The question: If you finish the roughly 1,300-hour Learning and Thinking Crash Course, how many more hours of study would it take to reach Harvard Law School's median LSAT score?
The short answer: For a typical strong reader who starts around 160 on a cold practice test, plan on roughly 260–390 hours of LSAT-specific preparation after the crash course, compared with about 350–500 hours without it. The crash course saves time, but not as much as its 2–3× learning-efficiency estimate might suggest. The reasons why are the most useful part of this article, because they apply to almost any high-stakes test.
This is a planning exercise, not an admissions guide. The Harvard median is used here as a benchmark for elite performance on a well-defined, timed reasoning test: a clean way to ask how far a general thinking program carries you toward a specific, measurable target.
What the Target Actually Is
Harvard Law School's most recent entering class (the J.D. Class of 2028, which entered in fall 2025) had a median LSAT score of 174, with the middle 50% scoring between 171 and 176.1 On the LSAT's 120–180 scale, a 174 is higher than about 98% of all scores in LSAC's current percentile table, which covers the 2023–2026 testing years.2 The typical test taker scores in the low 150s.
So the target is not "do well." It is "outperform roughly 49 of every 50 people who sit the test," and most of those people prepared.
It also helps to know what the test now contains. Since August 2024, the LSAT has had two scored Logical Reasoning sections and one scored Reading Comprehension section, plus one unscored section of either type. The Analytical Reasoning section ("Logic Games") was removed.3 Each section is 35 minutes. In practice, the LSAT is now a timed test of two things: dissecting short arguments and mapping dense passages.
The Baseline: How Long People Normally Study
The major prep companies cluster around a similar range. Kaplan recommends that most students spend 150–300 hours over two to three months, and advises self-studiers to lean toward the upper end.4 Blueprint Prep plans around 250–300 total hours.5 7Sage puts the healthy weekly maximum at about 30 hours, even for full-time studiers, and warns that the test can't be brute-forced.6
Those figures describe the average student pursuing an average gain. Reaching the 98th percentile usually takes more, and the hours you need depend mainly on where you start.
Why the Crash Course Helps Less Than You Might Expect
The crash course is built around general learning and thinking skills. The LSAT rewards specific skills: spotting an argument's conclusion and unstated assumption within seconds, recognizing recurring flaw types, and holding a passage's structure in mind under time pressure.
The research on skill transfer is sobering here. A 2017 set of meta-analyses by Giovanni Sala and Fernand Gobet examined chess, music, and working-memory training and found that the better a study's design, the smaller the claimed transfer effects; they concluded that far transfer of learning rarely occurs.7 Near transfer, between closely related skills, is common. Far transfer, between loosely related ones, mostly isn't.
That gives a useful sorting rule for the crash course: modules that resemble LSAT tasks will help a lot, modules that improve how you study will help a fair amount, and modules that build unrelated skills will help very little on test day.
| Crash Course Module | LSAT Link | Expected Help |
|---|---|---|
| Analytical reading (Adler) | Mapping RC passages | High |
| Spaced repetition, retrieval | Faster learning of question types | High |
| Debiasing (Kahneman, Galef) | Recognizing reasoning flaws | Moderate |
| Grammar fluency | Parsing dense sentences | Moderate |
| Attention training | Focus across 35-minute sections | Moderate |
| Mental toughness, confidence | Test anxiety, plateaus | Moderate |
| Systems and Bayesian thinking | Some inference questions | Low |
| Creativity, copywriting | Little direct overlap | Low |
Doing the Math Honestly
The crash course's companion ROI report estimates a 2–3× improvement in learning efficiency. It is tempting to divide LSAT prep hours by 2 or 3. That would overstate the savings, because LSAT preparation has two different kinds of hours:
- Learning hours (roughly 40%)
- Understanding question types, conditional logic, flaw categories, and passage structures. This is where better learning methods pay off.
- Performance hours (roughly 60%)
- Timed sections, full practice tests, and careful review of every miss. These hours build speed and pattern recognition through repetition, and repetition is hard to compress.
That 40/60 split is a planning assumption, not a measured figure, but it matches the way prep courses describe the work. If the crash course doubles the efficiency of the learning hours, total prep time falls by about 20%. If it triples it, total time falls by about 27%. Add a small gain on the performance side from better attention and review habits, and a reasonable planning figure is a 20–30% reduction in LSAT prep hours.
Estimated Hours by Starting Score
Your cold diagnostic score is the single best predictor of the hours you'll need. The table below gives planning estimates for reaching 174. They are informed by the prep-industry ranges above and the 20–30% reduction, but they are estimates for self-assessment, not research findings.
| Cold Diagnostic | Hours Without Course | Hours After Course |
|---|---|---|
| 165–169 | 200–350 | 150–275 |
| 160–164 | 350–500 | 260–390 |
| 155–159 | 500–700 | 375–550 |
| 150–154 | 700–1,000+ | 525–800 (174 uncertain) |
| Below 150 | Not a realistic target | Not a realistic target |
Two cautions. First, hours don't guarantee a score; many diligent students plateau in the high 160s, and the lower your starting point, the more likely a plateau becomes. Second, the crash course's own estimates say gains are largest for people starting from a low baseline in study methods. If you already use spaced repetition and active recall, expect the smaller end of the savings.
The Total Investment
For the typical starter in the 160–164 band, the full path looks like this:
| Component | Hours | Calendar Time |
|---|---|---|
| Learning and Thinking Crash Course | ~1,300 | 6–12 months |
| LSAT-specific preparation | 260–390 | 3–4 months at ~25 hrs/week |
| Total | ~1,560–1,690 | 9–16 months |
This leads to an important honest point: if the LSAT were your only goal, the crash course would be the long way around. Going straight into LSAT prep would cost 350–500 hours, far fewer than 1,560 or more. The crash course makes sense only if you value what it builds beyond the test: better retention, decision-making, writing, creativity, and the habits of sustained effort. In that case, the reduced LSAT time is a bonus on top of a broader investment, not the reason for it.
What Moves the Number Up or Down
- Pacing. Each section is 35 minutes. Some people reason accurately but slowly, and speed must be trained directly with timed sections. Untimed accuracy is only half the job.
- Quality of review. Kaplan's tutors stress that analyzing your mistakes matters more than the number of practice tests you take.8 This is where the crash course's metacognitive habits pay off.
- Limited official material. LSAC has released only so many real tests. Burning through them carelessly early leaves fewer fresh tests for the final weeks.
- Attention and anxiety. Anything that slows you under time pressure, whether attention difficulties or test anxiety, adds hours. The crash course's attention and confidence modules target exactly this.
- Weekly load. Going far beyond about 30 hours a week tends to produce diminishing returns rather than faster progress.6
How to Combine the Two Programs
If you want both the crash course and a strong LSAT score, a sequenced plan works better than finishing one and then starting the other from scratch:
- Take a cold, timed diagnostic first. LSAC offers free official PrepTests through LawHub. One three-hour test tells you which row of the table above you're in, before you commit hundreds of hours.
- Use real LSAT questions as practice material inside the crash course. Logical Reasoning questions are excellent applied exercises for the thinking and debiasing phase, and Reading Comprehension passages are ideal practice for Adler's analytical reading.
- Build a spaced-repetition deck of flaw types and question types while you're learning the methodology phase, so the LSAT vocabulary is already retained when the dedicated block begins.
- Finish with a dedicated LSAT block of three to four months at 20–25 hours a week, weighted heavily toward timed sections and full practice tests.
- Retest every few weeks and update your estimate. If your scores stall for a month, adjust the method before adding more hours.
Planned this way, some LSAT practice happens inside the crash course's existing hours, which can bring the separate LSAT block toward the lower end of the estimates.
Bottom Line
The Learning and Thinking Crash Course can realistically cut LSAT preparation time by about 20–30%, mostly by making the learning portion of prep faster and the review process sharper. It cannot replace the hundreds of timed repetitions that build speed and pattern recognition on a specific test. For a strong reader starting around 160, reaching Harvard's 174 median after the crash course would take roughly 260–390 more hours. For someone starting in the mid-150s, it would take 375–550 hours with no guarantee of reaching 174.
The broader lesson goes beyond the LSAT: general thinking skills raise your ceiling and speed your learning, but every specific performance target still requires specific practice. The crash course makes that practice faster and more effective. It doesn't make it unnecessary.
Related Articles
- How to Learn Faster and Think Better Via a Crash Course
- A-Level Mental Bootcamp: The Cognitive ROI Report — How Many Hours Each Module Takes and the Percentage Gains You Can Expect
- A-Level Mental Bootcamp: Which Modules Actually Multiply Each Other — And Which Just Add Up
- WOOP Analysis: How to Complete the Learning and Thinking Bootcamp on Time
- Identifying the Bottlenecks Once You Finish the Learn Faster and Think Better Bootcamp
- Book List For My Learning and Thinking Crash Course
Notes
- Harvard Law School, "HLS 1L Profile and Facts: J.D. Class of 2028," and Harvard Law School, 2025 ABA Standard 509 Information Report. hls.harvard.edu ↩
- Law School Admission Council, "LSAT Percentile Table: 2023–2026 Testing Years." lsac.org ↩
- Law School Admission Council, "LSAT Changes Coming August 2024." lsac.org ↩
- Kaplan Test Prep, "How Many Hours of LSAT Prep Do I Need?" kaptest.com ↩
- Blueprint Prep, "How Early Should I Start My LSAT Prep?" blueprintprep.com ↩
- 7Sage, "How Many Hours Should I Study for the LSAT Each Week?" 7sage.com ↩ ↩
- Giovanni Sala and Fernand Gobet, "Does Far Transfer Exist? Negative Evidence From Chess, Music, and Working Memory Training," Current Directions in Psychological Science 26, no. 6 (2017): 515–520. doi:10.1177/0963721417712760. Note: the scope of far transfer remains debated; some researchers dispute how broadly these findings apply. ↩
- Kaplan Test Prep, "How Many Hours of LSAT Prep Do I Need?" (tutor commentary on review quality). kaptest.com ↩
