In my non-LSAT life, I’m a musician. And for a musician, hearing a recording of yourself can be an edifying but horrifying experience. You might ask, “I really sound like that?”

But here’s the thing. You can clamp your nose shut with a clothespin whenever you go to the bathroom, but that don’t mean your **** don’t stink. If you’re going to improve your skills, you need to know which skills need improvement.

That’s the importance of review as an LSAT student. If you do the homework, get most of them right, pat yourself on the back and move on, you won’t improve much. There’s a lot to be learned from the ones you missed, even if it may be scary to confront those questions.

Review not in the spirit of beating yourself up because of your mistakes, but of learning lessons to apply next time. Here are some questions to ask: Did I follow the correct approach to the question? Did I misread anything important? Was my anticipation of the answer in line with what I should have been looking for? Why is the wrong answer wrong? How can I know that a similar wrong answer will be wrong next time? Why is the wrong answer tempting, and why doesn’t that make it right? Why is the right answer right? How can I spot a similar right answer next time?

Your goal should be to come out of each question you review with a better approach for the next time you see something similar. By analyzing your mistakes, you can avoid making them again.

Once you’ve figured out a question, talk yourself through the logical process one more time to reinforce the right way to do things. Make yourself follow the appropriate steps and come to the right conclusions, one step at a time.

Most Blueprint in-class students recently had their first workshop, a class devoted to review. For you, your focus should be on understanding the concepts you’ve covered so far and their application to the kinds of questions you’ve studied. You should know how to approach a Soft Must be True question step by step, for example. You should know all the indicator words that tell you how to diagram conditional statements, and understand what you can and can’t do with those statements once diagrammed.

Reviewing the questions you miss, as described above, is a great way to reinforce that understanding. Review not just to understand the particular question you’re looking at but also to correct and refine your approach in general. It may bruise your ego sometimes, but it’ll pay off in the end.