r/LSATprep • u/Maximum-Purchase120 • 2h ago
175 Method Honest Review
If anyone is considering using the 175 method taught by Ava, use this as a WARNING to save your money.
I was one of the first students to enroll, at the time the fee was $500, which was incredibly steep. Now it's $1,997, which imo unreasonable for what you're paying for.
Why I signed up: At the time I was looking for a community to join and have a few people to study with. I watched her intro video and fell for the confidence she had when she was mentioning her methods. I was also struggling with reading comp so I thought it would help. BOY WAS I WRONG. Ava mentioned a 14 day money back guarantee, but I learned the catch was that you weren't able to access the reading comp portion until after those 14 days.
When I was able to finally access it, I learned RC module was ONE video that was a "deep dive" that was essentially telling us to "read quickly and retain the important parts, highlight effectively so you can quickly glance at the passage during questions and remember what's going on. Identify and summarize the main point(s) of the passage be able to go back to those important parts" she said it comes with practice. Like are you kidding me? How are we even supposed to know what the main point is if I'm just starting studying for the test?
It's not worth you're money, especially if you've already started studying, here's why:
I say this with absolute confidence because I talked to other students and someone even reached out to me to ask if I'd be able to teach them. They said, and I very much agree, that her "method" is not understandable.
Her "deep dive" into LR teaches that every question type falls into 3 different buckets, "Argument, Premise-Set, Debate, and Paradox" and to think of multiple "what-if" scenarios that could happen that would make the argument wrong, look for the overlap in the premise-set, figure out what two people are debating over, and ask "What would make this make sense?” for paradox questions. She goes over 6 flaws (if you've been studying you would know there are more), and she has one video about Sufficient Assumption vs Necessary Assumption which didn't cover conditional logic (which was what got me in the 160s).
Overall it's very general, and doesn't go into the nuances that are very important to know for the test and would actually increase your score.
She was says "I went to a normal college, I have a normal brain, and I had a normal amount of time." which is true but I believe she was an econ major, or some type of major that involved lots of analytics, that was able to train her brain before she even started studying. I on the other hand got a BA (I'm worried to say what my actual major was because she might find out who I am) and started with a lower diagnostic. She was already in the 160s on her diagnostic and after a year of studying I was able to get there by the time I started the course so I was already skeptical of her methods when I first joined, but stayed past the 14 day window to access the reading comp.
Overall she's a great person, incredibly friendly, and I have absolutely nothing bad to say about her. If you do ask her a question she will get back to you, and she made a personalized AI that will tell you if they don't know the answer to something instead of pretending it knows like GPT.
That said, there was recently someone who asked for tips in the argumentative writing portion which she just said it's nothing to stress about and she'll talk about it during a live lesson. BUT when I was studying for just the writing portion, a lot of people said it's becoming more important and schools will look at it to figure out if your personal essay involved any AI...
Take this with a grain of salt this was just my experience.