Mike is from the Bay Area and has only recently learned to shut up about that. He studied philosophy at Yale, then went to Yale again for law school. There he discovered a deep, residing passion for not being a lawyer.
After law school, he went home and founded a tutoring company where every hour purchased was matched one-for-one with an hour given pro bono to low income students in Oakland. He did that for 10 amazing years, and he always insisted his LSAT students use 7sage – the company with the best curriculum and the best ethics (it’s not even close).
Now he’s living the dream – making content with J.Y. and Kevin, and helping to refine the curriculum he has admired from afar for over a decade.
He’s a father, a trad climber, a hockey player, and an avidly goofy goose.
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Here's a general video I made on the subject -- happy to answer any follow-up questions you might have.
@zhoujiangxie105 Heads up everyone, while matching positive/negative is a good rule of thumb, there are lots of questions that break that "rule". So many that we explicitly say +/- doesn't matter in our theory lesson.
@8Swans
Having spent 5mins looking at it (so perhaps I'm missing some nuance), I really don't think (C) and (D) are at all close. Mostly for the reasons you cited.
There are lots of ways to weaken this argument, but you're right that self-reporting is a big one and it's the one (D) attacks. The people in (D) were basically watching a video of themselves, and if anything they were watching a worse video of themselves that should exhibit the "false reporting" problem less well. And yet it was still there. So perhaps when people watch videos of basically-themselves doing stuff, they later overreport doing that stuff.
(C) straightforwardly weakens zero because of the conclusion's weak wording and correlative evidence. Mainly the weak wording. If I say "some dogs are cute" and you say "the ugliest dogs are not cute", I can just say "yeah bro those obviously aren't the ones I was talking about".
To the contrary, when you notice the stimulus moving from descriptive premises to a prescriptive conclusion, you're almost certainly looking for an assumption in the form "when stuff is this way, you ought to do this".
The associated tag for this concept is value judgment.
On the flipside (and it's risky to make "all" claims about the LSAT, but just shooting from the hip...) if the entire stimulus is purely descriptive, I'd guess that a prescriptive assumption will always be wrong.
I know this will sound crazy but I have such FOMO about y'all getting to see these new LSAT questions when I can't.
Here's a general video I made on the subject. Happy to answer any follow-up questions you have.
@ripleyschultz My written and video explanations address those points directly. Have you tried those yet?
@MichaelWright Oh my god look at this one! Quantifier mismatches galore.
@MichaelWright Okay not a clean example of a logical strength mismatch, but the correct answer to this one is missing a whole-ass premise.
I'll loop back around when I encounter a clean example with logical strength.
@astone3 Nice I love this. And perhaps you'll love this: the PT155 explanation was overstated and needs a correction. I'll do that now.
I was waffling about the standard at the time -- when I first started here I wrote a long string of P and PF explanations and saw over and over again the power of logical strength as a decider. But as this question shows, it's not absolute.
I'm gonna spend a bit of time looking for more examples. I'd encourage you to do the same.
@astone3 In parallel flaw questions, matching the flaw is more important than matching all the logic. There are indeed lots of examples like this, where the flaw matches but the exact logical structure does not.
Encountering seemingly-inconsistent standards as you study can be ridiculously frustrating. Still, rapidly dismissing questions as rule-breaking does yourself a disservice -- it prevents you from diving deeper to suss out the real intricacies underlying the test's patterns.
Come to think of it, you should use this rage. Go out and try to find other examples of this phenomenon. I'd recommend filtering for PF questions tagged with Conditional reasoning, then skimming through some that also have another tag (like Causal reasoning here).
Here's a general video I made on this topic. Lemme know if you have follow-up questions specific to your case!
@rebecca.weil yeah the key is in the conditional. they aren't claiming the others are better, or even that they might be. They're saying imagine if they were, and then saying that hypothetical world is impossible.
@savvyking You should still believe the things they say in the stimulus -- it's just really important to recognize exactly what they're saying.
If they're telling you "Bob believes the city council is corrupt," you should believe that statement. That is, you should trust that Bob really does believe that.
But you don't need to trust Bob. Bob could be mistaken.
This reference sheet shows data for avg questions per section (at the top left of each card).
Flaws are indeed the most common, at 3.85 per section.
I'd add MSS to your list -- it's #2 at 2.45.
@MRod Just taking away "even slightly" would still leave it too weak. But replace it with "eliminated" and yeah it'd be right.
Negate that and (B) would say "you could completely eliminate insecticides and it wouldn't change the outcome for wildlife populations"
They're two sides of the same coin. Think of one as heads and the other as tails. To take something for granted is to assume it is true. To overlook a possibility is to assume it is false.
There are two ways to get from SF to Oakland: the ferry and the bridge.
If you say "we must take the bridge"...
You've overlooked the possibility that the ferry is open.
You've taken for granted that the ferry is closed.
@niaxain So glad to hear it was useful to you AND THAT YOU SLEPT :D.
I'm gonna host another one first week of Sept too so keep an eye on the class schedule.