You should be fine doing this (very quietly) if you're taking the LSAT in a testing center. If you're doing a proctored exam remotely, it's strongly discouraged as they want to ensure you're not speaking with someone on a remote device or nearby. Overall, just try to practice not doing it and strengthen that internal voice in your head, since results may vary across the board.

@soleluna883 I usually put in about 1 - 3 hours each day, but will take a break of about a day or two when I can tell I'm plateauing. This has helped me return to the material with a fresh perspective, and allow my brain to create associations with older material that I remembered from previous study sessions, which has definitely helped certain concepts "sink in" and become more automatic.

I'm not an expert, and everyone's schedule and learning style is different, but I've personally found that anything more than 4+ hours per day is a bit excessive and can lead to poorer quality of learning.

One more thing: Every now and then, take a day or two off to give your brain a break.

From the U.S. National Institutes of Health:

The spacing effect refers to the finding that long-term memory is enhanced when learning events are spaced apart in time, rather than massed in immediate succession (see Ebbinghaus, 1885/1964, for the first study on the spacing effect). The spacing effect is arguably the most replicable and robust finding from experimental psychology. Hundreds of articles, including a number of reviews (e.g., Dempster, 1988) and meta-analyses (e.g., Cepeda, Pashler, Vul, Wixted, & Rohrer, 2006), have found a spacing effect in a wide variety of memory tasks.

In these studies, memory is typically tested by presenting learners with lists of words on two learning schedules, massed and spaced. Massed learning schedules present participants with learning events in immediate succession (i.e., one right after the other). In contrast, spaced learning schedules distribute learning events across time (i.e., separated by an operationally defined amount of time). After a delay, participants are asked to identify or recall the words that they had been presented earlier. Results of these studies have consistently demonstrated that learners have higher long-term performance on spaced learning schedules than massed learning schedules (e.g., Cepeda et al., 2006).

Interestingly, spacing effects appear to be persistent across timescales and development. Spaced learning schedules have been tested over a matter of seconds (e.g., Russo, Mammarella, & Avons, 2002), days (e.g., Childers & Tomasello, 2002), and years (e.g., Bahrick, Bahrick, Bahrick, & Bahrick, 1993). Moreover, spacing effects appear early in infancy (e.g., Gallucio & Rovee-Collier, 2006), in childhood (e.g., Toppino, 1993), in adulthood (e.g., Glenberg, 1979), and in older adulthood (e.g., Kornell, Castel, Eich, & Bjork, 2010). In fact, several other species also demonstrate spacing effects in learning, including simple organisms such as aplysia, a genus of sea slugs (e.g., Carew, Pinsker, & Kandel, 1972). This body of work has suggested that spaced learning is an index of fundamental principles of memory.

Hi Thomas, this is absolutely in the realm of possibility. I was around a 153 for my diagnostic test, and have been studying since August, and now I'm at a 168-173 Unit Test score range. I would say to just stay consistent and practice drilling as much as you can, while finding your areas of weakness, going back to the curriculum for those question types / concepts, and then heading back to drilling. Once you hit a flow state and know the right answers (and not just the one that sounds the best), start testing sections and then nail down one practice test per week.

I also utilized untimed drills (5-10) of level 4 to level 5 questions and really just analyze them, don't look at the time, don't worry about your score, just become acquainted with the questions, practice highlighting the main conclusion and premises, review the answer choices and see how they relate to the stimulus, etc.

I'm not sure what kind of 7sage subscription you have, but if you have access to live classes I HIGHLY recommend attending those and participating in them as much as you possibly can.

Also, a lot of the Analytics on some of the questions can sometimes be disheartening if you're already feeling a bit frustrated or burnt out, but take them more as a guiding North Star than a slap in the face. If/when you join the live classes you'll see a lot of people from all stages of their LSAT learning.

I love everything about these. I love the focus on everyday people who overcame a lot of the same issues that we new test takers go through, and became giant's of wordsmithing and language.

I really don't like the idea of A.) being wrong because it still leaves room for small families being smaller or Large Families becoming smaller large families or small families. The stimulus draws a correlation between family size and likelihood of allergies. It doesn't just draw a simple distinction between two family types (small and large) and says "okay. you've now entered into a nebulous definition of a small family - this is now sufficient to being prone to allergies".

This is a correlative relationship not a logical relationship.

We're approaching this like the latter by eliminating answer A.) on the basis of not knowing if family sizes in this country are small or still large after the average decline in family size.

Small Family -> Prone to Allergies

/Prone to Allergies -> /Small Family

This is not an appropriate approach to relationships of a correlative nature.

Additionally, in the explanation video, EY points out that the stimulus only points out the correlation found in infants, and answer choice A.) highlights incidents of allergies in general, but neglects incidents in infants. However, this is false. The hypothesis in the stimulus specifically mentions that exposure during infancy makes people less likely to develop allergies, not just infants. This led me to pick answer choice A.) due to the fact that answer choice E.) refers only to allergies in children less than age one and children not less than one.

Answer choice E.) requires us to assume that:

• Most day cares are sufficiently large enough of a pool of children to mimic the aspects of a larger family on infants.

• The children being sent to daycare after infancy are being sent to daycares of roughly equal size to the ones being sent during infancy.

• Children spend enough time in day care to be exposed to the full breadth of germs as children living full time with other children are.

• We fully understand the age range that is classified as infancy (1 year < less).

• The Small families that sent their kids to day care after infancy, were of equal "small" size to the ones that sent them during infancy. (The same reason we eliminated A.).

• Daycares would allow the same sanitation standards of a larger family (that is to say not sanitary enough causing the mitigation of allergies).

Granted, the day care scenario creates a rough experiment between two samples of small families, however Answer choice A.) compares families at one or more earlier points in time and families at one or more later points in time. Incidents of allergies at earlier points were less prevalent when families were larger (not definitively "large" or "small").

Just because we're taught to create the perfect experiment by comparing two similar or identical sample sets, doesn't preclude that charting an x (independent) variable (time) and a y variable (size of family) overlaid by the prevalence of allergies is a potentially superior method of proving this point. Not in spite of the century of tracked data, but especially because of the large breadth of time to track these changes. That is, if the span of the study was only over the course of a year, this would critically weaken A.)

@Kevin Lin Thank you! After writing the previous comment, I reviewed some of the material in this course closer and found that as well. Thanks again!

@esheeler

A parallel to this disagreement is the debate within Christian circles of whether or not, if Jesus were to return, would most people (the general public) recognize him as such?

Let's take two fake people: Father Doyle and Pastor Richardson to draw a parallel in this argument.

Father Doyle: If Christ were to return to Earth, the general public would recognize him as such, and we would all rejoice in his return.

Pastor Richardson: You're ignoring the current state of World society. There would still be people in powerful positions who would remain skeptical of the individual identifying himself as Jesus. This group of skeptics will have enough influence over public opinion that you could still have most people question whether or not this bearded man with long hair truly is who he says he is. So Jesus could easily walk among us right now, but be considered a crack pot amongst many other crack pots who claim they're actually Jesus.

@LsatFootpad I managed to get the correct answer on the first try, and on my blind review as well.

Feel free to ignore this wall of text and skip to Answer B.) and Answer D.) comparison.

The way I did this was simplifying what the speakers were saying by seeing what their explicit statements were to flesh out some of the implicit idea(s).

Waller states: "If Extrasensory perception (ESP) were real, most people ("the general public") would have agreed that person or people X demonstrated that they had this."

Explicit text as a conditional:

ESP-Real -> Gen Pub. Agree Real

/Gen Pub. Agree Real -> /ESP-Real

Implicit: "We're not currently in a world where most people agree an instances (or instances) of ESP is real, therefore it doesn't currently exist."

Chin states: "You can't please all of the critics of something being real. There is also some greater flow of causes from these skeptics that will result in a general consensus whether correct or not."

Explicit as a conditional (greater flow):

Cultural Elite Close Minded ESP -> Popular Media Reports -> public opinion will always support skeptics.

Implicit: "We wouldn't know if ESP existed simply because the general public didn't, because it couldn't convince skeptics and skeptics influence the general public."

Both speakers in their implicit statements contend to what is currently happening by contrasting it with a hypothetical.

Waller: The general public does not currently accept any one instance of demonstrated ESP. If ESP did exist, then we would see widespread (not universal, but widespread) acceptance of this instance.

Currently Happening: Public has not accepted an instance of ESP happening, therefore it hasn't presented itself yet.

Hypothetical: Let's say a situation of someone demonstrating that they have ESP is widely (but not necessarily universally) accepted, then that would conclude our debate on ESP's existence.

Chin: Look man, who are we to base widespread consensus as being a solid indicator of something existing or not? You're not going to convince all skeptics and the sources these dissenting skeptics feed their opinion to, and by indirect impact, the general public (most people) agreeing with them. So even if ESP was amongst us, your logic of proving it doesn't exist is faulty.

Currently Happening: An influential apparatus exists that leads skeptical thought to the general public (most people), thus shifting their opinion to that of the skeptics.

Hypothetical: If someone or some people demonstrated some insanely (almost jarringly) convincing capability of ESP, you'll still have skeptics that will shift public opinion to the negative, so we probably shouldn't base that as our method of reasoning.

Answer B.) and Answer D.) comparison

Now to go to the most common incorrect answer choice:

B.) Is a poor choice because of the quantifier "all".

Waller doesn't say that a necessary condition of proving ESP exists is having everyone agree that it does. Simply the general public (most people) that it does. Most people can still exclude all or most skeptics, and still be sufficient to proving ESP's existence in Waller's mind.

Chin explicitly states that nothing will convince all skeptics, and goes on to state that this is why we can't use Wallers method to determine the existence or absence of ESP. If chin said that we could convince all skeptics of a phenomenon, then his argument would fall apart and actually agree with Waller.

D.) is a good choice because it addresses both opinion (Waller) and counter-opinion (Chin).

It takes Waller's (naïve) opinion that if ESP existed then the general public would have already latched on to someone that convinced them they had it.

It also addresses Chin's disagreement on how Waller arrived at this conclusion. Chin says that we'll never know because there are elites that don't agree that ESP exists (possibly included in the skeptics, but we don't know), the popular media reports their opinions, and in turn the public copies their opinions, resulting in no consensus on ESPs existence or absence.

@Kevin Lin Hi Kevin, I chose the correct answer on this using my gut, however I'm lost on the falsity in the logic for Answer Choice D. The logic of the argument seem to be:

Minivans or Larger Sedan -> Lower Risk of Accident

Drive a Minivan -> Lower Risk of Accident

Using Lawgic, at what point does the logic fall apart? Or should I simply seek and destroy the argument using the correct answer choice?