Coming from a former student of the full length Testmasters (Summer
2012 – Los Angeles, CA) and Blueprint live courses (Summer 2013 – Irvine, CA)
and having also read the Powerscore and Manhattan LSAT curriculums, I strongly advise all prospective LSAT
students to sign up with Blueprint Test Prep for the following 5 simple, but
important reasons.
(Note: Although issues like cost, class size instructor’s LSAT score percentile
rankings and number of classroom hours are important, I am going to leave them
out of this post. You will discover (by calling or researching online) that
Blueprint either meets or beats its competitors “by the numbers” in every
objective category and I advise you to do your homework and see for yourself.
Instead, in this post, I am going to focus on the much more important,
substantive reasons why you should sign up with Blueprint Test Prep, reasons
that I wish somebody had told me two years ago.)
1. The comprehensive, student-friendly layout of
the Logical Reasoning curriculum
Since 50% of your LSAT score is determined by your performance in
logical reasoning, mastering these questions is critical in order to achieve a
top score on the exam. For most people, logical reasoning on the LSAT is not
natural because you are expected to think about, understand and operate on
arguments in ways that you have never been taught before. Blueprint’s logical
reasoning curriculum utilizes the most comprehensive, student-friendly approach
to LR questions on the LSAT by training you to understand every question as
belonging to one of three families: implication, characterization and
operation. The subsections of these families, which are made up of named
question types, are then broken down one-by-one to show you not only how to
recognize and approach each question, but to understand how and why it fits
into the larger families. Some of the other LR curriculums I tried to learn
from before I discovered Blueprint either place questions into arbitrary
categories (i.e. Assumption Questions and “the rest”) with no real rhyme or
reason for doing so, while other companies do not attempt to categorize
questions at all. Testmasters, for example, assigns mere numbers to question
types (Type 1, Type 2, Type 13 etc.) and fails to go beyond explaining how to
approach “type 6” questions. Knowing what I do now, no wonder I struggled so
much with their approach. While it may not appear to be all that important at
first, your understanding of how all reasoning questions fall into the logical
construct will be critical to your mastery of logical reasoning.
2. The availability and quality of resources
This reason is on par with number 1 in its importance. To be fair, I
will only compare the resources of the full class Testmasters experience with
the full class Blueprint experience since I have never been enrolled in an
official Manhattan or Powerscore course. Put simply, there is no comparison. As
a Blueprint student, every single assigned homework problem has an online
explanation in the form of a PDF, audio or video clip and sometimes both. These
are all animated, comprehensive and teach you to approach each question using
the methods taught during lecture. For practice tests, you are able to input
your answer choices into the website to score your exams and more importantly,
you are able to review every question right away using the online explanations.
The Blueprint site also breaks down your performance on tests and homework
problems into the categories mentioned above so that you have a good idea of
where you need to emphasize your study time. Each of the classroom textbooks,
which were also appropriately divided according to the LR families, contained
explicit outlines and methodologies to supplement the instruction of specific
questions as they were explained. Testmaster’s lesson materials, on the other
hand, contained mere question sets and nothing else. If you missed something
the instructor said, either make the class stop or get behind while you try to
figure it out. As a Testmaster’s student, I was given large amounts of homework
to practice, but the vast majority of it contained absolutely no explanations
whatsoever. The whole point of doing LSAT practice is to be able to learn why
right answers are right and wrong answers are wrong. Continuing to get questions
wrong without having adequate resources to help improve my understanding was a
complete waste of time. When I had questions about homework problems I could
either call the Testmaster’s hotline (during regular business hours only by the
way) or ask my instructor outside of classroom hours, which he was not paid to
do and clearly not interested in sticking around for obvious reasons. There are
some videos online, but these are few and far between and they are mere
recordings of the Testmaster’s founder giving a lesson to random students in a
classroom. Furthermore, the Testmaster’s booklets do not print an answer key in
the back of the book. Just to see the correct answer (without explanations), I
had to log onto my online account. The amount and quality of Testmaster’s
resources simply do not compare to those of Blueprint.
3. Exceptional Instructors
It did not take long for me to realize that my Blueprint instructor Jay
Donnell was of a different breed. I have never met someone who can have a room
of 40 strangers briefly introduce themselves and then 4 hours later, correctly
identify each person by name. This is precisely what happened on the first
night of our class and while I know you might be thinking “so what” with regard
to the LSAT, it speaks to the quality of instructors that Blueprint hires. Most
LSAT test prep companies have instructors that scored in the 99th
percentile, but very few have instructors like Jay. Throughout the course, he
would come up to me and various other students during class break and without
any reminder, he knew exactly what my practice test scores were (based on what I
had entered into the website) and was ready to discuss my progress. More
importantly, Jay knew how to alter his instruction based on student needs
instead of sticking to a rigid, inelastic method of teaching. While I am unable
to comment on other BP instructors, if Jay is any indication of the rest, I’d
say it’s a safe bet.
4. Professional Staff
While your interactions as a student with a prep company’s staff are
limited, Blueprint’s professionalism consistently exceeded my expectations. The
reality of this process is that not everything will run smoothly the entire
time. When a website malfunction prevented me from being able to access the
online lecture videos for a half-day, I called the office and was assured that
the issue would be taken care of immediately. But they didn’t just stop at an
apology and a prompt fix of the problem. Rather, a Blueprint staff member
updated me every 30 minutes with the status of the IT team’s progress just so
that I knew my issue was a priority for them. This type of customer service is
rare, but for Blueprint, it’s business as usual.
5. Positive Atmosphere
It is not a secret that the LSAT can be very dry. Sometimes it seems as
though the writers over at LSAC deliberately chose articles to make your life
miserable. While a test prep company cannot control the LSAT writers, they can
do everything possible to make the learning environment as pleasant as
possible. That is exactly what Blueprint does. Blueprint’s online videos and
classroom jokes are geared for college students. They consistently insert humor
into the curriculum in order to keep students engaged when it is easy to let
your mind drift elsewhere. Facilitated by the instructor, the classroom
environment was always comfortable and conducive to learning, but it also was
conscience of the audience in the room and when push comes to shove (and it
will when you study for this exam), having a positive atmosphere is more
important than you might realize.
Blueprint is certainly not perfect – no test prep company is or ever
will be. However, I do hope that the 5
aforementioned reasons for taking a Blueprint course will enable at least some
prospective LSAT students to get on the right track sooner rather than later.
In the end, a high score on the LSAT comes down to your willingness to dedicate
yourself entirely to preparing for this exam. Blueprint Test Prep is just a
sufficient (although not a necessary) way of making that process a whole lot
smoother.
