How should I review my LSAT mistakes in order to improve?

There are three possible results that can come from a mistake on the Law School Admission Test (LSAT), whether you're solving a Logical Reasoning or a Reading Comprehension question.

1. You can learn nothing.

2. You can learn how to answer that specific question.

3. You can learn how to answer any question that parallels that one.

Among the 1000s of students I've taught, the vast majority fall into that second category when approaching a mistake. At least, before we work together. Most thankfully don't fall into the first. But very few can apply lessons to future questions, start building test patterns, and turn mistakes in the present into correct answers in the future. Learning to do that is a large portion of our work together.

To truly learn from a mistake on the LSAT, you aren't looking for the right answer of any individual question you got wrong. You're looking for the exact step you took that left the most correct, most precise path to that answer. You're not looking for an individual word or phrase that you missed, but instead the purpose of that word or phrase. You can look specifically for that purpose to mistakes in other questions. If you're missing the same purposes across a variety of questions, in multiple question types, then it's much more clear what you need to study. It's much more clear from where improvement will come.

I always tell student that maintenance comes from writing tests and improvement comes from reviewing them. You should spend at least as much time reviewing a test as you do writing it. That means that if you are scoring -5 in a Logical Reasoning section, for example, you should be spending six minutes or more reviewing each mistake.

And the goal is never to find the right answers to those questions, but instead to find out why and how you got the wrong answer.