Hello, Mr. Allen. I'm only a recent grad but I appreciate your encouraging statement for us younger folks. If I may offer any advice for understanding the questions/test, it would be to buy the loophole by erin cassidy and do everything it says. I made a ton of flashcards with each component of the question/flaws she gave (which i think was mostly assigned as part of the homework, although I may have gone a bit more in depth than what was stated), but this led me to understand that each question has a certain ac it's looking for, keywords for identifying their type, backup plans, common flaws on questions etc. It's a completely different outlook for me from when I started. It minimizes any thinking process of what I need to do for each question because I can recognize the type of question from a couple of words in the question stem and can then know exactly what type of answer to hunt for. I would say learning these patterns really sped up my processes and in turn I average -3 LR with a lot of content left to study. I do believe that if you do everything the loophole says and then drill, then you will be able to obtain a good score. RC Hero is also probably the closest equivalent I have found for RC. Keep on keeping on and good luck with your test. Your obituary already sounds quite impressive but this will definitely be a boost lol

Above comment is correct. A deep understanding is the best thing you can do for your score before jumping into practice tests. If trying to be a high scorer, you need to understand on your own why you got a question wrong (ie the flaws and everything else--just letting JY explain it to where you think you understand isn't enough). Personally, I finished the 7sage curriculum and jumped immediately into practice tests but while I learned the question types and stuff, I didn't feel like I fully had the basics down. Thus, I bought the loophole and it built on my 7sage knowledge perfectly. Also, I did everything the book said (such as making probably 500 flashcards to learn every question stem, their keywords, back up plans, etc and reviewed them constantly for weeks) and by the time I finished, I was still around -5 to -6, but felt like I understood the questions much better on review and within a month or two of practicing got down to -3 LR avg with -2 to -0 being in my wheelhouse (and rarely ever worse than -4). While I'm still working to improve (especially on my RC), it was all about getting the basics down, and then only after doing so, practicing a ton that I really saw the improvement I wanted to see. If your goals are top scores, embrace the grind and do the extra stuff they say to do that you don't really want to. I truly think hard work is the differentiator on this test. Now if you're on the other side of the spectrum of wanting to basically get an average or slightly above average score, I'd also agree with the above comment. You can mix both practice and curriculum. The lower your score is rn, the faster it'll improve initially. I jumped ten points in a few months from my diagnostic with not very intense studying. If that's your goal I'd look to get a baseline understanding of the question types and flaws and continually drill and do a preptest or two a week with strong reviewing. But know that once you hit the 160s, there's a very strong plateau that is hard to overcome because the curve breakers begin to come into play and mastery is required to jump into the high 160s-170s. Anyways, the best thing I can say is to keep at it even when discouraged and review, review, review! Best of luck fellow LSAT friend!

It just depends what your goals are and where you're at. If you're truly shooting for top scores, you need to learn the fundamental basics of logic before you can consistently begin scoring highly. If you're just going for around a 160 most people can just get bye thru doing the basic curriculum and then drilling/pting a lot. But this is all dependent on where you're at and know that some ppl will have different results with the same modes of studying. The best advice I can give is don't half ass it. If you feel like you aren't doing whatever drill you're on or whatever it is at 110%, then re-evaluate and try to lock in or take a break/rest for the day.

Just wanted to unfortunately update this joke: If this video was recorded in 2016, 2020, or 2024, just replacing McBride with Trump will make everyone understand why the father wants to avoid a discussion with his daughter…

With it saying newly arrived as well as bonded pair, the context around establishes that one can reasonably assume and should assume they are talking about cats. Try not to overthink it rn on the surface-level stuff if there are context clues around that supply other shared traits from the rest of the stim.

I did straight thru and I now am going back to revisit strengths and weaknesses using not only drills and preptests, but also the individual curriculum section for whatever question type I'm focused on when needed. I'm still early on into it, but it seems to be somewhat working. I also had a 9 point increase from my diagnostic to finishing the full curriculum. On top of this, I do have The Loophole in my backpack ready to go for when I inevitably plateau.

yes, definitely do. I just wrote them out over and over again. It is very important you learn suff/necc

Go back and look at the Group 1 indicators lesson that's three lessons back. "The only" is distinctly listed as a G1 indicator while in the group 2 lesson, "only, only if, only, when, only where" are all listed. As someone scoring in the 160s who's shooting for the 170s and has come back to improve my conditional logic, these lessons are extremely important so do your best to understand them rather than relying on seeing an indicator. Practice, practice, practice. But also don't get bogged down by it as these concepts are new to most lsat studiers. I spent a couple of weeks on only these concepts when I first started and still didn't fully grasp them so I moved on, but if you don't fully grasp them when moving on, be sure to come back as conditionals make up a substantial amount of the test.

Question 3 is tricky because it’s a group 1 indicator, not group 2. “The only” is group 1, while “only”, “only if”, “only when”, and “only where” are all group 2 indicators.

Question 3 is not showing an outlier. Question 3 is tricky because it's a group 1 indicator, not group 2. "The only" is group 1, while "only", "only if", "only when", and "only where" are all group 2 indicators.

This question was really pissing me off when taking the preptest and especially when listening to the explanation. That is until JY ended the video with the cat whispering in his ear about going to college and the much-needed laughter came about. I'm now ready to get smacked in the face again by the LSAT writers!

I think we all have strengths and weaknesses that certain question types play into. For some reason, I have been getting all of these right and hitting the target times without drawing them out, but then in some of the earlier question types, like MBT where people commented about how easy they were, I really struggled. So, it just seems to me that we're all gonna do well on some types and struggle on others, and we really need to focus on improving the ones we struggle with, while not measuring ourselves to others as we struggle.

D is wrong because the question specifically asks us to explain why the universe's total mass estimates did not change with the updated increase in the estimated number of galaxies. Answer choice D simply states that theories of galaxy formations are rarely affected by the universe's mass, but we do not care about theories of galaxy formations. Instead, we care about explaining why the updated number of galaxies did not change the estimate of the universe's total mass (this is the phenomenon the questions asks us to answer- we are not being asked about what the universe's mass has to do with galaxy formation theories).

Ya I would definitely agree with you that always mapping out conditional logic takes too long for the test, but from previous lessons, I believe JY has stated not to worry about time if you're just going through these lessons and to map it out so that you get the basics down. Then, you can begin to transition to doing it in your head quickly when getting deeper in drills and testing.

Now I'm not 100% sure about this since I'm also learning but initially I wrote down /P --> C as a possibility, even though it wasn't listed because it made sense to me given the setup of the negated sentence "no parrots are clever," but then I started thinking of the group 4 conditional indicator rules (because of the use of "no") which state that you pick either condition and negate and put said negated condition in the necessary position which would mean it's either P --> /C or C --> /P. And if you did /P --> C, then JY would want to beat us up for falling for the oldest trick in the book and confusing sufficiency for necessity.