I'm revisiting this question after 9 months of studying and I still take some issue with it.

Just as I did 9 months ago, I deduced that A, B, D, and E were incorrect, but I could not bring myself to accept C's required assumptions.

As a more experienced test taker, I attribute this to the test makers. As written, it's too much to assume that Caligula's enemies plagiarized. C's wording just isn't strong enough for us to conclude that it couldn't have been a coincidence. Even just adding the word "unusual" between "specific" and "outrageous" would help.

On a test specifically designed to build argumentative ability by way of focusing on weak logic, it isn't appropriate to have the test taker move away from the correct answer because it's too weak.

I REALLY don't understand why so many people are confused about Passage A. It's very general and it's hard to verbalize its main point into one sentence, but it's very easy (for me, at least) to understand.

P1) 1990's scholarly shift from "women" as a subject toward "gender relations" as a subject (i.e. going from studying women's lives to studying how the female and male genders interact in traditional social settings).

P2) The above transition reveals that "gender relations" has potentially more value than the topic of "women" in analyzing historical social structures.

P3) The author wonders what academic drawbacks may result from a focus shifting away from the topic of "women".

With the amount of backlash this passage gets, I'm almost worried that I misread it, but I can't come up with another way to interpret the passage.

I was actually just about to comment this same thing. Hopefully this is a sign that my LR skills have finally matured to the higher level I've been aiming for, but I really don't see why so many people chose (B). It doesn't fit or affect the premise-conclusion gap at all.

This passage KILLED me. What the heck........

Did anyone else have an extremely hard time with this passage? 4/7 and struggled for time. How was this an "easier" passage?

I had trouble with this question exclusively because of C's wording. I knew all the other answers were unsupported, but "grounds for selecting...more narrow" really confused me. Like c'mon, LSAC. I deduced the answer now let me have it.

JY brushed this off as easy when it's not. This is a VERY tricky question, and it's because of the stimulus, not the answer choices.

Upon first glance, the stimulus looks like a textbook "Causation from Correlation" Flaw (or a "Coincidence" Flaw, as I call it), but it's not! It's a "Numbers vs Percentages" Flaw (or "# vs %" Flaw)!

B and C are very obviously wrong. B makes a "Third Party" Flaw (it assumes no other factor is relevant to the situation) and C seems to make a "Extreme Conclusion from Moderate Evidence" Flaw, though I could be wrong about that. Regardless, it's wrong.

D makes the same "Third Party" Flaw as B. It blatantly assumes that no other factor is involved.

A makes that "Causation from Correlation" Flaw I mentioned in the beginning, and it's very tricky for the test-taker because if you didn't make the correct judgement of the stimulus's flaw, you probably saw this and went "THAT'S DEFINITELY IT!"

E is the actual answer because it conflates proportion (or percentage) with quantity (or numbers).

VERY hard question, nearly impossible if you missed the correct flaw in the stimulus!

(P.S. it's very possible that I mischaracterized the flaws in B, C, and D, but I was able to deduce them as incorrect so it doesn't matter quite as much)

What the LSAT test-makers consider to weaken or strengthen an argument just baffles me.

That SOME people send flowers for reasons other than pleasure doesn't weaken anything because...well... great, but why would we expect that to be the case?

That THERE'S A POSSIBILITY people send flowers for reasons other than pleasure absolutely weakens the argument.

It's a roadblock I'll just never overcome.

"Primarily" in D was the real killer for me. I was also really thrown off by the fact that no answer choice addressed both the environmental and safety components of the argument. Yet another bitter pill to swallow from LSAC.

This is a really ugly question, and it's brutal as far as time sinks go. In and of itself, the logic and actual question aren't that bad. Where the difficulty lies is deciphering that logic correctly and doing so quickly enough to answer the question. It's brutal under a time constraint.

If I got this wrong on an official test and revisited it to review it, I'd be furious and wondering how I was supposed to get that in time. I'd contend that, unless it's paired with a somewhat shorter and/or easier section, it might even be unfair. There just seems to be such a low chance of succinctly decoding this on the first go.

#help

How can I stop making these mistakes? When I try to be as scrutinous as the LSAT seems to always need me to be, it always seems to backfire.

I picked B because I thought the wording of the conclusion was obviously a trap. I was really proud to have caught it and I'm blown away to see that it's wrong.

The conclusion very clearly seems to be assessing someone's likelihood of injury depending on the size of their vehicle. It also does not specify that the vehicle at-hand is what is being driven at the time of the accident.

I see that B does essentially nothing in regard to the argument, but D was an easy elimation for me. I can't believe it's correct!

D seemed like an obvious trap answer because the conclusion refers to chance of injury, not chance of an accident. Why would it matter if your chance of accidents are higher in a large car if your chance of injury is lower? Not great logic for daily life, but this was a no brainer to me.

Disregard

This passage absolutely destroyed me. Good lord. I got 2/7, and one was a blind guess because I ran out of time.

I understand this question, but it took me a solid 5 minutes to grasp the stimulus.

The language and terminology in this question are so unnecessarily complex that the question jumps in difficulty from 3/5 to 5/5.

I'm very thankful that recent LSAT's have had nothing like this. I think this is evil.

On Q4, I really struggle with D. I understand why C (my original answer) isn't correct, since we don't know that the critics are from/in Senegal or that their criticisms are widespread.

But the second paragraph only seriously mentions the social status of a single character. The passage seems to illustrate the diversity of his stories' character symbolisms, not that the characters come from different "social strata", much less a "broad range of social strata".

I find this really unsatisfying. Can anyone explain? #help

This question is an instance of underestimated difficulty. I got it correct, but if I'd had even a month less practice with LR, I could easily have gotten this wrong. I think the wording is trickier than it's being given credit for.

So the time crunch was already an issue for me with this question. I was rushing AKA mistake #1.

As seems to be common, "on the contrary" totally threw me off. I correctly guessed that the opening sentence was the conclusion, but "on the contrary" made me think it was background information. I then spent almost a full minute trying to understand how "on the contrary" made any sense given that the first two sentences don't contradict one another. Time sink = mistake #2.

This felt more like an RRE question, especially since I didn't see an argument being made because I thought the first sentence was background. So I moved on to the questions, hoping to understand better there AKA mistake #3.

This question killed me, but makes all the sense in the world in BR.

God, the LSAT is such a beast.

Q10 was really confusing because of its language choice. "Answering" an objection? I've never heard anything like that before.

Thankfully, this would have to mean that the correct answer would need to either perfectly embody the objection or perfectly counter it. Luckily, A did the latter and no answer choice did the former.

Way to make a mountain out of a molehill, testmakers.

This passage was intolerable to me. I had to read it three times.

Strangely enough, that "cosmos" section in parentheses in lines 30-32 that JY didn't understand really stuck out to me. I related to it, and probably a bit harder than I should have.

What the author is saying is that Byron's general rejection of literary method was a component of his personality. Specifically, he was frustrated with not being able to internalize it, and instead he just considered it something he wasn't meant to understand--which is where "cosmos" comes into play, representing that which was beyond his understanding. As if to flip it the bird, he just forgoes literary method. That was part of his personality.

I believe what you're looking for is called a "whole-to-part" flaw (or is it "part-to-whole"?) wherein it is incorrectly assumed that members of a group individually share a characteristic that the group as a whole embodies (e.g. whole pizzas are round, so pizza slices must be round).

The opposite would be a "part-to-whole" flaw--or "whole-to-part", if I do actually have them mixed up--where one would incorrectly assume that the group shares the same characteristic as its members (e.g. pizza slices are triangular, so whole pizzas must be triangular).

If anyone has a better explanation or sees a gap in mine, please comment!

This is a very aggravating question, especially when seeing how many people are dismissing it as easy.

Upon relfection, I'd loosely agree that (B) is more specifically representative of what is being said in the stimulus than (A) is, but a correct answer choice should really be more clear. (A) is a much safer and more easily supported answer by nature of being more general.

#help#help#help

Whoa whoa whoa, red flag on Q27! I must be missing something pretty crucial.

Despite not loving it, I incorrectly chose (C), which I now see is incorrect.

How on earth does (E) weaken the claim that wealth equates to power?

Suppose the elite being discussed consists of 1000 people, 10 of which are vice-chancellors. Let's say that, of those 10 vice-chancellors, 4 ("many") had their positions due to their wealth exclusively.

How can that possibly weaken the claim that wealth equates to power? That's 0.4%.

I respect and envy your humility, but I don't think your emotional response to (B) was out of place. "Antisocial" does not fit the answer choice's context, and being "charitable" to answer choices is how the test-makers get you.

#help

I correctly chose (C) because it obviously does not contribute an explanation.

But I found (B) really bothersome because of the word "antisocial". Has this ever been officially addressed?

I'm trying to get better at tackling LSAT content without emotion or attachment, and, while I've certainly faultered there before, I feel very comfortable that that word choice is an error.

In the context of a social behavior in children, "antisocial" is not "antagonistic" or "unruly" as the question requires. Quite the opposite, an "antisocial" child will be reserved and won't be the one disciplined for acting up.

Perhaps "antisocial" was meant in a more literal/formal sense (i.e. "challenging rules or social expectations"), but this context would serve this version extremely poorly. It'd go beyond the LSAT's understandable attempts to use cryptic language to make things more challenging to read. If that were the case, then the test-taker would have to routinely pause to explore the potential definitions of a word that isn't the focus of the answer choice. I think that's unreasonable to the point that it could turn any sentence on the LSAT into a slippery slope of ambiguous definitions.

With that in mind, I find it much more comfortable to believe that the culprit is unintentionally poor word choice by the test-makers.

Apologies for the ranty essay of a comment, but I want to understand. Am I missing anything? Can anyone clear this up?

#help

I disliked every answer here.

B is the closest, but I can't help thinking it's not correct.

P1 does not indicate that they believe this. From reading their position and having passing knowledge of the subject, I think this would be something they'd support, but we do not have the evidence to assume they would believe this. What if they oppose biotechnological advances for whatever reason?

I find it very frustrating that we are expected to make this logical leap. It's too much of an assumption.

Please forgive my frustration. I just want to do well on this test fair and square. Am I missing something? #help