I'm a UCI law student. I can spare some time today to go over what I did in applying.

Hey guys. Since the 7Sage chat function isn't that great. I can't go back and forth between messages on here, I created a discord server so you can all ask questions and I can provide a pretty generalized guide for all of you.

https://discord.gg/MGHxzDQq

I messaged you all individually and I might take a bit to get back to you but I'll definitely try to give you an updated check list of study tips by tonight

Purchase the Loophole by Ellen Cassidy. It was amazing for logical reasoning. I read it over twice and it vastly improved my score. I also approached LG differently. Instead of always watching JY do the problems, I would take a bunch of problems blind and review them in-depth before doing anything else. I taught myself LG and it got me down to -2. If you're at a 133, unfortunately you don't have a good grasp on the test. 7Sage didn't let you down, you just aren't studying correctly. You should be drilling the basics that 7Sage gives you, taking practice drills timed, and blind reviewing everything.

I second Robbie. Take the usual 3 section modern test and tack on an additional fourth section. Usually I just took a random section from any test and had it in another tab. I would also take the most recent tests. You should be taking the 80s and 90s, as these will be the most like your real LSAT. I would also consider taking timed 35 minute sections on your off days. After taking these sections, I would blind review them heavy. Blind review will boost your score more than anything.

I'd love to join!!!!

This might help, even though it's 7 months late lol. Let's say I'm Indiana Jones and I go to Fiji and I look at an area of the forest that's a 12 mile circle. For the first study, I look at plants that are characterized by red stripes with blue circles. The next time I go back, I only look at plants with red stripes. Since my definition of pattern for the second study is much more narrow, I find less plants that fit the pattern description. This helps clear up the discrepancy that was in the passage.

Not sure if anyone else noticed by for question #5 it tells us to look in paragraph 3, however, the answer is in paragraph #4. I'm not sure if I'm just not looking correctly or what.

This is how I examined the passage. Say you have city X. You have a bunch of people who drive their cars. When people drive their cars, they emit a lot of pollution. If the people in city X chose to walk instead of drive, pollution would be greatly reduced. What is the necessary assumption we need to come up with? The necessary assumption is that we need to have people who can, in fact, be persuaded to walk instead of drive. This comes in the form of answer choice E. We need to have people in city X who sometimes drive when it is feasible to walk. The author needs a subset of the population in city X who can align with his examination of how to reduce pollution. If we didn't have people in city X who chose to drive instead of walking, the argument simply wouldn't make sense.

I thought about answer choice D a bit differently. The author states in the passage, "One should not make an informed decision solely on the basis of the information one does possess." D states, "on the inadequate basis of one's personal experience with cars." That personal experience with cars, I took, did parallel the personal information mentioned in the passage. The other answer choices don't talk about any individual having prior experience in their chosen topics or fields.

This is two months late but I'll do my best to explain how I got to the correct answer. I just focused on the first part of the second sentence. "Since certain health problems that are caused by crowded living conditions are widespread in Oldtown..." A is essentially saying the opposite of what this claim is. The author is in fact saying that health problems are caused by living conditions. It is an explicit statement. A is really tricky because it sounds good based on its language, but it isn't correct. E is correct because it's saying that Spooville and Oldtown are the same merely because they have identical land and population. This is where the flaw lies.

I'd be down

The answer is C because the reformers basically just want to see an alternative form of legal narrative. If we look in line 45, the author states, "These legal reformers propose replacing such abstract discourse with powerful personal stories." The author doesn't specifically propose that these legal reformers should train or educate those not fluent in the law. The reformers would like to empower those who have are not fluent in the law, but they would empower them by proposing alternative methods, not direct education. The answer is really found in the middle part of the third paragraph. Hope this helps!

I feel like you need a degree in economics in order to answer this question right

I did the exact same thing. It feels good when your thought process about a wrong answer matches JY's

This comment had me rolling hahahahahaha

This is great advice. I still struggle to avoid the preset college mentality but I'm working hard to fully understand exactly what I'm doing.

We're supposed to look at the passage as describing a correlation. If we add answer choice B, we get a causation. I also got this answer choice wrong. I guess if you see a passage where you identify a correlation, and every answer choice just looks like straight trash, you need to pick the only answer where it establishes causation. This is good practice for the future.

That's exactly what I was thinking. I specifically thought that B was a trap AC because it used intrinsic merit as quality. Just because a book is a high quality book, certainly doesn't mean it has intrinsic merit. A book could be highly sentimental to a book publisher, but be absolutely terrible in terms of quality to other people, since quality is a highly subjective term. Like the cover of the book could be terrible and whatnot. It's requiring an assumption that is so out of the ball park for most people. I honestly feel like the LSAT writers who wrote this, wrote it for the sole purpose of people getting it wrong. We're to make an assumption that the quality of these books is the same as them having intrinsic value. I know JY said that independent boards review every answer choice for every LSAT passage, but this AC just seems absolutely terrible.

My biggest problem is the amount of time we have to analyze this question. Making an external factor the answer is easy to see, but in the moment many many people miss that. I think that's why this question is annoying. We're looking for a C (external factor) → B (cancer) instead of an A (fat intake)→ B (cancer). The LSAT writers know people don't have 5 minutes to understand this question and the answer choices, so this is a question designed to be as hard as possible. They really don't want people to get every question right, so they mess with our heads especially after we've latched on to "not make assumptions" I'm so glad JY added this passage into our problem sets so we can get it right for another passage similar to this in the future.

The passage gives us a theory. This theory basically states that tectonic plates slide past each other and this creates a lot of resistance. The mystery though is that this resistance should create heat, but scientists have not found any. We have to take the passage at face value. This "face value" is that the theory doesn't fully explain what scientists can gather from observations in the field. AC: A, C, D, E aren't really related to the main point at all. We're focused on the one mysterious thing about earthquakes. This is why AC: B is correct. This mysterious thing can't be explained by the current knowledge on earthquakes. The theory isn't 100%.