.
Steve: Are you feeling like it's valuable?
Vivian: Yeah, I thought it was valuable. A lot of things I had to think about again, and until I was writing, because when I started passing the stimulus to the spreadsheet, I had to rephrase it in my own words, and I had to rethink it again. That translation from the paper to the computer made me see it differently. Even one of the questions I had wrong, when I was thinking what to write to condense the stimulus, I couldn't even see what was wrong at first, and I think it was very valuable. I like it.
Steve: That's a really key insight, that this process takes work to figure out what exactly was wrong with the method of reasoning in the argument or the choice you picked initially. The work is in recognizing what you did incorrectly on your previous attempt so you can avoid making the same mistake next time. Done properly, review can take just as long as taking the exam. If your standard exam is 2 and a half hours, another 2 and a half hours of review can feel like diminishing returns, but unless you fully learn the lessons from the questions you're getting wrong, you'll probably end up making the same mistakes again, because the LSAT repeats itself. Reviewing every single question on a 100 question exam is a lot of work, and a lot of that may not be necessary. So a lot of what I help students do is study more efficiently by narrowing the review to only the questions that truly need it, which lets you go deeper on those. If you got a question right and feel confident about it, no need to spend more time there. Devote that time to the ones you got wrong, but also the ones you got right if you had difficulty, or were down to two and guessed and got lucky. So rather than reviewing 100 questions across 4 sections, maybe you review the 15 or so you got wrong plus another 15 you guessed on and got lucky, or could have solved more efficiently.
Vivian: What do you recommend, should I write everything even for the right ones, or just the wrong ones?
Steve: Great question, let's dig a little deeper into the document and see how we can help you allocate your time more efficiently. You're doing the breakdown of question type, argument structure, stimulus, then choices A through E, and for a lot of these you're just writing "eliminated." I'm wondering if you can consolidate those 5 columns into 4: 2 columns for the wrong answer you picked, and 2 columns for the right answer. For the wrong answer, what was tempting about the choice that made you pick it, and what ultimately makes it wrong. For the right answer, what was unappealing about it that pushed you away, and what ultimately makes it correct. Those are traps of encouragement toward the wrong answer and traps of discouragement away from the right answer.
A lot of the time students confidently eliminate 3 answer choices, then they're down to 2, and that's where the review comes in. The 3 you eliminated off the bat, you probably don't need much time there. I'd want you to double down on the wrong answer choice you picked or were tempted by, and the right answer choice you didn't find appealing. A lot of the time a tempting wrong answer is half right, the first half sounds good but there's one small word that pushes it into incorrect. So rather than 5 columns for A through E, 2 columns for the wrong answer, tempting and wrong, and for the right answer, unappealing and correct. In addition you have your stimulus column and question stem column, and you won't always fill in every column, sometimes the stimulus or the question stem wasn't the issue.
Vivian: Sometimes I still have problems identifying one question, I never know if it's most strongly supported or must be true. When I start to read I think, oh, that has to be that one, and it always comes out right, the other ones I can recognize, that's not a problem. Sometimes the wording is deeper, some words I've never heard, then I have to guess what they're saying from the context of the whole stimulus.
Steve: Were you saying there's an issue with most supported versus must be true in terms of knowing what they're asking for?
Vivian: No, what they're asking for isn't the issue, it's more like sometimes I think, is this must be true or not, but then it ends up coming out right. Let me see one here, this one says which one follows logically from the historical claim, then that's must be true, or is that most strongly supported because it follows logically. Whichever one of the two will be must be true or most strongly supported, that was my question, and whenever I see that question I always have to stop and think, it's not like I go quickly like the other ones.
Steve: I'm really glad you raised this, Vivian, because it's suggesting you're thinking through what the question type means in real time during the exam. There's a limited number of question types in logical reasoning, only about 15 of them, and for each of those 15 types there might be 3 or 4 different question stems referring to each one, but it's still a limited set. If you can get crystal clear on the task they're asking you to perform, then when you encounter these question types in a timed section on test day, you'll be able to solve them rapid fire because you'll have already thought through what it means. That question stem column is going to be really important for you.
Vivian: Yeah, I know most of them, but there are some I don't know.
Steve: And whichever ones you don't know, that's what I want you to drill. If you're in the low 140s looking to get to mid 150s, 160, there's enough other difficult stuff about the exam aside from question stems, but question stems are an easy gimme, they're table stakes. If you could do nothing else for the next week but drill question stem recognition for whichever ones give you trouble, that alone might give you 5 points in the next week, because there are a couple of those per section.
Vivian: Yeah. Luckily, the two I'm confusing are almost the same thing, they're assuming the terms are true, and the challenge is the answers can't have new ideas, they're almost the same thing, just the intensity of the truth is different, and it's very slightly different, not much difference.
Steve: But small differences on the LSAT can have big consequences.
Vivian: I know.
Steve: Those small nuances, drill down on those, put those in your takeaways column, what are the major insights, these are the categories that give me trouble, maybe I'm going to drill more of these. A lot of students have trouble distinguishing between question types with very similar wording. For example, if a question stem says the conclusion above follows logically if which one of the following is assumed, that tells us we're assuming all 5 choices should be taken as given, and the question is which one, if taken as new information, would guarantee the validity of the argument. That's a sufficient assumption question. In contrast, if the question asks which one is true if we assume the information in the stimulus to be valid, that's an inference family question, or must be true, because we're assuming the stimulus is true and given, and asking what we can infer from it. Small differences in the wording of the stem make a big difference in the truth value of the inference we're evaluating. You don't want to be interpreting the logic of these stems for the first time on your official LSAT. You want to have already spent the time analyzing them during your studying, so you're primed to recognize the differences on test day under timed conditions. You've got 3 months, if you want to take a week just to focus on this to lock up those 5 points, I'm all for that, and then beyond that you go back and do more of the answer choice analysis.
Vivian: What do you suggest, go drill those types of questions, must be true, most strongly supported, mix them all and drill a bunch of times to make sure I recognize them, is that what you mean?
Steve: If that's the area where you're having trouble with question stem recognition and the implications, then by all means spend the time there, making sure must be true means the choice must be 100% supported by the stimulus, versus most strongly supported, where it's incredibly likely but not necessarily 100% guaranteed.
Vivian: Another question I have on this review, should I list all the right answers to all the right questions too, or just the wrong ones?
Steve: So to circle back, the question is should you review every single question you do, or only the ones you got wrong?
Vivian: Mhm.
Steve: I'd say reviewing every single question might be overly time consuming. I want to help you study more efficiently by narrowing the scope, so you have time to go deeper on the ones that truly need it. Wrong answers, yes of course. On top of that, the ones you guessed on and got lucky, but could have gone the other way where you weren't 100% sure. But if you got it right and were super confident, no need.
Vivian: Maybe the ones where I was between two and chose that one, but the other one was almost right.
Steve: Right, you mentioned a lot of these columns, you're eliminating 3 and down to 2, right? A lot of times the 2 is the focus, I'd say in those cases you want to focus on just those two. But if you got it right and there were no issues, if it's green and you're good on it, no need to spend time there, I'd rather you go deeper on the others. Now, you mentioned this is taking you 2 and a half to 3 hours to review one exam. Tell me about your week, how much time do you have to study?
Vivian: The whole day, I'm not working, I just study, I'm studying 8 to 10 hours per day, the whole day.
Steve: Oh, wow. Do you feel like that's sustainable for you?
Vivian: Yeah, I love to study, so for me it's okay.
Steve: How long have you been studying that much for?
Vivian: I just finished my master's, where I was studying 15 hours a day, and then I started the LSAT right after, since May last year. I stopped for 2 months, started again, stopped again because I had to take the state test for my master's, I'm a social worker, and then for the last 4 months straight I've been studying.
Steve: Are you taking breaks during that time?
Vivian: Yes, I start around 8:30, 9:00, stop around 12 for an hour, come back and stay until the class starts at 7:00 and finishes at night. In the middle, around 4, 4:30, I take a half hour break and come back.
Steve: I love the dedication and the commitment, as long as you're watching your energy levels and not burning out. Everyone's different, I love the drive to make this happen, and that you're going to have the time to fully adopt this new review process. Keep filling out your journal, refine it with the two wrong answer columns and two right answer columns we discussed.
Vivian: I love a study plan, because then I have everything laid out day by day, it's more organized for me, I need some kind of direction of where to go, and that's great.
Steve: The day by day study plans are key, and for every student we make it different. You have 18 hours a day, so yours is going to be super detailed, lots of questions to work on. In your case, starting back at PT 101 is totally fine, for someone else they might start at PT 130 or 140 because they won't have time to do them all. But you're going to have time to do them all and review them in depth, and I think that's going to be a huge difference maker for you, worth 15 to 20 points or so.
Here's a moment that stood out to me: Vivian said she's studying 18 hours a day, with a smile. When I hear that, a few alarms go off in my head, not because she's wrong, but because this is the exact trap high achievers fall into. I once worked with a student, a classic perfectionist, 14 hour days, 5 practice tests a week. She crushed it for 2 weeks, then crashed hard, went from minus 3 on logical reasoning to minus 13, and could no longer finish timed sections. That's burnout, not because her motivation vanished, but because her brain couldn't keep up with the overload.
So I coach students to go smarter, not just harder. Start with a realistic baseline: can you do 8, 10, 12 hours a day consistently without sacrificing comprehension, sleep, or sanity? If not, scale it back, quality beats quantity. Track your energy, not just the hours. Build rest into your study plan on purpose, sleep, exercise, regular breaks, none of that is optional, I call this strategic laziness. And do fewer things better, master one section, then the next. That's the LASER approach: learning, accuracy, sections, exams, and review.
Vivian's got the drive and the intensity, and that's a superpower, but my job as a coach isn't to cheer her on blindly, it's to protect her from burnout even when she doesn't see it coming. Have you been joining most of the classes so far?
Vivian: All the classes. I'm taking all of them, I really enjoy it. I was joining another group before which I left, this one is great because the group is small, you can really interact, the instructors are so nice, they call on you, "come on, let's do it," and you're not just one person in the middle of a lot of others, that makes a difference because you really have to force yourself to do it.
Steve: Exactly, that's the accountability and support. With a small group like ours it's more interactive and personalized than an anonymous webinar chat. Studying has to be active for you to get something out of it, whether it's the small group class or documenting the review process. Tracking your results alone doesn't lead to a change unless you make a change by looking at what you're getting wrong and why.
Vivian: Exactly. Yeah, I've never done this before and I think it's phenomenal. I always heard about it but never had to do it. I saw what was wrong already, but it makes a difference when you have to process what you did wrong instead of just looking at it.
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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