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Check with the admissions for the schools you're planning on applying to.

Some have "best LSAT score" and some take the average of your LSAT scores.

If the schools fall in the former category, its a no-brainer.

"Every law school uses the high score when making admissions decision. We don’t know of any schools that use the average score"

https://blog.powerscore.com/lsat/do-law-schools-average-lsat-scores-or-use-the-high-score/

OP i'm in a similar situation, as is the case for the majority of october test-takers. The consensus seems to be that taking in November is a no-brainer if you think the extra month of prep can actually improve your score. Since it's in the beginning of november, you can get your score back before the end of the month, and assuming you have your apps ready to go by then, you can still be considered an "earlyish" applicant, or at worse case scenario an on-time applicant.

I think this question sort of illustrates the value of older PTs, and how older PTs are still relevant to the most recent tests. The older LR sections tend to test on very mechanical, formal logic like the one used in this question. the harder questions to these sections will often require the test taker to juggle multiple variables in their head, and to be able to properly follow along a seemingly complexly written logical path, to ultimately keep yourself from making faulty assumptions that trick ACs will tempt you to.

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Podcast Summary:

They believe every variant (with one exception) will be a curve of -8

The one exception is the combo of Orwell/Maple Trees LR + Newspaper LG which they believe will be -9

Curve is the # of Qs you can miss and hit 170. May 2020 curve was -9.

How accurate have these been in the past?

they've been pretty damn accurate. I heard for may 2020 they predicted -8 when it turned out to be -9, but overall they seem to be pretty accurate (hard to say 100% tho because may 2020 is the only flex test we have a released curve for). Keep in mind powerscore says they're being conservative w/ their estimates because it's better to be extra strict than give someone false hope. they said that for the -8s they predicted for this exam, they wouldn't be surprised if some of them swung to -9, but the only combination where they're confident w/ a -9 for is Kafka + maple tree LR w/ Newspaper LG.

with this stimulus it helps if your attention is immediately brought to the incomplete correlation. We know from the stimulus that the best sales reps in the company are seemingly correlated w/ entering the job w/ an engineering degree and little to no sales experience (i.e. most of the best sales reps entered w/ engineering degrees + little/no sales exp.). From this the author essentially concludes that they should try and emulate this further by favoring applicants who likewise have engineering degrees w/ little/no sales experience over applicants w/ vice versa. But we don't know anything about other workers; do the average/mediocre sales reps also have this type of resume or do they lack engineering degrees? And what about the crappy workers, what if most of them also shared the same resume as the best sales reps in this respect-- possession of engineering degrees w/ little/no sales experience. Basically, what if this was already a quality shared by the majority of the sales reps? The author here is assuming that this particular factor distinguishes the best sales reps, so the fact that most sales reps already have this factor definitely weakens the premise's ability to support the conclusion.

the author is basically making an argument like this: most of the best-performing basketball players in the NBA have blue as their favorite color. Therefore, we should prioritize drafting/signing players whose favorite color is blue over any other color. In essence, I need to know how other sample sets (the average players, bad players, etc.) relate to this factor in order to contextualize and subsequently establish this correlation. It could very well be that the majority of the players in the NBA have blue as their favorite color, meaning that this factor likely does not actually discriminate b/w sets of samples in any significant way (e.g. best sales reps/players vs. the average sales reps/players and etc.)

Given that this is #25 and there is a lot of stuff to read in each AC, it might be one of those para flaw questions where you're better off picking the right answer as soon as you get it and moving on, unless you have ample time left. B matches the stimulus argument so well, to a point I felt like I shouldn't even bother wasting time on reading the rest of the lengthy ACs. (I was also running out of time).

I heard on Reddit that there was confusion about this. I think it's because the november test was originally supposed to be on the on the 2nd week of the month but then they changed it to be a week earlier. So I think to go along w/ that, they changed the registration deadline to be a week earlier as well. I feel like LSAC should've definitely sent out an email about this tho as a heads-up!

Another important NA here is that successfully making AI is related to the operation of the human brain. The reason why I was initially hesitant to pick B is because I thought that the author came short on establishing the necessary connection b/w AI and operation of the human brain. Basically I thought: okay, so the author is saying that the information in the interaction of proteins is what governs the operation of the human brain, and due to lack of this information, computer scientists need more than just the human genome. But then I thought to myself-- why does AI have to care about the operation of the human brain to begin w/? Why can't computer scientists simply take info from the human genome, ignore all the stuff that has to do w/ the operation of the human brain, and use that to successfully create an AI program? For instance, something as simple as the spam filter on your email account is considered to be AI. I guess the LSAT writers on this stimulus require you to assume the common knowledge that AI applies the human mind.

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Took it earlier. Felt really good about LR as usual. Surprisingly RC felt pretty good. A little scared about LG. The first, third and last games weren't too bad, but for some reason, I just could not process something about the classes in upper and lower halls game. Had to guess on a few of those due to time.

I did great on that one (at least I think I did). I just drew out every possible scenario real quick. The museum game is the one that tripped me up. I was sure I had it all right and then the last question had me realizing my lineup was wrong and the previous five questions were probably wrong based on that. Oh well. This set of LG was definitely the one to get a -0 on, and I probably screwed that up. I felt like all the games would be labeled no more difficult than a 3 here on 7sage.

Feel pretty good about the test, but LR is always a toss-up. I've thought I did pretty well only to see I missed 12-13 on LR. So hopefully July 1 brings good news. That LSAT was definitely easier than any PT i've taken in the leadup to this thing.

I had the other LG section (the one about truckloads and presidents/secretaries/treasurers) so I have no idea about the LG w/ museums and economics, but based on what many others have said and Powerscore's perceptions on the exam, I feel like there'd be at least one game in that section that'll be rated higher than 3 stars on this site. Again, I have no clue how these games went specifically, but too many people thought this section was notably difficult, and even Powerscore inputted that this section MAY broaden the curve by 0.5-1 point, such that it doesn't sound so easy that all the games would be rated 3 stars or lower.

Sorry that it didn't go to your planning, but keep in mind that there may be a chance (based on Powerscore's curve predictions) that your LG section may broaden the curve!

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What a wild ride this has been.

I also had the Japanese Bells LR/Econ LG/Brittain RC

Honestly, I'm feeling good. Like.... really good... It worries me a little. I know for a fact that I got -0 on LG as I had time to go back over the stimuli and my rule translations and all flagged questions.

RC felt ridiculously easy compared to the PTs in the 80s I've been taking. The passages were long and dense, but I felt like they took it easy on us with the actual question difficulty to compensate...

I had the same RC section and it's funny that you mention that part at the end about them taking it easy on us w/ the questions because I felt similarly. I was even scared that I missed something after completing my test because some people apparently thought this RC was very challenging. But based on Powerscore's prediction of this RC section being a reasonable section that did not make the curve any more lenient/broader (they predicted this RC section would +0 the curve while they thought that the other RC section w/ the copyright passage was more challenging, and hence broadened the curve -1), I feel like our suspicions regarding the rigor of the questions may be accurate. We'll see I guess!

"underestimating the influence on English writers of their counterparts on the European continent" reads so awkwardly to me. is it basically the same thing as "underestimating the influence of the European continent on English writers?"

negation test really helps for this one. Otherwise D can be a considerably attractive AC

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Are the tests different everyday? And then they curve each section that's the same? Or are they all the same test, just different orders?

Yep they have a bunch of different forms. But you can get a form that has like 2 sections that are the same as someone who took it on another day. Overall though I was hearing from powerscore that they have about 40+ versions of the test for every flex administration.

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Had RC-LR-LG. Every section felt middle of the road in terms of difficulty, and the test as a whole felt average relative to PTs in the 70-80s, or potentially even a little bit easier. I found LR in particular to be a bit easier than normal, as I had 4 mins at the end to review my answers, whereas I usually finish right on time or with a minute to spare. I had the RC with insects and predator and preys, along with the passage about Inuits and territories. RC was my weakest section in my previous flex attempts, but I made a concerted effort this time to really focus on it, and I eventually got my RC performance about equal with my LR performance on PTs. I think my hard work paid off because in contrast to my previous attempts in which I felt like RC was noticeably challenging, this particular RC section did not feel notably difficult, tho I wouldn’t say it was easy either. Right about average to any RC section you’d see in the PT80s.

I feel most confident about this exam compared to my previous attempts. On my prior attempts there’d always be at least one section where I’d be scrambling for time at the end, but this time I finished with time left for each section. I’m hoping to score right along with my most recent PT averages, where I scored between the ranges of 172-174.

I took it on Saturday and had the same LG and RC sections it sounds like. The order I got was RC - LR - LG, which I think probably helped me confidence since I find RC to be my strongest section at this point.

RC was

Britain being pro-war before WWI and then a pacifist

the role of courts in interpreting the law

the two authors discussing aquatic keystone predators

I had a brutal time trying to remember the third passage, I vaguely came up with Canadian native tribes? ~you jogged my memory though; I had the territories passage as well.

I thought this was a pretty easy RC section - with the exception of the legal passage, that one was super dense to me.

The LR questions that I remember were

family vacation and choosing which motel to stay in after a bad experience

vampire stories and rabies

pilots and cancer

using folk remedies/plants to make medicine

ankle injuries and the type of shoe worn

ivy growing on buildings

I found this to be a fairly easy LR section. I had a little over 4 minutes left over at the end to go back and review, which was so nice.

LG was

the first one is the one I have the most trouble remembering - ordering of student seating?

upper and lower hall

economics classes & prerequisites (this one was just plain RUDE)

the order of events with the burglary in the museum, noises, etc

I'm already signed up for August - hoping/planning on that being my second (and last!) go at the beast. I know I can improve on my June score. God, waiting for the results in brutal.

I had a really wonderful proctor experience, no waiting, no weirdness, no interruptions. I was asked to move my desk a few inches so the proctor could see the door behind me, but it was honestly such a small change, didn't throw me off at all. I was a little apprehensive coming in because I saw other folks post about proctors telling them not to mouth the words and I read aloud A LOT when I practice, thankfully I didn't hear anything about my mouthing or whisper-reading.

Wish everyone the absolute best!

The only section I recognize is RC. I know for a fact I had a different LG (I didn’t have the museums and economics one) and I’m pretty sure my LR was different as I don’t recognize those topics.

Yeah I felt like RC was about average, possibly even a bit easier. I also felt like the legal passage was the most dense, tho I didn’t feel like the questions were so bad. The last passage about insects and predators/preys felt the easiest to me.

Good luck to you as well! Sounds like you did pretty well!!

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Anyone else here keep replaying games in your head wondering if you made a huge mistake and second guessing everything? I honestly felt Games was pretty standard. One game was worded oddly in the stimulus (the museum game) but then I realized it wasn't anything new. I was just bummed I had Games last, since I was completely drained and bleary eyed by the time I got there.

I definitely relate to this. I had a couple mins at the end of LG to review, tho not nearly enough time to really review a lot of my answers, as I spent most of that time reviewing one question. Regardless, I feel like the fact that I finished with time to spare is a good sign. As I ruminate over the games, I too speculate if I made some crucial errors or incorrectly transcribed a rule. But I keep telling myself that they usually design LG questions and ACs in such a way that you usually can’t get down to just one AC if you made a crucial error. And when it comes to inferences, they usually require you to make important inferences with their questions, so you usually have to face such important inferences anyways even if you missed it initially.

Had RC-LR-LG. Every section felt middle of the road in terms of difficulty, and the test as a whole felt average relative to recent PTs, or potentially even a little bit easier. I found LR in particular to be a bit easier than normal, as I had 4 mins at the end to review my answers, whereas I usually finish right on time or with a minute to spare. I had the RC with insects and predator and preys, along with the passage about Inuits and territories. RC was my weakest section in my previous flex attempts, but I made a concerted effort this time to really focus on it, and I eventually got my RC performance about equal with my LR performance on PTs. I think my hard work paid off because in contrast to my previous attempts in which I felt like RC was noticeably challenging, this particular RC section did not feel notably difficult, tho I wouldn’t say it was easy either. Right about average to any of the recent RC sections.

I feel most confident about this exam compared to my previous attempts. On my prior attempts there’d always be at least one section where I’d be scrambling for time at the end, but this time I finished with time left for each section. I’m hoping to score right along with my most recent PT averages, where I scored between the ranges of 172-174.

I rationalized B by assuming that "prosecutor brought charges" was synonymous w/ "brought charges." Basically, I thought that a prosecutor bringing charges is so essential to the act of bringing charges (much like how when one says "I learned math in class today" we just assume a teacher was present in that action) that the part about the prosecutor wasn't important. When you read the argument as, "I think there is good reason to believe the defendant is guilty because, although he was found innocent, he was brought charges in the first place." it sounds like a circular argument to a tee, whereas when you actually take note of the prosecutor in this argument like you're supposed to, you notice that the author's reasoning relies on the prosecutor as an authority figure.

For D, can't you also eliminate it because there's nothing in the stimulus that leads us to assume that there is even a population increase to begin w/? We know there are improved life spans, but increased life expectancy =/= greater population size, as we have no idea what the amount of births is relative to deaths, as well as emigration #s. I guess JY's explanation is also nice because it shows how it's wrong even if it were true that the population is increasing.

I made the mistake of doubting C by imaging a hypothetical situation where the modern author is writing in two very different genres (say, for instance, one is a murder mystery novel whereas the other is a fun children's book), and assumed that in that case the author having the same amount of differences in the same respects while we KNOW that he/she wrote both books would not affect the argument in any notable way. Part of this mistake was because I falsely assumed, from the fact that both the Odyssey and Illiad were poems, that they were in the same genre. This is obviously not true in retrospect since poems are more of a format (I think?). In that case, then C by itself does create a least some doubt in the stimulus' conclusion.

For #17, I went w/ A over D because the author explicitly mentions that the book contains a political fervor that is clearly moral, and thus I figured I could assume that the author is suggesting that Rosenthal makes ultimately normative/prescriptive claims (i.e. that something should be the case). Therefore, I figured A is better since it is more in line w/ making a normative/prescriptive claim, whereas D simply illustrates igniting discussion and it's not clear if there's an ultimate prescriptive claim being worked towards.

For #16 I went w/ B over C because tho you could POSSIBLY argue that author B's central purpose is to examine shifting scholarly attitudes on plagiarism (answer C) based on their first paragraph, Author A clearly does not make a concerted effort in examining such attitudes. Rather, author A merely mentions such attitudes in claiming that the fact that changing attitude standards exist does not mean that such ethical standards are nothing but expressions of power. But the clear higher purpose w/ author A is to find issues w/ the approach discussed in the first paragraph (their entire last paragraph is basically dedicated to critiquing the view in their first paragraph), and w/ author B, even if you did not understand what their last paragraph was finding issue w/ exactly, you could've used the fact that author B says "yet" as a transition word after initially acknowledging some points of agreement w/ Rick's work, to assume that Author B is likely disagreeing w/ Ricks to some extent. On nearly every RC passage, if the author grants positives/points of agreement w/ a particular perspective, and then follows it up w/ a sentence start w/"yet/however/but," then you can be almost certain that they're going to disagree w/ or criticize said perspective to at least some extent.

for Q#25, C is meant to trap you by playing w/ an assumption regarding what "just compensation" entails. I think w/ this it's important to realize that what is considered a just amount of compensation is generally independent of what the client subjectively perceives it to be. It could very well be that the client believes that they should receive an unreasonable sum of compensation, and virtually no amount short of 100% is considered "fair" to them.

For answer choice A-- I've learned that you usually want to be cautious about ACs that use percentages to attack a premise when there was not any mention of actual or relative quantities in the stimulus. We have no idea what !% of automobiles driven in the local area is relative to the 4% of local air pollution the plant accounts for. For all we know, it could very well be that the 1% of automobiles can account for much more pollution, thereby failing to weaken the argument. AC A is definitely playing on our real-world/everyday assumption of numbers-- 1% of anything just seems like such a small amount, especially when there's an "only" in front of it!

C is much more effective because if almost none of the cars sold to the company are running cars, then the environmental campaign is barely doing anything to reduce pollution. Thus it is unlikely to be a better alternative than directly reducing the air pollution caused by the company plants, thereby weakening the company spokesperson's conclusion.

I think another issue w/ D, along w/ JY's point that it requires the assumption that "proponents of economic growth" are the same as the group of people mentioned in the end of the stimulus, is that the stimulus already concedes that the ecological improvement may largely be due to the environmentalists' policies. D may have worked if, along w/ the assumption that the two aforementioned groups are the same, the stimulus argued that the policies suggested by the supporters of economic growth made a significant contribution to the ecological improvement. However, the stimulus makes no such argument and merely concludes that the there is credibility to the claim that excessive restriction of the utilization of natural resources may weaken the wealth required to adopt the policies that brought about the environmental improvement in the first place.

Analogous argument

There is this special Pink Apple in the island of Fiji, about 40 total of these apples currently exist. Experts identified that 100 total Pink Apples have existed throughout history, including the current ones. Some of these apples were Pink Apples from the time they came into existence, while others were originally Red Apples that went through a very rare, special chemical reaction while hanging from a tree that transformed them into Pink Apples. I conclude that most of the Pink Apples currently available were originally Red Apples that went through this transformation process.

To strengthen this argument, if I could insert the premise that most of the 100 total Pink Apples throughout history were originally Red apples (let's say 85% or 85 apples), then that definitely helps my conclusion that most of the Pink Apples were ones that went thru this transformation process, since it means that at most 15 of the current 40 Pink Apples did NOT go thru this transformation (or in other words, at least 25 of the 40 current Pink Apples were, in fact, transformed).

20 is definitely a time waster, and idk if it's just me but the capitalization of every word in the answer choices made it hard to read for some reason. I just saw that A worked and went w/ it because I was a bit low on time

let's imagine that having a college degree always leads to more job opportunities.

There can only be two possibilities-- we either have a college degree or we don't.

And based on these two "worlds," the scenario where we have a college will always lead to MORE job opportunities. Therefore, naturally, if we do not have a college degree, then we won't have the maximum amount of job opportunities.

But that doesn't necessarily mean that the scenario with a college degree has more job opportunities, in quantity, than the scenario w/out a degree (perhaps in the world w/out a degree we have other things that could make up for the quantitative difference). However, based on the fact that by having a college degree, we will ALWAYS have more, this inherently means that no college degree = failure to have the highest amount of job opportunities possible.

it helps to understand the "general" modifier as similar to the "most are" quantifier. If a particular sample generally believes something, then we can reasonably assume that more than 50% of said sample believes in that thing (it's similar to the "usually" modifier). Thus for this stimulus, we can keep in mind that Waller's argument merely commits him to most of the population accepting ESP as a real phenomenon, ultimately leaving open the possibility for SOME of said population NOT accepting esp as real, and thereby allowing us to clearly eliminate B.