Lofty ambitions, but I need to write this somewhere I don't forget:

Started July 22nd. Aiming for a 170 in the November LSAT. Finished the curriculum today, August 23rd. I will start doing weekly PTs on Wednesday.

No matter what happens, I will not give up!!

SHALLOW DIP IS AMAZING! 5/5 AND BELOW TIME FOR 4/5.

My advice though? If shallow dip ain't clicking for the question, you got two options.

A: If the stimulus was easy to visualize or to understand, attempt the question with vibes and strike out poor answers.

B: If you don't get it, do something else and come back.

@gastoncaleb14165 Love this comment, very important to not underestimate the power of a break. If you want a fun video game example, there's a YT video about someone getting a record in Mario Kart. Long story short, he improved his record after taking long breaks from playing the game.

However! IF you're deadline is approaching or you just really don't want to take a day off of studying, take a break with some kind of physical activity!

Try to pick an activity that's fun and you're able to do in your space. Since I study at home after an 8-5 office job, I need a minor break. So, I literally dance for 20-30 minutes inside my home before starting to study. Does wonders!!

@jessverpez I have a more in depth comment on my profile, but... Imagine a peasant and a ruler. Let's just say the peasant said.

Peasant: The only clothes I own are green.

So if you find green clothes in the wild, they may belong to the peasant. Now let's pretend the peasant didn't say that. Instead, the ruler said.

Ruler: Only clothes I own are green.

If you find green clothes in the wild, you know they are the ruler's.

I used different roles for assisting in the demonstration, but if you flipped the roles for who says the lines, then what we conclude from what they say will still make sense.

Got it right on blind review! This question type has shown me I do not read hard enough on modifiers anymore... Gotta up my reading game and these get easier!

@marlencmillan563

I'm seeing some comments that are a little frustrated. Here are tips that I've just realized I'm doing through these exercises:

• Identify the conclusion. This is important because this will likely assist you as the destination in your bridge (not always)

• Identify what the argument has already fully built up, in this question, I saw that it formally argued that love (the feeling) is nonsensical to promise.

• See what type of gap is it. In this case, we're not connecting the conclusion of the premise chain to the argument conclusion. I.e, 'promise to love (the feeling) is a nonsensical promise' is not connecting to 'should not take love (the feeling) to be what the vow is referring to'

And from there it's just inducing the solution.

Time trap to note: Reading the application, I had it in my head to look for a stem with Delacruz working for the company... It was not there, and so I had to reread the questions multiple times to register that my assumption about what the gap was incorrect.

Just from this question experience, I think it'll be bad on the LSAT to hunt with this question type because if you're wrong, it could be costly on time.

I resonate with the "unity of LR" as I feel better equipped to handle all prior question types we've encountered through doing new question stems.

@CeciliaBurton1 The good news is we can drill until we almost never get it wrong 😭

@DonovanReynolds Good instincts. I think while you're not doing PTs, there's no harm in viewing all of the answers so you can parse what's going on.

I only say this because we're in a learning environment; if you got it wrong when hitting the first answer that looks right to you, the only thing you'll learn is to be more thorough... Where as if you read them all, you may stumble upon two answers that are persuasive and you get to exercise that part of your brain which compares answers in the LSAT. You could exercise that part of your brain with your method, but it may be less effective when you know you've already gotten one answer incorrect.

@sammariscal07533 mm, I could go for a po' boy rn

@Rose955 Me too! This is a great attitude and direction to take your studying. I'm gonna do the same, reading more carefully so that I can be faster later.

@littleflo Me too, but I've not been struggling with other stuff. This makes me feel good at knowing whether I am actually good or bad at stuff!

If you only get stuff right, you'll get sucker punched in the LSAT by a weird question. But when you're bad in the exercise, you know you gotta train!

@oanhli34 A small criticism of your C explanation as my own exercise in breaking down logic.

I think you're including a bias in your answer that comes with assumptions. I realized I thought C was attractive because I subconsciously concluded that a news program covering something controversial wants to play into the emotions of the controversy. And thus, C was attractive to me because it plays into a bias that is not stated in the stimulus. It is not good on any grounds to me in that sense.

What the stimulus and conclusion are getting at is /bias/. C has nothing to do with bias because what would people being emotional have to conclude with being biased? Yeah the side that is worried about being affected by the freeway would probably be emotional, but that isn't inherently biased is it?

@GDatria715 It's not necessary. But more importantly, your accuracy gets better the more you try. So your baseline is around 3-4/5, it just means you have less practice to get your accuracy up to 5/5!

Regardless of where we all are though, when we just keep practicing, we will all hit 5/5!!!

@BrydenSolonar Yeah that was me xD

@GnatTaylor I actually think this is a really good learning opportunity in determining how you interact with your biases. I can't assume what's happening in your brain, but I'd be asking:

1) Does my personal bias distract me?

2) Are there reasons why my brain floated to here? (you already identified being a nature lover to explain it, but what does being a nature lover really mean?)

Etc. I appreciate you sharing this because I'm thinking of what biases affect me.

@VanessaPonce

@laurpie

@DavidDunbar I understand that, but remember you're gonna be reading far more than this brief essay in law school and beyond.

@anamat To piggy back, I forget which lesson said this, but...

A sentence can sound like a conclusion BUT if the rest of a passage or set of premises do not support it, then it cannot be the conclusion. Remember: Arguments are premises and conclusion. The premises give support. The conclusion receives support.

@TeklaCo I concur. I think of myself as someone whose better than average at discerning problems with studies. Yet, some of what we're covering would not have occurred to me as flaws to watch out for when reading studies on the LSAT.

Additionally, people are complaining about reading and... What do you think you'll be doing in law school when you're not in a lecture???

@GDatria715 you’re missing the core meaning in all of this.

If we have the statement: all dogs are friendly. The negated statement (proving the statement false) is just saying this: some (from 1-100%) dogs are not friendly.

It could be all dogs aren’t friendly or only 1 dog in the universe is not friendly. We can’t infer from the original statement. The some in the negated sentence spans the entire potential cases for which you could negate the original statement.

Actually I think I have a good way to explain question 3's common mistake. I prefer to focus less on memorizing word rules and instead understanding the meaning underlying the words.

Imagine you're looking at my wardrobe. Something about it is strange so you ask, "Do you only have green clothing?" Two replies I could say are:

The only clothes I own are green.

OR

Only clothes that I own are green.

The first reply infers a relationship where if I own articles of clothing, they're gonna be green.

On the other hand, the second reply infers a relationship where if articles of clothing are green, I own them.

With this example, now you can internalize the rationale as to why 'the only' is sufficient (at the beginning of a clause), where as solely 'only' is necessary (at the beginning of a clause).