Why the usual study habits fail here
Everything you learned about revising for content exams is inapplicable. There is no chapter to re-read, no deck of facts, no gap to fill with knowledge. A student who prepares for the LSAT the way they prepared for finals will do a large volume of questions, feel busy, and improve slowly if at all.
Skill acquisition has its own rules: distributed practice beats massed practice by a wide margin, and — the part nearly everyone skips — reviewing your errors matters more than doing new questions.
The review process is the whole prep
The mistake is treating a practice section as a test. It isn't. It is a machine for generating information about how your reasoning fails, and the information is only extracted afterwards. For every question you got wrong — and every one you got *right but weren't sure about*, which is the category people ignore:
- Why is the right answer right? Not 'it just is'. Articulate the logical move.
- Why is each wrong answer wrong? Four explanations per question. This is where the improvement actually comes from.
- What did the question want you to think? Distractors are engineered around specific reasoning errors. Name the error you nearly made.
- Have you made this exact error before? Keep a log. Patterns appear within two weeks and they are not what you expected.
This takes far longer than sitting the section did. If your review is faster than your practice, you are not reviewing — see error analysis.
Where a study tool genuinely helps, and where it doesn't
Real LSAT questions from LSAC are irreplaceable and you should use them. What a tool can honestly do is hold your error log — the recurring flaw types you keep falling for — as a spaced repetition deck, so that the reasoning error you made in March comes back before you make it again in June. That is a memory problem, and it is solvable.