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cappelldaniel400
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LSAT · Should I keep my score?
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cappelldaniel400
Saturday, Aug 31 2024

cancelled scores look like 150s or lower to schools.

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Thursday, Jul 18 2024

cappelldaniel400

Lawhub losing preptest data?

Today i woke up to finish preptest 147, and noticed that the LR section i finished yesterday had only 3 questions marked as answered. So rather than retake the rest of the qs (which would take more time), i pulled up the answers on 7sage and filled them in using the answer key like i was cheating. The especially strange thing is that between my two takings of this LR section, i took a different LR from 146, and that was indeed not lost this morning. Has anyone else experiences such quirks with Lawhub losing data?

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LSAT · PTF97.S1.Q3 - McBride: The new proposed fuel-efficiency...
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cappelldaniel400
Sunday, Aug 18 2024

This question paired with the one in the op sucks in a very typical lsaty way. There's absolutely no change in perspective count on here. "Perspective", after all, is a very robust psychological notion regarding how someone looks at a some domain. Leggett does not shift our perspective, as it's not clear that this is something you can do in a sentence or two. Now, you could say that there is a much thinner sense of "perspective" at play here, where are the correct answer choice is just saying that Leggett is offering a different opinion or something--But then this would be trivial because absolutely every disagreeing interlocutor would be doing this, so the correct answer choice would correctly describe at each and every example of this question stem.

What there is here is reconsidering the issue in light of new information. Newer lsats have shifted to this more accurate verbiage. But the wrong answers are super wrong here, so I guess this one is not a totally broken question.

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LSAT · PTF97.S3.Q16 - Zebra mussels,a nuisance when they clog
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cappelldaniel400
Saturday, Aug 17 2024

This question was so bizarrely easy that the right answer felt like a trap answer. The right answer is almost tautological, so you don't even need to look at the text to choose it. Yes, something will be toxic if a toxic substance enters it but does not get detoxified. Adventures in pre Y2K LR!

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General · Discouraged after first practice test
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cappelldaniel400
Monday, Aug 12 2024

Well, the LSAT measures skills that are useful in life generally. The more dissapointed you are in your initial results, the more oppurtunity you have to quite soon vastly improve skills in yourself that you value.

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General · Scored 5 points lower on most recent practice exam
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cappelldaniel400
Monday, Aug 12 2024

Numerical progress is not perfectly linear since different concepts are tested at different difficulties on each PT. Go by fluctuations in the mean/quartiles of your last five exams to see if youre making progress. And keep on truckin'.

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PrepTests ·
PT148.S2.P1.Q6
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cappelldaniel400
Thursday, Aug 08 2024

6 is the most unfairly advantaged I have ever felt reading an LSAT question. It leverages a point that's subtle if you're not familiar with Rawls but canonical to people who have studied him.

It's also a major diss that LSAC expects test-takers, who have never been exposed to Rawls before, are able to find this fundamental objection to Rawls's theory in about a minute or so--and that they can do this in the first (supposedly easiest!) passage of an RC section!

I guess all this is mitigated by the fact that the wrong ACs are pretty bad, and they lead you to the very specific sentence from which the right answer can be inferred.

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General · Resources to improve in logic generally?
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cappelldaniel400
Wednesday, Aug 07 2024

These videos were helpful for me back in the day

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLz0n_SjOttTcjHsuebLrl0fjab5fdToui

The channel has a couple logic playlists

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PrepTests ·
PT123.S1.P2.Q7
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cappelldaniel400
Tuesday, Aug 06 2024

Everyone who takes a certain number of LSATs should get honorary degrees in the Harlem Renaissance, underground rock formations, and the science of managing businesses with obsolete computer electronics.

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PrepTests ·
PT123.S3.Q14
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cappelldaniel400
Tuesday, Aug 06 2024

Easiest RC passage of all time

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PrepTests ·
PT123.S3.Q16
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cappelldaniel400
Tuesday, Aug 06 2024

This question gives me flashbacks to the other question about nations, individuals, and moral responsibility that came out like eight years after this one (it was a different format, an "identify the role" question). I bet they were written by the same person back-to-back.

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PrepTests ·
PT123.S3.Q21
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cappelldaniel400
Tuesday, Aug 06 2024

E is a very lazy trap answer because a nutritionist isn't even the sort of professional who would have authority on this matter. Dieticians would be more like it

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PrepTests ·
PT123.S4.P2.Q12
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cappelldaniel400
Tuesday, Aug 06 2024

12 is kinda hilarious because the brain thing is reffering to totally different mechanisms. It's like Aquaman and Archimedes agreeing that water is interesting.

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PrepTests ·
PT123.S4.P3.Q22
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cappelldaniel400
Tuesday, Aug 06 2024

22 was the only question on this exam I didn't get until I reviewed after flagging. They obviously try to trick you into confabulating that the question stem is about internet copyright law, when it's just about copyright law. Hence so many people wanted to pick A or B--but the fact that neither a or B were superior made me check the answers I quickly dismissed and have a "DUR" moment.

But the extremely low correctness rate on 15 surprises me tbh. The ideas in the most commonly chosen wrong answers are localized to the very end of last paragraph, and they both miss a bunch of the discussion.

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PrepTests ·
PT123.S4.P4.Q23
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cappelldaniel400
Tuesday, Aug 06 2024

-0 times 4. First flawless! Great place to end my testprep before the August exam tomorrow. Good luck to all future test takers, and thanks so much to JY, Kevin, and everyone who left insightful comments. If there's one piece of advice I can humbly leave for posterity it's the following: f*ck the LSAT! Don't revere this monstrosity: master it like you'd tame a nasty beast.

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PrepTests ·
PT123.S2.Q17
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cappelldaniel400
Tuesday, Aug 06 2024

This is a great example of what I call a smartass question, or a question that's more like a riddle or a joke than a logic problem, because the question-writer probably first came up with some clever, funny conceit and shoehorned it into a logic problem. The answer is always going to be something that completes a joke or a cleverness. For these questions, there may look to be no answer that is clearly the best; they may all have flaws, or fail to address the question stem perfectly. What you have to do is turn off your logical brain for a second and find a joke/gimmick of the problem. These problems are nearly pure intuition.

Here, the joke, I think, is pretty obvious. The computer guy is saying that the most important problem for hospitals and universities is cyber problems. But this is clearly ridiculous. Far more plausible candidates for most severe problems for these institutions are, I don't know, DISEASE maybe? Rising cancer rates?? The upcoming demographic cliff and skyrocketing tuition? Haha, what a dummy this tech guy is!

B is the only answer that captures that conceit, even if it doesn't do so precisely (if it did so precisely, that would be giving away the joke!). It might even make an assumption or two that we would find illicit in other circumstances. Some of the other ACs may be salvageable under strenuous interpretation, but these answers wouldn't be funny or clever; they wouldn't inspire a question-writer in the bathtub to rush out and get their notebook and pen.

You cannot master the LSAT until you master the smartass question.

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PrepTests ·
PT123.S2.Q15
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cappelldaniel400
Tuesday, Aug 06 2024

This is the sort of question that's easy with practice but can be hard when you're new. It comes down to appreciating the distinction between properly drawn and necessary assumption/MBT--and remembering to read the damn question stem!

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PrepTests ·
PT123.S2.Q9
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cappelldaniel400
Tuesday, Aug 06 2024

I'm surprised this question was considered easy since birth cohort/age fallacies are super common (logical errors where one hastily assumes that because people of a certain age have a property, this property is tied to their age, rather than birth cohort, or vice versa).

Side note: a lot of people know the supposedly Socratic idea that "The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority . . ". Most people assume this was Socrates attributing a generational vice where there was really just a vice of adolescence. But I wonder if maybe he was just plain right, and that generation below him was just different for some reason?

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PrepTests ·
PT123.S2.Q8
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cappelldaniel400
Tuesday, Aug 06 2024

Tricky, since both A and E go slightly beyond what's given in the text. But if you take enough LSATs, you know the way E does is considered more egregious. The word "may" in A also seems as if it is was inserted specifically to make it choosable. A is made almost so weak a proposition that you could derive it from a stim about sand dunes.

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PrepTests ·
PT123.S2.Q5
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cappelldaniel400
Tuesday, Aug 06 2024

This passage is so inaccurate; The only place I'd expect a "buildup of minor gasses" is Uranus.

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PrepTests ·
PT123.S2.Q23
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cappelldaniel400
Tuesday, Aug 06 2024

rare lsat biconditional (the best logical operator - bi pride!)

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PrepTests ·
PT132.S3.P2.Q13
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cappelldaniel400
Monday, Aug 05 2024

13 is bullshit. There's nothing in the passage that indicates that Mars couldn't have continued to have other bombardments afterward or before--or even during--the famous bombardment, albeit from other sources. The stim also never specifies that the famous bombardment was particularly heavy. Yes, abstract these problems away and A would be a stronger answer than D, because it negates the hypothesis rather than just weakens evidence for an alternative hypothesis (as D does). But the fact of the matter is that A is hopelessly broken, so you should actually have more grist for your meal for improving your LSAT reasoning if you picked A than if you pick D. I think this is the first time I found a broken LSAT question when there was another answer that was objectively better, as opposed to just on a par.

Butcha know what? I'm done complaining at this point. I got a 180 on this exam (pt 132) and 13 was my -1 on this experimental section. This was my third 180 in a row. Can't wait to take the silly test Wednesday and be done with this forever.

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LSAT · Negating "Most" when there is a binary cut?
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cappelldaniel400
Monday, Aug 05 2024

I should correct myself, "0-50% are not white" cannot be translated to "a minority are not white"; rather, it would be translated to a "a minority or exactly half are not white", which would be equivalent to "half or more are white". It's minding the 50/50 scenarios that that's so befuddling here and making the negations complicated.

To make matters worse, here's 'nother thing that might be going on. Philosophers at least since Bertrand Russell have noticed that sentences claiming that sentences denying an entity a property can be ambiguous between claiming no such entity with a property exists or that the entity exists but has no such property. It's summed up on the first page here:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2252540

So "The King of France is not bald" is ambiguous in meaning between "there is no entity that is the king of France and bald" and "The entity that is the king of France is not bald."

So maybe your cognitive procces interpreting those sentences is vaccilating back and forth between trying to apply these two different sorts of interpretations (which Russell called "primary" and "secondary") which results in the weird uneasy feeling some of us might be getting when we're staring at these "most people are not white" sentences in trying to negate them back and forth.

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PrepTests ·
PT132.S4.Q24
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cappelldaniel400
Monday, Aug 05 2024

This question is tough but not impossible. It requires some empathy for your interlocutor (the character narrating the stim, who is unnamed here for some reason). C might not be what you or I would take from the data, but it's the interpretation the researcher is getting at. There's no text-based reason not to pick it. It's not the only conclusion one can derive from the data, but it is one the aims to explain it.

B is straight-up not supported by the text. There's nothing in the experimental data related that would bear on that hypothesis described in B.

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PrepTests ·
PT125.S1.P3.Q18
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cappelldaniel400
Monday, Aug 05 2024

18 is a question that has more complaints about it in the comments than any other that I've seen-- after my taking like 25 prep tests. This is a little puzzling to me, because C seemed clearly wrong to me. The stim simply doesn't talk about different interpretations being choreographed, so C is factually unsupported. The stim does not paint the artist as someone self-conciously trying to reach as broad an audience as possible by manipulating their act and service of that; rather she is being authentic and different groups happen to end up liking her for different reasons, different properties that are naturally present in her act. C paints her as a conniving businessperson trying to optimize her act for popular broad appeal; but the passage gives us several clues that this dancer is a highly authentic person, who would not be prone to do that. True, C is a little ambiguous with regards to the word "tailored" (which mean both intentionally tailored or incidentally tailored), but it doesn't matter how you interpret it, because the AC is wrong no matter what because another aspect of it is factually unsupported. And whats 7sage folks are debating below-- cultural versus social versus racial groups and what is a subset of what etc--these questions are unnecessary to settle; the question would be wrong solely because of the multiple choreographs thing.

I'm always happy to see when there is a revolt against a question, because I think there's just way too much deference and reverence for the LSAT in general. I think there's typically one to two broken questions per LSAT exam (several more if you count questions where there's no objectively correct answer in a vacuum, but knowing the LSAT's conventions from experience tells you the answer). But this is the first time I've seen a ton of complaints about question (probably the most ever!) where I actually just think the question is fine. And please trust me, it's not because I happened to get it right; I've gotten several controversial questions right and still agreed with the general sentiment of the community that the question was totally busted. I'm not saying this to gloat, but to humbly advise that people who get this wrong actually go back and take a second look and see if there's something to be learned from it. There's usually one question per reading comp section that looks a little like this (where you have to apply a piece of information from elsewhere in the passage in a way that's not obvious, in order to answer the question) , and understanding what cause you to get this one wrong can be very valuable.

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PrepTests ·
PT125.S1.P1.Q4
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cappelldaniel400
Monday, Aug 05 2024

First point: this is probably the easiest RC passage I've ever seen, no offense to anyone who might have had trouble with a question or few (we all have bad days).

Second: Q4 makes absolutely no sense. It was an easy question, for sure. And I know what they wanted--they wanted you to pick the fancier word, that's more of a smart boy shibolethy law word (vis a vis Draco of Athens) , and is more emotionally loaded so better gets "at the authors perspective" (even though perspectives aren't necessarily emotional). But the author has neither a draconian nor an unpopular attitude towards the hypothetical measure; their attitude is that the measure is draconian. The author's attitude in itself is probably better described as one of scorn or distaste. Strictly speaking, calling something "draconian" can be a wholly, dry intellectual act, though like I indicated, we might more tend to imagine it being uttered by the author with an emotional inflection. So there isn't necessarily any emotion behind the author's words, and thus no real reason to pick "draconian" over "unpopular". The question writers honestly just weren't thinking that hard when they wrote that question. I've said it before, the biggest errors are often on the easy questions, possibly enough people get the right answer statistically such that it's hard to complain.

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