It’s four weeks to the day until the June LSAT. Once you start breathing again, let’s look at what you should be doing to prepare, week by week.

This Week
Finish with the new material. If there’s anything on the LSAT you haven’t covered yet, now’s the time. You’ll need time to review and practice, so get new concepts out of the way first.

Weeks Two and Three
Timed practice, practice tests, and review. Once you’ve gone through everything new, you need to refine your approach. If there’s anything you studied a while back that you’re still a bit hazy on, it’s time to solidify your approach.

It’s also time to work on getting faster. Keep in mind that this doesn’t come from rushing through things, but from making your approach ruthlessly efficient. If you rush and don’t read carefully, you’ll just be faster at getting things wrong. That’s not much help. The right kind of speed comes from knowing how to approach everything, knowing what to expect from the answer, and being able to find quickly why answers are wrong or right.

LSAT students often want to overdo practice tests early in their studies. But now, you can’t really take too many, with one caveat: reviewing the test is more important than taking the test. Simply taking test after test without careful review isn’t a good way to improve your score. On every test you take, you’re not done until you understand every question. Only then should you move on to the next test.

Week Four: The Final Tune-up
This is the last week before the LSAT. You should continue doing practice tests and reviewing them carefully, but your priorities should shift a little. Sleep and exercise are always good ideas, but they become a little more important now; be very wary about burning yourself out. You should also take care of those last bits of preparation for LSAT test day. You’ll need a passport-style photo and a baggie full of supplies. It’s a good idea to make time for a dry run to the test center as well.

This last week before the LSAT is also your last chance to assess whether you’re ready for the June test. You can withdraw your LSAT registration up until the night before the test, and the only penalty is that you’ll lose your registration fee. Therefore, the earlier deadline to change your test date isn’t terribly important. If your practice test scores in the last week are within spitting distance of something you’d be happy with, then don’t get cold feet. If you’re far from where you need to be, it might make sense to wait for October.

But don’t think about that right now, here in the present. Stay positive. You can make big gains in the next four weeks. It may not be the most enjoyable month of your life, but it’ll all be worth it when you have a killer LSAT score in hand.