Thank you for opening this~

I'm registered for the Feb 22 exam so I am trying to be at max. efficiency level with my studying LOOL.

I was struggling with RC for the longest time but after EXTENSIVE review I think it's finally clicking with me.

My score per PT now depends on how I do on GAMES. I really want to get to that -0 / -2 (max) level by test day.

I only miss more than 2-3 on games that are a little "untraditional" (for example, PT 80 game 4). When I hit game 4 on PT 80, I stayed calm and tried to use intuition to push thru.. but got stuck... big time.

Do you all have any tips on how to improve on these kinds of games? Also, if you know any PTs with funky games please let me know!

To all my fellow February takers.. we got this!

I am struggling to get more than 17 right on LR consistently. I reviewed all the LR curriculum but I'm still unable to break the 17 right during timed sections. I have noticed a few trends. During timed LR I am usually getting the first 10 correct in about ~12 minutes. I usually run out of time and don't get to 3-4 questions so I blind guess on these. Of the 3-4 it's very unlikely that I get one of them right by chance. During BR I am usually able to get 3-4 correct out of the 3-4 I skipped.

My BR is usually around ~20-21 and ideally I would be scoring as close to ~21 as humanly possible! Any advice?

Also, I'm practicing from tests 1-20 right now out of paranoia. I do not want to "waste" the good/more recent exams. Is this legit reasoning or is it smart to "save" the more recent exams for full practice test practicing purposes?

I was wondering when the video explanations will be up for the November 2019 LSAT

Hi all, can somebody explain why answer choice (c) is incorrect?

I thought it was a good choice for the following reason:

(C) Whenever most practitioners of a given discipline (the psychologists) approach a particular problem in the same way (should the childhood age group be understood in its own terms), that uniformity is good evidence that all similar problems (should the elderly age group be understood in its own terms) should be approached in that way (yes, it should be understood in its own terms, just like psychologists do for children)

Please, if you can let me know where I’m wrong that’ll be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,

I am able to recognize premise, conclusions and the approach to classify the inference family LR. However, when I see the questions I freak out and get totally lost. All the answer choices look alike. It is hard to decipher the correct answer and I give up. Help................. !!!!!!!!!!!!!! . Please and Thank you.

Hi everyone,

I am still quite confused about why answer choice D is wrong here. After all, couldn't it be argued that P is proposing a hypothesis (that M's hypothesis is laughable) and showing that it is merely possible (by stating that it is possible that a person who knew the epics well enough to write them down would not need to read them nor would anybody else be able to read them)?

In a sense, why does P's counterargument not count as a hypothesis?

#help

Thanks!

Admin note: https://classic.7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-24-section-3-question-04/

In LG, when given a question stem that provides a new premise AND includes the terms: could be true, must be true, could be false, and must be false, etc. I tend to take a lot more time than I should in trying to process the question. Usually, I am dealing with a game board that I split, so it takes me even longer to try to figure out the relationship between the question and the game boards that I have in front of me. I'm planning on drilling this particular skill, and was hoping someone could look over my notes:

Could be True: inference has to work in at least ONE of the game boards

Must be True: inference must be true in ALL the game boards

Could be False: as long as the inference could be wrong in ONE of the game boards, it's wrong

Must Be False: inference must be false in ALL the game boards

Cannot Be True: is this the equivalent of must be false???

I feel like JY addressed this in the CC, but can't remember exactly where. Also, are there any other terms that I missed?

Thanks in advance!

I recently started a wrong answer journal to help pinpoint where I'm going wrong on answers. Most of the time, I find myself making reading errors or approaching an answer the wrong way. Upon further reflection, I can typically recognize my error, describe it to myself on paper, and then I try not to do it again. However, sometimes it genuinely comes down to the fact that the answers just didn't click. I look back at the answers choices and think to myself duh, of course that's the answer. In these situations, I have no reason why I didn't answer correctly other than the fact that I just couldn't find the right answer at the time even though in retrospect it's pretty obvious. It's not timing because sometimes I spend a significant amount of time on them. Maybe just anxiety even in a practice test setting?

Does anyone have any insight on what might be happening here? Or how I can correct for that? I'd like to figure out the error of my ways to continue improving my score! Thank you!

I’m getting into the weeds of the curriculum. Earlier on in conditional and sufficient reasoning, I see the use of diagramming. However, this creates so much more confusion than it’s worth. Has anyone had any success in LR without using the extreme details conditional reasoning? It’s easy in the LG section but doing 4 or five in one string is time consuming and confusing. I’m not trying to score a 180, just a solid 160+. Thoughts?

Hey everyone! I wanted to ask if there was some form of process / equation / anything mechanistic to attack the math questions dealing with proportions and absolute values?

Having to constantly plug and chug numbers (or drawing pies) is fine, but I wish there was something more elegant that wouldn’t leave me with the feeling that I might be leaving out some possible consideration. It's been taking me far longer than other question types (and it's hard to be consistent) to get to the right AC for math questions.

Additionally, I haven't finished the core curriculum yet, but are nearly all the questions-that-require-you-to-conclude-something-about-a-number on the LSAT just dealing with % vs quantity?

I’m getting rid of practice exams and books that I had purchased. Message me for more details.

After reviewing answer choice E, I can see how it strongly weakens the argument, but I'm a little confused why answer choice C couldn't be a correct choice as well. If the number of people competing for the elected position isn't more when the pay is high vs when the pay is lower, isn't that enough to prove that these people are not doing it for the purposes of money?

Admin note: edited title; please use the format of "PT#.S#.Q# - [brief description]"

I have been struggling to chain up conditional statements together, and am looking for extra practice on this particular skill. I went back to the CC and found a few exercise problems on the following page:

https://classic.7sage.com/lesson/chaining-conditional-statements-together-exercise/

However, I really want to drill more of these and was wondering if anyone knew where I could get more of these exercises.

Thanks in advance!

If anyone is scoring great in rc and has tips / does tutoring please let me know I am missing all my points in rc. I am missing like 13 in rc and -2/3 in everything else. SOS.

What do you think the scale is?

How do you represent neither nor ?

https://classic.7sage.com/lesson/visual-representation-of-or-and-not-both-in-inout-games/

I want to quickly discuss a common type of causation argument that LSAC uses.

Here is an example:

Those who wear glasses are more likely than those who do not to have knee problems. To ensure good knee health, ditch the glasses.

We take a correlation and make a recommendation, seems pretty innocuous- maybe this is sound advice.

No! This advice is rooted in making an assumption. This assumption is a really bad reasoning error. It is assuming that wearing glasses is what causes knees to have problems. That is why the advice to stop wearing glasses to prevent knee damage is given. Notice how the argument never comes out and says "Glasses cause Knee problems", that would be too easy. The implicit assumption that the argument makes is inferring causation from correlation.

As we know, when A is correlated with B, there are 4 possibilities :

For our advice to ditch the glasses to work, we would need A to cause B, or, in other words, glasses to cause knee problems. If it really is the case that knee problems cause people to wear glasses (B causes A), then just stopping wearing glasses will do nothing, the advice would be terrible. Similarly, if genetics causes both knee problems and glasses and that is why we have our correlation, then taking glasses off will do nothing. In short, the only way our advice works is if glasses really do cause knee problems. We cannot say this is the case just based on the existence of a correlation, there are 3 other possibilities which are equally likely.

Boiled down to variables the argument goes like this:

**A is correlated with B

If you desire B, just do A.

or

If you want to prevent B, don't to A**

Well, for this advice to make sense, we must assume that A causes B and we cannot do that based on a correlation.

These questions are sometimes tricky because they make intuitive sense. They will really try to make the advice sound good, despite making a correlation causation error. Here is one last example:

People with a lot of sugar in their diets tend to get disease XYZ more often than those who do not. To lower your risk of XYZ, cut out sugar from your diet.

Well, we know sugar is bad for health, so this does not seem bad at all. BUT, this argument commits the error of taking a correlation and jumping to the conclusion that sugar is what is causing XYZ. This is done implicitly (hence to title of the post) and is not ok for the reasons discussed above!

PT 78 S3 Q21 (https://classic.7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-78-section-3-question-21/) is a good example of this form and disguises the flaw with an argument that seems to make sense.

Hope this was helpful!

Basically, my issue is with the whole explanation from JY. But for discussion sake let's focus on Q23.

If you read the question paragraph or question stem without reading Q23, you will figure out that J and K are bidirectional i.e. cannot be in the same clinic together (proof below).

So my question is why is then Q23 can have A too as the right answer choice.

Proof

s and r are locations

Js -> Kr

~Kr -> ~Js

Ks -> Jr (because only s and r are there)

Therefore, Ks (-) Jr

Hey 7Sagers,

Here's the official January 2020 LSAT Discussion Thread.

**Please keep all discussions of the January 2020 LSAT here!**(/red)

Rules:

✅ You can identify experimental sections. 🙆‍♀️

You can say things such as the following:

❌ You can't discuss specific questions. 🙅‍♂️

You CANNOT say things such as the following:

Hi there,

Could anyone please help me to understand why answer C is correct.

Thank you

Hi fellow 7Sagers :) it's my first time posting on here but would really appreciate your advice.

I'm scoring around low to mid 160s and BRing around 170-175 range. My biggest challenge is that my LR scores fluctuate a lot (from -2 to -7 per section before BR). I'm mostly missing level 4/5 questions that are logic heavy (e.g. parallel flawed question, method of reasoning, etc.). It takes me over 2 mins to answer these questions as I'm slow at drawing out conditional logic. So would like to ask if anyone scoring around my range benefited from going back to the core curriculum or any tips on being more accurate/fast at this types of questions? (drilling by question type, etc.) And any other tips on narrowing gap between actual to BR score would be much appreciated!

Thank you in advance!

Stmt: Either A or B is in the forest

Question: Is "either or" and "exclusive or" here ?

My Answer:

No, because atleast 1 has to be there but not both.

A B not both

0 0 0

0 1 1

1 0 1

1 1 0

My Discussion:

"Either or" is different than "not both" because "not both" truth table is below.

A B not both

0 0 1

0 1 1

1 0 1

1 1 0

Notice the 1st line is different in both truth tables.

Question for you guys:

please see if my logic is correct

Q7 here:

https://classic.7sage.com/lesson/inout-game-1-questions-part-1/

Are "noth both" and "neither nor" equivalent?

Hi,

When I did this question, I got stuck between B and D, even after I used the negation technique for assumption questions. Why exactly is D here wrong?

For context, I thought D could be an answer too because when voters are paying enough attention to make informed decisions, then they don't need the press to cover substantial policy issues for them, and thus then they don't need the campaign advisors to stay out of the limelight.

This question presents the cheetah as an exception to the coat pattern attributed to large cat species. From the stimulus, we know that Living/Hunting Habitats have an impact on the type of Coat a large cat has. We also know that, normally, Spotted Coat -> Habitat = trees and dappled forests. Meanwhile, Plain Coat -> Habitat = open plains.

Yet the Cheetah has a Spotted Coat, while living in the open plains. How come?

My problem with this question is that the most valid support for A (the correct answer) seems to be that it sharply distinguishes Cheetahs from all other large cats, which suggests "well, I guess cheetahs being weird regarding X helps explain why they're also weird regarding Y: they're just weird compared to normal large cats". But that still feels to me like A is just basically saying "ah, they're an anomaly because...they're an anomaly". If I asked this question to an expert on large cats, and answer choice A was his explanation, I'd just feel like it's another way of saying that he doesn't really have an explanation.

Another explanation for A that I've read is that "they don't rely on stealth, only purely speed, so it makes sense that they're in the open rather than in forests", but this, to me, seems to assume a lot about what kind of hunting strategy is most appropriate for large cats in forests. Regardless of whether it's true, I feel like we can't assume this based on the information on the stimulus.

I'm curious if anyone agrees with my assessment, or whether I am not assessing it the right way.

Thanks

Admin note: https://classic.7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-87-section-3-question-04/