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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6 comments
I used to have that issue too - I think your prephrase/prediction is too specific. now I identify the weak point/assumption & just hold that in my mind, without coming up with a specific prephrase. on the red admiral question, because the reasoning is based on an analogy between the two types of butterflies, you know the correct answer needs to address that analogy. use that to eliminate 2-3 answers and then just evaluate the remaining two.
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!
@haena I've been studying for about a year with some breaks in between while working. I think the logging definitions is an interesting idea. How do you end up finding out that pattern? Is it through reading explanations or just deducing that this is a word that will be used in this way again? I think my problem is that while I am reading to understand, my understanding of what a stimulus or reading comprehension passage means is not the understanding I was supposed to take away. For the example of the red admiral butterfly, I broke the stimulus down, and still came away with the, wrong, understanding that they were trying to mimic, or at the very least came away without the correct understanding that the poisonous butterflies were doing something different.
I am just struggling to see what strategy I can use so that I can recognize which understandings they want me to have or how to lessen my urge to misunderstand what a stimulus or passage means.
@CarolineKaplan Ooh okay yeah, so it might be less of a familiarity thing since you've been studying for a while. I also have an issue with reading to understand, so I started logging definitions after my tutor suggested it to me. Her first language is not English, so she had to rely on recognizing patterns instead of understanding the material itself. I think it doesn't work all the time because the LSAT loves to throw curveball exceptions to every rule, but it's really helpful to keep track of the assumptions that I'm allowed to make and not allowed to make. I also realized that there were a lot of questions where I wouldn't pick an answer choice because I wasn't sure if I was allowed to conflate a concept/word so those are the ones that I try to target. For example:
Does not necessarily endorse
I got an RC question wrong that asked about the approaches between Passage A and Passage B. I didn't like any of the answer choices, and I eliminated the answer choice that stated that Passage B 'does not necessarily endorse' land restitution because the author was explicitly sympathetic to the indigenous populations fighting for land ownership. My non-LSAT understanding was that 'Oh, but he DOES endorse the position, so it can't be that answer choice' and moved on. But in the LSAT world, "does not necessarily endorse" is a very weak statement that is NOT incompatible with his sympathy. He can explicitly state that "ideally, the land should be restored to its rightful owners" AND not necessarily endorse this argument.
Abstract shape = nonrepresentational, replaceable, non-specific
This is another RC question I got wrong about Sumerian clay tokens with abstract shapes on it to represent things like sheep or metal. The correct AC stated that the shapes could have been "replaced without loss of significance". I didn't think that something being abstract means that it can be replaceable, so I didn't choose this AC. This doesn't mean that from now on, I'm immediately thinking if something is abstract, then it's definitely replaceable, but it's an additional consideration that I try to keep in my back pocket.
There are also just a bunch of vocab words that the LSAT likes to use the less popular definitions of:
Interfere:
I thought it was only being used to mean mean 'to prevent or block an action,' but it can also just mean 'to involve yourself.'
Qualify:
This is one that I just noticed under a lot of the discussion posts because the LSAT loves to use all of its definitions (the 3rd definition is the one people are the least familiar with).
(1) To have the skill/standard necessary for something; (2) to have the legal right to do something; (3) to limit the strength or meaning of a sentence.
These are just a couple of patterns that I found! A lot of my mistakes come from eliminating the correct AC because of one or two words and humoring the wrong AC because of underlying conceptual gaps. If these are the kinds of mistakes you make, I recommend logging! That way you can also read through them and review them every once in a while as a form of light studying.
Also back to the red admiral question, whenever there are two relevantly similar entities/groups/samples being compared to form some sort of hypothesis (a lot of PhenLR, CausR, ST/WE stims have this), I would ask yourself immediately: what are the implied differences between the two entities being compared? If the hypothesis is that they're different, we need to assume things between the two entities that will allow us to conclude that they are different. Same thing with hypotheses that the two entities are similar. It may not always help you get the answer, but it helps to have a methodical approach to lean back on if you're stuck!
@haena Wow, you're a star! Thank you so much for this!
@CarolineKaplan My pleasure! Wishing us both luck :-)