On this site I regularly see people with LSAT scores 20-30 points lower than mine making ridiculous assertions about the amount of work that is supposedly required to get a top score. By contrast my personal experience was that the prep required to get a 99th percentile LSAT score consisted of learning basic logic game diagramming and writing a handful of practice tests. I see people with scores in the 150s knowing all the names of the different types of logical reasoning questions and discussing the logic behind them in terms I never learned and don't understand. All I know is if you put the test in front of me I intuitively understand what almost all of the answers are, but I couldn't do a good job of articulating why--the answers simply seem self-evident and to be taken for granted.
Just chiming in because your statement squares with my experience (although I didn't reach 177). But by and large people with mediocre scores invariably claim that the LSAT is all about effort and just don't want to believe that innate aptitude has anything to do with it, because they tend to view it as an attack on their intelligence in general.
(Just so I don't seem like a totally arrogant douche, everyone: for what it's worth I've put in serious effort trying to learn instruments and second languages and my innate aptitude in both of those areas is abysmal--I found such endeavors nearly impossible. Also the innate LSAT aptitude did not translate into innate law school aptitude, and I certainly would have preferred the latter. But yeah, the fact that I suck at other things but can effortlessly get an LSAT score in the 170s just emphasizes how much of it is innate. And the degree to which there are different kinds of intelligences that people have varying aptitudes for. The LSAT is irrelevant to me now in practical terms but I do find the subject interesting from a psychological perspective.)
The vast majority of people that score 170+ and post here put in a fraction of the effort the people grinding through the 150s and low 160s do. And I’m sure a ton of those grinders put in as much effort as is humanly possible into studying without having an innate grasp of the LSAT.
But the people scoring 177-180 for example? Probably putting in some of the least effort into studying.
I've taken 14 sociology courses, 12 at u of t and 2 at ryerson. I dropped out a while back and decided to go back to school because I was tired of working construction so I went to ryerson to finish my degree.