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anthonymahmud595
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anthonymahmud595
Tuesday, Oct 31 2017

I think the usual advice of starting with major life events for essay topics can actually be counterintuitive. Remember, the event itself is arbitrary: what you learned from it and how it reflects who you are is what matters. The circumstances are merely a vehicle used to reflect those characteristics in a narrative fashion.

Try this: look at some random object in your room. Maybe it's a computer, maybe it's a bag of chips, maybe it's an eraser shaving sitting next to your keyboard. The more mundane the better. Now, consider your relationship with that object. Where did it come from? How did it end up in your possession? What actions or feelings or personality traits indirectly led you to have that object at this time in that position.

Eraser shavings could be from a pencil that you "borrowed" from a classmate, used to write notes for a history class whose professor drives you nuts.

Is the bag of chips scrunched up, or is it folded neatly with a clip holding it together? Did you eat straight out of the bag, or did you portion out a serving size and eat out of a snack bowl?

Everything we do and touch reflects who we are in some indirect manner. If a speck of dust can indirectly reveal something about you, the potential implications and insights from any life event are 100-fold.

tl;dr DONT think of an interesting story and then figure out how to turn it into a reflective essay. INSTEAD, come up with something (anything) you want to convey to the admissions team, and weld together stories/examples (no matter how boring) that fit the message you're trying to communicate. Boring examples can make for an interesting essay if they're used to drive an underlying idea.

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anthonymahmud595
Saturday, Sep 30 2017

Time to whip out the DJI Phantom. Good luck, competition ;)

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anthonymahmud595
Monday, Oct 30 2017

Feel free to DM me! I'd love to swap :)

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Tuesday, Aug 29 2017

anthonymahmud595

Compendium of "uncommon" vocabulary on the LSAT

Although the LSAT is not supposed to test your vocabulary, in certain cases, deriving correct answers requires knowing the definitions of words that are not familiar to a notable portion of test takers. I thought it might be useful to make a list of these "somewhat-lesser-known" terms, especially those that have appeared on multiple tests. My rule of thumb is that if it's not core LSAT vocabulary, and might not be known by a freshman in high school, it's worth making note of.

I'll perpetually add my own entries, but I hope you guys will post yours too so we can have a more comprehensive resource! I didn't see any other threads like this, but please link me if one indeed exists.

Would it be worthwhile to have the Oxford definitions under the definition, or would the convenience not compensate for the extra clutter?

'Idiosyncratic' ~ PT 69 S3

'Impasse' ~ PT 69 S3

'Laudable' ~ PT 69 S3

'Posterity' ~

'Reconcile' ~

'Relinquished' ~ PT 69 S3

"Semblance' ~ PT 69 S3

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Thursday, Aug 24 2017

anthonymahmud595

PT23.S4.Q14 - the debate over the environmental crisis

Hi guys! I wanted to get some feedback on this RC question.

The prompt asks for the main idea and the right answer is that 'the views of ecologists and economic growth advocates have only recently become polarized.'

To me, that phrase implies that the passage is about recency. It implies that the passage is primarily dedicated towards explaining a long history of no polarization that has but little time ago turned into a polarized dichotomy.

I agree that the passage accomplishes this, but to me, this accomplishment was used as a template for the author rather than his/her explicit, or even primary purpose.

I detected notes of author view, such as in line 11 when he describes the recent polarization as "sad." On top of that, the way the author describes both sides seems to indicate that he favors the previous attitudes towards the issue, consistent with what Marsh and the Enlightenment thinkers believe. I almost got a sense of sarcasm in how he described the implications of Clements' equilibrium model. The author claims that the model became a "mystique," environmental interference was "taboo," wilderness was "adored." These descriptions made me believe that the author saw followers of this mentality to be radical, cult-like, trendy, and perhaps a form of the "tree-hugger" stereotype.

Back to the first paragraph, the final sentence talks about how the "sad effects" make it "difficult for industry to respond to impact analyses that demand action." This came across as having sympathy for contemporary industries, being pinned down in this polarized climate where (as we would later read) before they could act in harmony with environmentalists and have productive conversations based in compromise and understanding.

With all of that in mind, I was very quick to eliminate D, an answer choice with no reflection of the author's argument/bias, and way too much (in fact, pretty much 100%) emphasis on the mere fact that such a change is recent. Who cares if it's recent? You didn't need to give your opinion and write four paragraphs only to tell us that this polarization is recent. You could easily switch the dates mentioned in the passage, and the meaning would barely change. It would just be polarized ----> not polarized instead of not polarized ----> polarized.

I picked E because I thought it captured the author's sentiment and reflected an idea that the entire passage built to establish. A lot of the passage's content contributes to that idea, while only a few small distinctions affirm that the change happened to be recent.

https://classic.7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-23-section-4-passage-3-passage/

https://classic.7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-23-section-4-passage-3-questions/

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Saturday, Jun 24 2017

anthonymahmud595

PT73.S2.Q20

Hi guys! I wanted to get some clarification on the logic that makes this answer E rather than D.

The stem is that the argument relies on the assumption, but my current understanding is that neither answer accomplishes this, though E has more issues than D.

The correct answer, E, is saying that the argument /relies/ on the assumption that many of the farmers wouldn't grow green manure unless they abandon chemicals. I believe the argument is still in tact if this is false.

Even if this was untrue, meaning that few or none of the farmers will only grow green manure if they abandon chemicals, the argument could hold for a variety of other reasons. E's reasoning could justify the argument if true, but it also has the potential to not justify the conclusion if true. Just because the farmers won't grow manure without ditching chemicals, doesn't mean they will grow manure if they were to stop using chemicals. I think the test makers designated E as the correct answer with the thought process that "in order to significantly improve the soil structure," the soil must be "rejuvenated," and they /must/ be "rejuvenated" by growing manure, which relies on and will happen if chemical fertilizers are abandoned.

None of the steps in that logic sequence are supported by premises in the passage. "Significantly improving the soil structure" does not to rely on "rejuvenation." "Rejuvenation" does not rely on the growing of green manure. Abandoning chemical fertilizers doesn't guarantee that the green manure will be grown, not to mention that the diction of E states that the principle applies to "many" farmers while the passage refers to simply "farmers" which implies all farmers, or possibly a mere plurality of farmers (neither of which necessarily matches reliance on the actions of "many" farmers.)

D has inconsistencies as well, though fewer than E does, in my opinion.

In order to conclude that chemicals must be removed to increase soil quality, we must be certain that "farmers" not removing chemicals absolutely inhibits "significant improvement in soil structure." D purports that chemical fertilizers "will have destructive effect on soil structure of farm fields." It does not say that there's a chance it will or that it will contribute to destructive effects, but that it will cause destructive effects. If the /end/ effect of something is destructive, it has not shown significant improvement.

That said, if we are supposed to assume (an unfair assumption in my opinion) that the destructive effects are merely a contribution to the net structure of the soil, then the assumption that chemical fertilizers are disruptive is not necessary to conclude that farmers should ditch chemicals to significantly improve soil structure.

Now, I know the culmination of my thought processes lends to the idea that I may be merely overthinking/overanalyzing the text; I don't disagree. I follow the logic that leads one to select E, even though I think it's flawed logic.

I guess the real implication of my question is to find out where and how the line is drawn between relevant logical inconsistencies and their irrelevant counterparts. Unless the LSAC lays out exactly which factors can be considered for assessing logic, there will be an inherent gray area of subjectivity. I won't claim that this question falls in that gray area, but it must exist somewhere.

Any thoughts and opinions are welcome! Thanks for reading :)

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anthonymahmud595
Sunday, Dec 24 2017

Congratulations, that's an amazing score! Best of luck with applications, potential future classmate! :)

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Friday, Jun 23 2017

anthonymahmud595

Plan of Action for Studying

Hi guys! I wanted to field opinions on my course of action for preparing for the September LSAT.

I've been studying for a little bit under a month, and as of today have finished all 80 LG sections without time constraints. Now, I'm unsure whether I should immediately redo all 80 LG sections with full testing conditions, or if I should move on to something else and come back later.

I worry that I'll lose a lot of the skills I've accumulated if I put it off, but I also don't want to burn myself out on logic games early and potentially weaken my abilities closer to test time. If I were to put off LG, I'd probably move onto LR, but it's already my strongest section and I don't know how I should approach it. I've finished 6 sections of LR without studying as part of diagnostics, and I'm consistently getting -2/-3 per section with around 10 minutes to spare. Approaching LR from the basics is probably what I need to improve, but I have a feeling it's going to be a plateau for a very long time, and this raises concern regarding motivation.

RC is definitely where I need to improve the most, as I've gotten in the -5/-6 range in my diagnostic.

What do you guys think I should do next? I know this is a very specific situation, but I would be tremendously grateful for generic/anecdotal and specific tips alike :)

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anthonymahmud595
Thursday, Sep 21 2017

Are there any equivalents to surrogacy for males? Not like procedures for guys to do it, but other highly involved practices that yield a lot of money? Certain kinds of donations come to mind, but having some alternatives would be nice...

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anthonymahmud595
Friday, Oct 20 2017

Message me!

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Thursday, Jul 20 2017

anthonymahmud595

PT36.S3.Q26 - before 1986 physicists

My question here stems from the situation presented in PT36.S3.Q26 (https://classic.7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-36-section-3-question-26/)

It seems that the explanation for the right answer is that by falsifying a factor that would harm an argument if otherwise true, you are therefor strengthening it. This seems odd to me, as establishing a lack of past dissent doesn't equal some degree of current support in my opinion. It's neutral if anything.

But anyway, if we accept the aforementioned logic as fact for LSAT purposes, here are my

Does this mean that scratching off a potential weakening factor always counts, and will always be the answer for a "Most Strengthen" question?

And if so, does it happen in the reverse? Does scratching off a potential strengthener always qualify as the answer which most weakens?

Would we ever have to choose between an answer that merely hurts a weakening factor (which I see as being closer to neutral) vs. deliberately supports a strengthening factor?

Thanks ^_^

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anthonymahmud595
Wednesday, Sep 20 2017

My money is on -11. Easy logic games makes -10 seem possible, but I think it's easy to overestimate the contribution of LG difficulty to the curve. Being on this forum, anyone posting here or reading this comment has prepared for Logic Games in some capacity. The performance difference between "easy" and "difficult" games is more pronounced among our subgroup than it is in the general LSAT-taking population. People who go into the LSAT blind aren't going to do significantly better on an "easy" test than they are on a "hard" test because they'll likely A) Not finish a game or two and B) Guess on questions that require upfront deductions.

RC was a bit tougher than usual of the past 20 tests, and LR was about the same, maybe a tad trickier. 11 makes the most sense to me given that train of thought.

out of curiosity, though, do we know why some of the mid 60's/early 70's got such high curves? I found them to be a lot easier than say, 81.

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anthonymahmud595
Wednesday, Sep 20 2017

I think strength/study allocation was most important to me. Getting consistent -0's and -1/2's on LG and LR respectively is the first step. It's a straightforward goal and you can tell pretty easily when you're there. After that, you can just keep drilling RC until you get at least in the -6 to -3 range. Any decent RC score in that range will get you the 173+ if you're only missing 3 questions on the rest of the test.

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Wednesday, Oct 18 2017

anthonymahmud595

Discounted/Affordable Consulting

Hello!

I wanted to ask if anyone knew of any reputable application consulting companies that offer need-based discounts. Spivey's $300 per hour is well out of my affordability, and I've seen that many LSAT tutors/companies offer discounts for individuals who qualify for the LSAC fee waiver.

The $600 unlimited edit option from 7sage looked attractive, but it appears to be sold out and I'm looking to have everything submitted within the next three to four weeks.

Thanks for the input :)

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anthonymahmud595
Sunday, Sep 17 2017

Yeah I live on high street across from OSU @ :)

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anthonymahmud595
Saturday, Sep 16 2017

Sounds great to me!

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anthonymahmud595
Saturday, Sep 16 2017

Would it be allowed for us to post a fictional LG that we may believe mirrors the scenario of the real thing? It wouldn't be listing any questions, but we would be able to show and discuss our deductions for the different but logically similar problem?

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anthonymahmud595
Saturday, Sep 16 2017

I had an extra LR with a LR-LG-LR-LR-RC order. This was almost ideal for me in contents and order, only having an extra LG would have been better.

I felt like the LR sections were pretty fair, and characteristic of everything we have come to expect.

When I got to the LG, I was so certain that it was the experimental. It seemed way too easy and some of the questions seemed to test really easy deductions, so a small part of me is nervous that I overlooked a nuance. Did you guys pick up any complex relationships between entities? Everything was super straightforward to me.

I'm most concerned about RC for sure. I actually found three of the passages to be among the easier I've come across, but as others have mentioned, the judge passage was horrendous. I think I lost more points on that passage alone than I did in total on the rest of the test. -2/-6/-12/-18 is my guess for the curve, but it could easily be harder if LG is actually as easy as I found it.

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anthonymahmud595
Thursday, Nov 16 2017

I think people talking about context and connotation are hitting the nail on the head.

I would personally stay aware from 'conscious' because it has a deeper emotional connotation. Being conscious of something can be associated with insecurity or feeling anxious about something. I think cognizant is more neutral in conveying awareness.

That said, you could also just say of "Aware of X," or "With X in Mind."

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Tuesday, Aug 15 2017

anthonymahmud595

GPA vs Application Date

Hello, everyone!

I wanted to hear opinions and gather data on weighing the costs and benefits of applying to law school after fall semester (early December at my university) with a higher GPA compared to applying much earlier in the application cycle (Late September/Early October) with one's existing GPA.

For context, I'm currently in the 75th percentile for LSAT, and between the 25th and 75th percentiles for GPA at most of the schools to which I'm applying. If all goes well, my GPA will rise by .03 after Autumn semester grades are applied to cumulatives. Obviously .03 wouldn't matter much if I was already well above or well below the inner GPA quartiles, but being inside of it, how does the potential GPA boost stack up against the drawbacks from a later application?

I've seen those statistics that try to equate additional units of GPA with additional chance of admission, but my hunch is that those are more correlative and based on averages whereas incremental GPA increases aren't nearly as distinguishing as other soft factors.

Does it vary by program? Would T6 schools treat it differently than T14 or T50 or T100?

I'd love to hear input for all contexts of the question :) Thanks!

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anthonymahmud595
Thursday, Oct 12 2017

Applying to all three, definitely message me to swap! @ @

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anthonymahmud595
Thursday, Oct 12 2017

-1 LG, -0 LR, -0 LR, -4 RC

I would be salty about the LG, but I'm too excited overall to care! Thank you to everyone in this community for all of your help! More than anything, I think the accountability and friendless provided on 7Sage is unparalleled. Best of luck to everyone else :)

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Monday, Sep 11 2017

anthonymahmud595

Taking Off Prescribed Glasses

Hi guys! I tried searching for this in the archives, but couldn't find anything that specifically addresses my question.

I wear glasses regularly and typically have them on from the time I wake up to the time I go to bed. The only exception is that when I'm working on a laptop or on paper, I occasionally take off my glasses for comfort. Otherwise, I get a headache from prolonged focus on things close to my eyes.

Glasses aren't listed as items allowed to be set on the table during the administration of the test. Will I be permitted to take off my glasses and set them on the table if they begin to bother me during the test? Other people have inquired about bringing extra reading glasses, but my case is the opposite. These are my prescribed glasses that I normally wear, and actually only affect my far vision.

I know the worst case solution would be to put them in my plastic bag right before the exam, but I feel much more comfortable wearing them during the test with the ability to remove them if needed.

Thanks for the feedback :)

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anthonymahmud595
Wednesday, Oct 11 2017

This is for real, wow. Best of luck everyone.

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anthonymahmud595
Monday, Dec 11 2017

I think the comments regarding accommodations may be overlooking a lot of salient circumstances. Without the raw data on which to run statistical analysis, we have little reason to believe that score differences between the accommodated testing population, or any other testing population for that matter, is due to unfair advantage.

The influence of self-selected groups cannot be understated. An obvious example is Mylsn.info: the averages in their database are well above the national figures because the majority of people who use the tool and report their scores will be highly motivated, generally successful individuals.

When looking at students given accommodations, we have to consider that individuals who end up taking the LSAT with accommodations are an exclusive subset of people who could potentially take the LSAT with accommodations. The process for requesting accommodations is said to be long and effort-intensive. Such a barrier likely weeds out a large portion of the subset that isn't strongly intent on taking the LSAT/going to law school. One also has to consider that accommodation-warranting students are less likely than the general population to pursue graduate school in the first place; students who are good candidates for grad school in spite of their disabilities are going to be skewed slightly towards the higher end of aptitude.

I think a decent (albeit potentially controversial) comparison is that of first and second generation immigrant students. In particular, Asian-American students are stereotyped as being 'smart,' and many pools of data are congruent with that sentiment. Does that mean that Asians just have superior intellectual DNA? Of course not.

Because of barriers such as immigration laws and financial requirements, people who immigrate to the US often do not represent the population distribution of their homelands. They skew towards being wealthier and more educated since otherwise they may not have had the opportunity to emigrate. Consequently, only a select subgroup of individuals are reflected in data about the ethnicity as a whole.

Likewise, students who test with accommodations are a curated group of the greater accommodation-warranting population. Is it still possible that accommodated testers are scoring disproportionately higher than the skew of their self-selected populace would merit? Sure. But to jump to that conclusion without supporting data is unfounded and dangerous.

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Sunday, Jun 11 2017

anthonymahmud595

Tips for mitigating chronic mindless errors?

Hi everyone!

I'm currently a rising senior in college, and I intend to take the LSAT in September and begin law school in the fall of 2018.

I started my LSAT prep in late May, working almost exclusively with Logic Games for that duration. My timed scores have been consistently high for the past two weeks, but I almost inevitably miss a single question on each game. The missed question is almost always one of the easiest in the game, and my incorrect answer is always outside of the commonly selected wrong answers (according to the 7sage metrics.)

The situation is derived from a consistent pattern of mindless/silly mistakes, and I've struggled with this kind of thing since elementary school. Even using blind review, even after reading every word in a passage twice and out loud, I end up writing down a rule wrong, or bubbling in a letter different than the correct answer I just identified.

I know that the canned answer to this is to drill, and trust that over time I'll sharpen up and the necessary skills will develop. That said, I wanted to reach out and field any advice from others who may share a similar personal weakness. Even if focus/detail is your forte, I'd love to hear your stratagem and facilitate a discourse on how to remain keen, especially when practicing with time restriction.

Thanks!

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Thursday, Aug 10 2017

anthonymahmud595

PT20.S1.Q16 - brown dwarfs

(P.S., I know this is a long and dense post, but there's an opportunity at the bottom for anyone reading this to get paid, so hopefully that's an incentive to read this :P)

Hi guys! I wanted to get some feedback from you smart people on the LR question about brown dwarf stars.

We're asked for an assumption on which the argument depends, so this is a NA and the right answer should strongly undermine if not completely discredit the argument when negated.

The claim is that any star found with no lithium is not a coolest brown dwarf (CBD.)

The support is that all stars except for CBD are hot enough to "destroy lithium completely."

The right answer, A, is that "None of the CBDs have ever been hot enough to destroy lithium."

Formal logic wise, I get CBD ---> Not(Hot enough to destroy lithium)

Negating it, you get that not none (so, some) CBDs have ever been hot enough to destroy lithium.

I don't understand how this even undermines the conclusion, let alone discredits it as we would hope for in a NA. In fact, this sounds perfectly congruent with the argument. The support says that CBDs cannot destroy lithium /completely/, completely being a deliberate word choice that does not appear in the answer. If "completely" had no bearing on the meaning of the text, it wouldn't be included.

Therefore, our negated answer, suggesting that some CBDs have ever been able to destroy lithium in some capacity, does nothing to undermine the claim that a star found without lithium cannot be a CBD.

Maybe in being able to destroy lithium in some capacity, said stars are still not hot enough to destroy lithium content in full. Even if you need to make a small assumption jump for this question, I think the most reasonable assumption is that CBDs being able to destroy lithium by some means does not really even scathe the claim that it can't finish the job. This would be a stretch for a weaken question in my opinion, let alone a necessary assumption.

My other question on the matter regards the rules for dangling modifiers in LSAT texts. In this question, a sentence reads "All stars but the CBDs are hot enough to destroy lithium completely by converting it into helium.

I'm a bit confused about how a dangling modifier would apply here in the absence of context. Does the clause following "destroy lithium" imply that the dwarfs cannot destroy lithium in full, (the process by which happens to be by converting to helium,) or that they cannot accomplish the task exclusively by converting the lithium to helium (implying that in order to complete the task in full, CBDs must destroy it in some other way than converting to helium.)

As a native English speaker, I probably wouldn't even have second thoughts and assume it was the former option, if reading or hearing that sentence. However, as an LSAT student who is actively analyzing precision of language, I find myself confused. I feel like I've seen other situations on the LSAT where failure to consider the precision of language, instead using traditional colloquial interpretations, in fact leads you to the wrong answer. Why is it different in this case? (Assuming there isn't some grammar rule I'm not aware of, which I'd love to discover!)

I realize that there is a degree of "picking the best answer" with LSAT questions, and NAs in particular. With that in mind, I still felt that B was a better, albeit still lacking answer.

Negating B leaves us with the statement that it's not the case that most stars too cool to burn hydrogen (TCBH), (which concretely includes CBDs,) are too cool to destroy lithium completely. This still leaves open a wide range of possibilities for some (but less than 51%) TCHB stars to indeed be able to destroy lithium completely. If we know that this class of star may very well have members capable of destroying lithium completely, and that CBDs are a member of that class, we at least have a hint that maybe some CBDs can destroy lithium completely, undermining his support and damaging the argument consequently.

Do I like answer choice B? Definitely not. However, it matches the specific, important diction of the prompt ("destroys completely") whereas A does not, and it gives concrete reason, when negated, to suggest something that directly contradicts and soils the argument. A, when negated, simply refrains from counting out a possibility that would damage the argument, rather than in any way suggesting that the argument is in fact damaged. Knowing that some CBDs have ever been hot enough to destroy lithium at all leaves the possibility that they can destroy it all the way, which we would want to be the case for this answer to be right since that breaks the argument. But, it just as neutrally, it allows for the possibility that they still can't go all the way, which would leave the argument in tact and reaffirm the support from which the conclusion is derived.

TL;DR, I see A suggesting an ambiguity that reads neutrally: If negated, A only weakens the argument by indicating that the opportunity for the argument to be undermined exists, not that it likely does or does not.

B, when negated suggests an ambiguity that, while still concluding nothing, leans towards something that would hurt the argument. Obviously that's a fine distinction that the question doesn't even mean for you to consider, but I don't think it can be avoided if you read the text precisely, and reasonably interpret "destroy completely" and "destroy" as meaning different things. If they meant the same thing, they would say the same thing.

Lastly, any question I ever get wrong on LR is similar to the conundrum I have with this one. I overanalyze the question, but even when I recognize that I'm overanalyzing and need to read a little more simply, I cannot for the life of me figure out when it's appropriate to make which particular little assumptions. If I redid this question 1000 times, I'd think that the logic leap in choice B is more realistic than the choice B counterpart all 1000 times.

Are there any tutors who would be particularly well suited to help me with this very specific challenge? It's frustrating because I literally have no clue what I need to change in order to get these questions write. I'm a native English speaker, born and raised in the midwest United States, and so I don't know what other factors could be causing me to be so clueless when it comes to figuring out which little logic leap/assumption is the right one. If I'm not overlooking some other caveat to this problem, how can the LSAT justify the correct answer if there isn't a concrete reason why their leap is more valid than mine.

If anyone thinks they would be able to help me remedy this conclusion, I'd be more than happy to pay for your time. I'll take help any way I can get it, so don't hesitate to take my money even if you're not a tutor and are a fellow student! Thanks guys :)

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Monday, Jul 10 2017

anthonymahmud595

PT32.S4.Q19 - editorial: medical schools spend

Hello, 7Sagers!

I'm a bit puzzled with this NA question and wanted to get your input on the matter.

This question states that medical schools are teaching curative medicine and preventative medicine at a 10:1 ratio respectively. It goes on to state that despite this, the use of preventative techniques lowers medical costs significantly.

The claim is that if medical school's have the goal of making medicine lower in cost, they aren't spending enough time teaching preventative medicine.

The correct necessary assumption is purportedly that the amount of time needed to teach preventative medicine thoroughly is greater than one hour for every ten currently being spent on the curative counterparts.

Now, a negation test should confirm this answer, but from my perspective, it does not. Negating the statement results in the time to teach preventative medicine thoroughly being equal or less than one hour for every 10 spent on curative. Now, I assume that at this point the LSAT wants you to assume that because the ratio now favors preventative being taught thoroughly, the argument falls apart because they're no longer spending insufficient time.

But who's to say that the ratio of time spent has anything to do with the actual time spent? The argument has to do with the actual time spent. In fact, we could only be sure that there isn't an insufficiency if we know for sure that the med schools are meeting or exceeding the total amount of hours needed for thorough teaching of curative medicine.

So what if we have a 10:Less-Than-One thoroughness need ratio ? Maybe the schools are teaching 1000 hours of Curative and 100 hours of Preventative, when students actually need 10,000 hours of Curative and 200 hours of Preventative to be thoroughly taught each respectively. (This would give us a 50:1 ratio of time needed for curative vs preventative thoroughness, congruent with the negation of the right answer, but still leaving the argument perfectly in tact.)

If the argument can easily be correct without the designated answer being negated, why can we call it a necessary assumption for the argument? The argument can be just fine without it being true.

https://classic.7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-32-section-4-question-19/

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anthonymahmud595
Monday, Oct 09 2017

I'd love to participate!

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anthonymahmud595
Monday, Oct 09 2017

In principle, I see no issue with bringing a parent. Choosing a law school is a major life decision, and if anything, I think it looks good that you take the matter seriously enough to involve people close to you.

My only caveat in practice would be to consider how your parents act in these kinds of situations. Parents love us and always mean well, but some parents like to involve themselves more than others, and if you know your mom or dad has a tendency to be argumentative, politically incorrect, or anything else you wouldn't want to be attributed to your application, you might want to go alone.

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Sunday, Jul 09 2017

anthonymahmud595

Factoring AP scores into LSAT GPA

Hi guys! I was wondering if anyone had experience or knowledge regarding how/if the LSAC calculates AP credit in with GPA.

The website says that it will factor in if your university gives credit and counts the grade. My university gives credit, but I don't think it uses those credits in GPA calculation. Does anyone know of situations where AP scores have been taken into account? Could I potentially transfer universities/enroll in an additional one and apply under it to have my AP scores factored in?

Much Appreciated!

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anthonymahmud595
Friday, Dec 08 2017

Yeah, I think it's their way of staying high in the rankings through a certain niche of candidates.

I think it works well for them because the LSAT range is much more exclusive than the GPA range. There are hundreds of thousands of students who have 3.5+ GPAs, but only x000 170+ scorers among college students/people who might apply. Generally speaking, it's "easier" to be a 3.85 student and get a meh lsat score than it is to be a 170 scorer and get a "meh" GPA. The percentile comparison is way off. The 171+ automatically puts you in the top 2%, while a 3.85 is probably 10-15th percentile nationwide.

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Saturday, Jul 08 2017

anthonymahmud595

PT29.S4.Q17 - studies of the reliability of eyewitness

Hello! I didn't see any prior discussions on this question, and it's confusing me a bit so I wanted to get some outside opinions!

https://classic.7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-29-section-4-question-17/

We have an underlying principle/SA question which means that our answer needs to fill the logic gap pretty much completely.

Background info says that confidence of a testimony has little correlation with the accuracy of said testimony.

Support says that factors can alter the confidence of a testimony without changing its accuracy.

Conclusion says that police officers shouldn't allow situations where witnesses giving testimony can hear other witnesses giving testimonies.

The designated correct answer for gives us the principle that the confidence in one's testimony is affected by seeing other testimonies. To me, this leaped out as a wrong answer choice because the passage seems to suggest that confidence in one's testimony doesn't really matter, so there would be no incentive to prevent it.

D, on the other hand, seemed to fill the gap using unusual, but plausibly correct logic. If the police, for some reason, cared about confidence more than accuracy, factors that change confidence would want to be controlled. I don't know why Police would want to know about confidence rather than accuracy, but it's not our job as test takers to question the likelihood of a gap-closer to occur in the real world; we want to know if that gap closer, taken as it is, would bridge the support with the conclusion.

D does it in an ugly fashion, but I don't think A does it at all. Knowing that viewing other testimonies can alter confidence doesn't give us any logical reason for police officers wanting to prevent it. We can't bridge the gap between evidence and officers stopping testimony exposure without understanding the criterion based on which an officer would want to prevent testimony exposure. Even if you make the least extreme assumption and consider that police would want to stop something that alters the accuracy of a testimony, (since accuracy of evidence is important to court cases) answer A becomes more flawed in that it gives the support an attribute that the police wouldn't care about, or use in a decision for policy.

Any help is appreciated :) Thanks guys!

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anthonymahmud595
Tuesday, Nov 07 2017

Nice job! Very happy for you :)

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Wednesday, Sep 06 2017

anthonymahmud595

PT67.S4.Q08 - if the burden of a proposed policy change

Hello! I was hoping to get some clarification on this question.

So clearly our right answer should link the reintroduction of rock salt to a disproportionate burden on low income people.

I put B, and the correct answer is D.

My understanding is that you're supposed to use the part of the prompt that says "Although the city claims that cars are now better protected from salt's corrosive properties than they were as recently as five years ago" to pair with the text D, which says that low income people are more likely to purchase older vehicles.

My issue is that I think not a large leap, but a nonsensical leap to interpret the prompt portion as referring to new cars in comparison with old cars. The text merely says that "cars are now better protected from salt's corrosive properties." There's literally one subject in that sentence: cars. The sentence makes no distinction about different groups of cars within the general "cars" umbrella. The distinction, grammatically and logically speaking, is between how "cars" handle salt now, and how "cars" handled salt before.

Maybe "cars" better handle salt because of some trends in humidity levels. Heck, you could just as easily and fairly interpret the opposite of what you were meant to. Maybe the older a car is, the more resistant it becomes to salt corrosion because they develop a layer of dirt and debris that keeps the salt from penetrating as deeply as it does in new cars which are exposed.

Deriving the necessary assumption is ludicrous and arbitrary, in my view.

On the contrary, D requires but a small, feasible leap. We're told that sales tax disproportionately burdens low income people. We're told that road maintenance is primarily funded by local sales tax. This appears to have all the ingredients we need to make a perfectly in-tact chain of logic. All we have to do is check to see if rock salt re-introduction counts as road maintenance.

Rock salt is applied to roads in order to maintain a safe, drivable road. It is undoubtedly a road maintenance matter. We weren't using it for several years, we are now. Sure, maybe we have a vast reservoir of rock salt in an underground bunker that will spare us any additional expense, but that's terribly farfetched and extreme. At the very least you're going to have some costs associated with the switch, if not also the highly likely case that you're going to have to buy some quantity of rock salt, the money of which is coming from sales tax that disproportionately burdens low-income people.

B seems to be all but iron clad, while D is all but impossible. We need but the smallest, likeliest set of circumstances for B to work. We need the biggest, most ridiculous, most ambiguous crapshoot of an assumption in order for D to make a drop of sense.

Am I missing something here?

https://classic.7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-67-section-4-question-08/

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anthonymahmud595
Thursday, Oct 05 2017

It's an interesting phenomenon from a marketing academic perspective. Grad school is generally a high-cognition decision, which is why tactics like anchoring and celebrity endorsements aren't typically used. You'll see that kind of marketing with scum-of-the-earth for-profit "universities" like ITT Tech and Phoenix because they manipulate information asymmetry to pray on people who are desperate or uninformed.

It's interesting that we see it used with NYU, and they're by no means an anomaly. When I was applying for MBA programs, I got a lot of ads for UNC, and their big message was "The MBA Program You Can't Get Into" (which I think is a horribly inefficient and counterproductive rhetoric base but oh well.)

Maybe the schools are just giving it a shot to see what happens? Perhaps they're trying to increase enrollment and don't care about how they accomplish it. Such ads cheapen my perception of the schools if anything, but maybe it all works on a deeper level that isn't particularly apparent.

After all, any school that must say they're a good program is no true good program...

https://scontent-ort2-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/603966_1390562504537142_941086795_n.jpg?oh=5519d1f740fc0fcae9bf11af891e0028&oe=5A46CCAD

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anthonymahmud595
Thursday, Oct 05 2017

I have not used this service, but I'm critical of its value from an outside perspective.

It looks like you're paying for some kind of algorithmic analysis of your data points, and many quality tools do the same thing for free. Additionally, resources like the profiles on Law School Numbers will likely give you more candid insight than any kind of calculator.

I think $75 would be better spent on an hour or two with a private consultant.

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Monday, Jul 03 2017

anthonymahmud595

Event Independence on the LSAT

Hello again! First of all, I wanted to express my general appreciation for everyone in the 7Sage community! You guys are essentially total strangers, yet almost always go the extra mile to help and support each other. I'm very impressed, and I feel privileged to be among you.

As for my question, I wanted to inquire about how the LSAT treats independent events in relation to likelihood. The content that spiked my curiosity came from Mike Kim's LSAT trainer rather than an official LSAT passage, so if this issue is not relevant to the LSAT, I'd love to know that too. The trainer has an exercise where one has to use proper knowledge of LSAT meanings for "some" and "most" to determine whether or not a statement in valid.

One of these statements is that "Everyone who orders a sundae gets offered a free extra cherry, and most people say yes to the extra cherry. Some people who order the banana split get offered a free extra cherry, and less than half of these people say yes. Therefore, people who order a sundae are more likely to say yes to a free cherry than are people who order a banana split."

Using the LSAT definitions of the qualifier words, Sundae buyers have a 1.0 chance of being offered, and more than half of them say yes. Banana Split Buyers have a 0 to 1.0 chance of being offered, and fewer than half accept. The conclusion then maintains that /people/ who order a Sundae are more likely to say yes to a free cherry than their heathen Banana-Split ordering counterparts; the book later designates this as a valid statement.

This situation immediately reminded me of a common mistake people make in evaluating confidence intervals in statistics. A 95% confidence interval, for example, does not mean that any given member of a population has a 95% chance of meeting a certain criteria. Rather, they already have have either a 0% chance or a 100% chance of meeting that criteria; their status (or in this context, selection,) is fixed and independent of any outside conditions. There is no roll of the dice. The interval merely gives us insight into the qualities of the group as a whole. In a way, this principle is reminiscent of the piece = puzzle LR flaw.

In the cited problem, we have data regarding the proportions of entities who made a decision being equated with the likelihood of those rigid entities from making one decision or the other, which isn't true.

So what does this situation mean for the LSAT? My guess is that this kind of situation would never arise on an LSAT, but if it does, I hope to find out whether my aforementioned thought process is correct, (thus invalidating the ice cream statement,) or if the LSAT does indeed require us to treat a population proportion and the "decision likelihoods" of its individual members as congruent values.

Thanks!

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anthonymahmud595
Thursday, Nov 02 2017

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Saturday, Jul 01 2017

anthonymahmud595

PT29.S1.Q19 - arbitrator: the shipping manager

Hi guys! I wanted some insight into why A qualifies as a right answer for this question.

The argument is saying that the manager should be blamed/is responsible for the project's delay because he was aware that the contractor often runs late and should have planned for this possibility.

The designated correct answer, "a principle that underlies the argument," is that a manager should take foreseeable problems into account when deciding things.

While I recognize the logic that makes this answer correct, I take issue with its specific language. Saying that a manager "should take foreseeable obstacles into account" does not necessitate that /a manager should in fact be blamed if they do not take such obstacles into account,/ which is the logic piece that would plug the hole. Specifically, the word "should" cannot be reasonably assumed to mean "must, otherwise blame/responsibility is accrued," and it fails to accomplish that on multiple fronts.

Should is an opinion word and does not guarantee certainty of execution, or lack of execution. Furthermore, even if one was to equate "should" with some form of "must," "must" alone would exclude the possibility of an event not happening, making it impossible to address the implications of it not happening.

Is there a LSAT-specific reading of "should" that alters the meaning of the question?

If not, why would it be incorrect to read "should" as "ought to"/"would benefit from," thus making "ought to take foreseeable problems into account" insufficient as a principle that justifies the manager being /blamed/ for not taking them into account?

Thanks for the read :) I really appreciate any thoughts you all may have!

https://classic.7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-29-section-1-question-19/

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