Self-study
Hello all! I am running into a very frustrating situation that keeps costing me time and points in many question types including strengthen, necessary assumption, and sufficient assumption. Namely, I am dissecting a stimulus and either making the wrong assumptions or missing assumptions. So then, when I have my prephrase that either contradicts a correct assumption, or never regards a correct assumption, I will often ELIMINATE the correct answer because it feels like it contradicts my prephrase, or because I never thought of it.
Could anyone offer any advice on how to get these questions with consistent accuracy, or how to change my thinking habits? I have read all the typical advice, and it doesn't really help me on actual LSAT questions of these types, so I'm hoping there are some high scorers here who have perhaps a different approach they could share!
An example of my thinking is on PT 143, S 1, Q 9, a strengthen question, on red admiral butterflies, my prephrase, and my interpretation of the stimulus, was that perhaps the red admiral is mimicking the poisonous butterfly's flight pattern, and thus eluding predators. However, when looking at explanations, one of the assumptions that I obviously missed was that poisonous butterflies did not fly in an irregular flight pattern. Because of this, I immediately crossed out A, the correct answer.
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1 comments
Can I ask how long you've been studying? I had a similar frustration for a while (and occasionally still do), but you eventually can grasp what kind of assumptions that the LSAT wants you to make. I've also been keeping a log of certain kinds of definitions that LSAT likes to use for a word (i.e. the word 'qualify' has multiple definitions and its second definition has been used a few times instead of its first) or certain assumptions that I just force myself to memorize (i.e. the word 'waste' is usually intended used to signal something that is not necessary, rather than what we usually associate it with, like excess or something to be discarded).
I have a similar issue with NA and being too committed to my prephrase, but it's been helping me to mentally divorce myself from my prephrase and taking everything given to me at face value. Especially for NA when the ACs are often so weak and obvious, there are many hidden defender assumptions that sound 'weaker' than another AC but are still necessary.
As for the red admiral question, you first made an assumption that the poisonous butterflies fly to evade predators, when this was never given to us in the stimulus. In fact, it is implied that the poisonous butterflies do something differently from the red admiral butterflies to evade their predators. We don't need to know what that thing is, but we just need to know that it's different from the non-poisonous ones. The researchers are basing their hypothesis on red admirals, or non-poisonous butterflies, by comparing their behaviors to the poisonous ones. For their conclusion to follow, we need to know that the non-poisonous butterflies and the poisonous butterflies are relevantly different, which is what (A) is saying.
Hope this helps! It's definitely frustrating, but the LSAT world of assumptions is learnable!