I'm in the same boat I've been studying a little under 5 months now and scoring consistently between 160-163. I got my highest PT score a couple weeks ago at 168 and was thrilled only to get a 161 on the next PT I took. I think it's important to have the right perspective however. Getting a score like that and then scoring a lot lower subsequently doesn't mean you aren't still progressing. I always have to remind myself progress isn't linear. But scoring several points higher than you are averaging isn't a fluke, it just means you're breaking into new score capabilities and over time that 169 will become your average, with scores in the 170s becoming those "flukes."

j.oshbarker

Drill: look at your analytics and the specific question types you're doing the worst with. Drill those until you consistently get -1/-0 on a medium difficulty. Then work on the same question types on a higher difficulty. I would seriously recommend not taking another PT until you feel you've mastered every question type.

Speed: On LR the first 15 questions or so will be majority 2-3 star questions so work on finishing those within the first 15-17 minutes so that the remaining 4-5 star questions can be worked out with more precision and confidence. The same can be said for RC. Try and finish the first 2 passages in 15-17 minutes so the remaining and more difficult two passages can be read more thoroughly.

Do less: This seems counterintuitive, and I'm speaking purely from personal experience, but I went from trying to take 2 PT's a week, BR them, log all the wrong answers, and drill and I found this not only to be draining, but kind of hindering. I reduced by studying to 1 PT a week, BR, logging, and maybe drilling for an hour or two 1-2 days a week and I've seen significant improvement since then. The LSAT is exhausting and your plateau can very well be caused by burnout if you are putting too much time into it.

Could this answer also be a form of a generalization flaw? It seems like with the comparison they're making a conclusion about generations as a whole supported by a comparison of two subsets of each generation. If I say black dogs like to run more than white cats, so dogs are healthier animals, I am committing the same flaw by failing to compare the appropriate things. I think A says this too by essentially saying they're not comparing the generations as a whole. Anyone else agree? #feedback

#help is there a good rule of thumb for when determining whether to kick a sufficient condition into the premise set vs leaving the conclusion a conditional conclusion?

I would drill every question type without time constraints until you're consistently getting -0/-1 and then start adding time or increasing the difficulty. You really don't want to start taking PT's until you have a good foundational understanding of how to recognize and answer each question type.

I think with NA questions, thorough diagramming like this only serves to confuse you. I typically like to take a completely different approach to NA than I would to PSA or SA. Applying the negation test is a really powerful tool for these types of questions and can help identify the NA easily just by asking "if this were to be negated, would the argument still function?" Let's apply this to this specific question.

We are told that profit-driven institutions are responsible for almost all the funding for the department's research, and unless we can find more funding for basic science research, it is unlikely that we will make any significant advances. Thus, without increased funding from institutions that are not profit-driven, the department is unlikely to gain the prestige that it can only obtain from basic science research achievements. Here we can recognize a gap between the need to obtain more funding and the need to obtain funding specifically from institutions that are not profit-driven. AC D recognizes this and tells us "the chemistry department's funding is not likely to increase if its funding from sources other than profit-driven institutions doesn't increase." Here it is already relatively obvious to see that this is a required assumption, but to make it even clearer we can apply the negation test and read this as "the chemistry department's funding IS likely to increase if its funding from sources other than profit-driven institutions doesn't increase." If this were true, then why the hell does the department need to obtain funding from institutions that are not profit-driven if their funding is going to increase anyways? And thus the argument falls apart under the negated assumption. This shows us that this is in fact the required/necessary assumption because without it our argument can't function.

Breaking down NA questions into conditional diagrams can be very time consuming and confusing considering that we are not trying to reach a strong or valid conclusion like we would be in SA or PSA, but rather just something that the argument absolutely needs to not fall apart. Applying the negation test is an easy way to recognize these subtleties as I find with NA it is hard to pre-phrase sometimes.

Hope this helps!

I really struggled with flaw for a long time and what helped me was taking a step back from taking PT's and focusing on flaw questions very heavily. I'd recommend just drilling flaw questions over and over and over again, starting at about medium difficulty and once you're getting -0/1 consistently increase the difficulty. Doing this exposed me to a lot of questions that I started to recognize patterns on and flaw questions became a lot easier after that. Flaw is the most common question type so mastery of them is kind of imperative to reach those high 160s-170 scores.

Is B not just describing a valid argument form? If we're trying to argue something is a necessary condition and we use as support that its absence has led to a failure of achieving the sufficient condition then that should just be a valid conclusion, which is another reason to eliminate B.

An argument that captures what B is actually describing: Mark claims that to be successful you have to work hard. We have seen that when people do not work hard it always causes them to be unsuccessful, so mark is right in claiming that hard work is necessary for success. #feedback