LSHopeful

Joined: Sep 2025
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LSAT

174

CAS GPA

3.6

1L START YEAR

2026

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Yale

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Discussions

LSAT · Understanding Sufficient Assumptions

LSHopeful

Tuesday, May 26

Sufficient assumptions are what they sound like. What is the assumption that is sufficient for your conclusion to follow from your premises? In other words, what is something that if true, when combined with the other premises being true would guarantee a true conclusion.

Take the argument:

Garfield is a housecat
All housecats are pets
All pets are cute
Therefore, Garfield is cute

If the argument was missing any one of the premises, adding it back would be "sufficient" to fix it. If premise #2 was missing, adding it back is "filling the gaps" as you said. If premise #3 is missing it is "linked to the conclusion" as you said. Importantly, premise #1 could also be missing or you could jump over premises entirely. A sufficient assumption would also be "garfield is cute" (skipping past the whole argument but guaranteeing the truth of the conclusion if true).

LSAT · What is The Psychology of LSAT High Performers?

LSHopeful

Friday, Jan 16

While not LSAT specific, there are a ton of resources on sports psychology out there. The same principles apply to the LSAT. Keep your breathing steady, focus on what you can control, self talk, positive framing, follow a routine, etc..

My personal opinion is like in most things, you have to find the joy in it to be great. Professional athletes deal with massive financial stakes when they play. Yet, they are also adults who are paid money to play games meant for school children. The LSAT is a series of fun little puzzles. It's no different from doing a crossword on the weekend. If you can find the joy in it, it will be easier to practice and to stay positive on test day.

Feature Request · Trap Answers

LSHopeful

Friday, Jan 16

I don't work for 7sage, but every wrong answer is technically a "trap". Some are just more convincing than others. Question difficulty / distribution can already give you a sense of how convincing other answers were. If you are only falling for the very hard traps, congratulations you're doing great!

I'd say that the last step is understanding what exactly is being said in the answer and what exactly is being asked in the question. There is always a better answer. I found BR helpful for practicing this, as well as doing untimed tests with a focus on understanding the stimulus and question before looking at the answers.

An argument is a bridge from premises to conclusion. The more intermediate conclusions you have, the more connection points in the bridge. LR mostly comes down to understanding the strength of those connections, and what (if anything) can be done to help/hurt them.

LSAT · How to break out of low 170s??

LSHopeful

Friday, Jan 9

It's hard to say as everyone has their own strengths and weaknesses but I can share what worked for me. One thing that helped me in LR was to start doing the section in chunks, and not necessarily doing the chunks in order. For example doing questions 5-10 quickly, and then reviewing 5-10, flagging any that felt tricky and then going to the next chunk, rather than doing the whole test and then going back to review. Taking a deep breath between chunks can help to reset and keep your heart rate low.

The fast track lessons are also helpful to reinforce what each question type is looking for. Sometimes going too fast, I would treat one question type like another. For example, picking an answer that would be good for a strengthening question when I was doing a necessary assumption question.

More broadly, I think the challenge for me was to know when to get out of pattern recognition mode. It took a lot of intentional practice for me to know which ones were 100% correct and which ones felt a little off and needed to be thought through more. Doing untimed tests, and treating every question like it's difficult can be good practice for developing that skill set.

Reviewing questions that I got correct, but I was slow on, helped earn me some time back on the exam. I tended to focus at the start on incorrect answers. Sometimes you get things incorrect because you are rushing to make up for time you lost on a different question that you got correct.

It may be the case that none of that was relevant to you, good luck regardless!

LSAT · Where can I find a lesson on these type of conditionals?

LSHopeful

Edited Wednesday, Jan 7

It's in the "Foundations" section of the core curriculum, in the lesson "Logic of Intersecting Sets". An example of this valid form would be "Some pets are mammals. All mammals are animals. Therefore, some pets are animals."

Be careful with this one because the "some" relationship has to come "before" in the conditional chain to be valid. A not valid argument form would be: (A -> B <-s-> C, therefore A <-s-> C). An example of this dubious argument would be "All dinosaurs are reptiles. Some reptiles are pets. Therefore, some dinosaurs are pets."

The intuition is that unless specified, dinosaurs are just one of many sufficient conditions that could "arrive at" reptiles and so you don't know if the "some" reptiles that are pets, are the same "some" reptiles that are dinosaurs. If you replaced "dinosaurs" with "iguanas", the premises and conclusion might all be true, but the key is that the structure of the argument does not have to be true. Valid argument forms are all forms that guarantee that a true conclusion follows from the premises.

LSAT · Just started and getting my butt kicked

LSHopeful

Friday, Dec 19, 2025

If you were really dumb, you would probably not be dissuaded by your result. With effective practice, it does get easier. RC especially can be strange because it's a different way of reading. For example, for me personally, I thought I did a fair bit of reading. I realized that most of my reading was really "skimming" to find the answer to something. I had to learn how to read slowly and for "structure" vs. for information. It took a lot of practice, but I have gone from -6 RC to consistently -0. It can be done!

LSAT · Tips on Timing?

LSHopeful

Friday, Dec 19, 2025

There seems to be a few notions of "timing" embedded in your answer. There are certainly time allocation strategies you can experiment with. What works for me, for LR specifically, is to do questions 4-17, then 1-3, and then 18 onwards. I do this because often they will start the exam with a wordy, hard to parse question to discourage you. Usually, 4-17 is pretty straightforward and so you build up a time buffer and feel like you're ahead. Chances are you may at first get a couple wrong 18-25/26 and so they're the least valuable per minute to allocate. For RC I like to spend a lot of time really understanding the passage, buzz through the questions, and then go back to check for support at the end. It's all personal preference, but it takes experimenting to find an approach that works consistently for you.

How efficiently you use your time per question, unfortunately, does boil down to practice. You seem intelligent, and you may be smart enough to brute force the answers with plenty of time, but it takes practice to hone your approach for each question type. Consider testing a plumber of 40 years against a homeowner by giving each a broken sink. Sure, if you're an adept homeowner you could probably figure it out. Chances are the plumber is going to do it better and faster. Does the homeowner need to work on their time management skills, or their plumbing skills?

Feature Request

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Edited Thursday, Dec 18, 2025

LSHopeful

Review a batch of questions based on filter criteria

(It's possible this is doable, and I just cannot figure out how to do it).

After finishing a prep test, it seems you can either review the whole test or filter and look at specific questions. When you click into that question, and then go back, you lose the filter criteria. It would be nice if these two were combined and you could review a batch based on filter criteria.

My specific use case is: looking at questions where I consumed much more than the target amount of time. Most of this platform seems to be geared towards correct vs. incorrect. In my opinion, this is only part of the puzzle. Questions you get correct, but that take up a disproportionate amount of your exam time, are also worthy of review.

LSAT · Help with Improving Accuracy in Timed Sessions

LSHopeful

Edited Wednesday, Nov 19, 2025

Sounds like you could be allocating too much time to some questions and not enough to others. Try to look for a pattern in your sections of where you are spending too much vs. not enough time, and where you are more or less accurate. For me personally, in LR, I have found that the first two and last five questions tend to be the hardest. I do questions 3-14 first aiming to go as quickly possible, I slow down for 15-19, then go back to 1 and 2 and then really take my time on 20-25/26. Experiment around to find something that works best for you!

LSAT · Help me understand why this answer is correct...

LSHopeful

Edited Thursday, Oct 23, 2025

@pamelajkok Maybe what would help is by thinking of the trap the LSAT writers are trying to set here. They might be trying to get us to fall for a sufficiency/necessity confusion by telling us that they aren't physically dangerous. Being physically dangerous is sufficient for being threatening but not necessary, and so not being dangerous is irrelevant to us arriving at threatening via the other conditional chain. For example, take the argument "all dogs are mammals and all cats are mammals". If I told you that Garfield is a cat, you would know Garfield is a mammal. If I told you Garfield was a cat and not a dog, you'd still know Garfield is a mammal.