I ended up spending 4 minutes and 24 seconds on this question lol

"Best known for her work with lacquer..." The LSAT writers must have been so pleased with themselves after putting the hardest question's answer in the first few words of the passage. This is even more bold than "silt-clogged rivers" → "impair water-based transportation."

What is the apparent paradox here? Well, it is the question of why advertisements for cigarettes can remain legal despite the fact that governments are justified in trying to prevent them. We just need an answer to show how a government can prevent advertisements for cigarettes without making them illegal, which is what AC (D) does.

For Q23 I did not pick AC (A) because it seemed to me that the author was suggesting these policies are not in the university’s financial interest because they might persuade faculty to leave for commercial firms (with the assumption being that they would lose more money from faculty leaving than they would gain by exploiting them, something I realize now is a little much to assume on this test). I ended up picking AC (D) and now understand that the use of “invariably” makes it a bit too strong, but a more thorough explain action of this question would have been helpful.

AC (C) is telling us that whenever sea creatures have wreaked havoc in a new habitat in the past, it is likely that it was because the creatures were able to survive after being dumped by ships (translating the unless statement is tricky with "rarely, if never," but I think this is close enough).

Does this have to be true? Not really, because maybe most sea creatures that have wreaked havoc in a new environment were released pet goldfish or live bait fish dropped by local fishermen. These sea creatures could very well not have been able to survive being sucked up and dumped out of ballast water, and only wreaked havoc because they were introduced into the environment in a less violent way.

I also didn't have this reasoning while doing the PT, but the way I think about unless statements made me hesitant to pick AC (C). These statements tell you how the world is, and then the "unless" bit gives you the only possible way that the world could be different.

I think you get the most value out of PTs if you save them until after finishing the lessons (or at least quite a few lessons). I went through all of the foundations, logic games, and a decent portion of the LR lessons before taking any more PTs (I was already doing well on RC).

I think that you need to determine for yourself how many of the drills to do. Ideally, you'd do drills until you feel like you have complete mastery (or as close to complete mastery as you can get). Logic games are particularly important to do as many as you can, since a lot of similar situations repeat under different disguises, and the same inferences apply. The same sort of logic applies to LR. A lot of the argument styles and different flaws appear over and over again in different PTs, and having seen them before helps a lot.

I did all of the LG drills, whether or not I felt like I had control over the game type. For LR, If I was uncomfortable with a question type, I'd do all of the drills. If I was confident with a question type, I'd try some of the medium and hard drills and move on if they went well.

I don't think 7Sage has this feature. Elemental Prep has a free tool available called "Camo Review" that does something pretty close to what you are asking. After taking a PT, you can enter your answers for a section and it will give you a list containing all of the questions you got wrong mixed in with some questions you got right. It allows you a chance to correct yourself without seeing the correct answers but also tests your confidence.

After putting in your new answers or sticking with your original answers, it will tell you which questions you got right or wrong the second time around. It won't tell you the right answer. I've used it after blind reviewing to have a second shot at any questions that I got incorrect during blind review.

I think the curriculum suggests working through the course before taking any prep tests (aside from perhaps the first cold diagnostic). I think that this is probably the best way to go about it, since as you say, you would be wasting valuable LG and RC sections by attempting them before you have developed a good strategy to attack them. You want to save clean, never before seen PTs until you are ready to get as much out of them as you possibly can. After working through the core curriculum (or the most important parts and the parts you need help on most if pressed for time), then you might take PTs weekly or biweekly, but I wouldn't do that until after you've studied quite a bit from all of LG, RC, and LR.

Q14 is an acceptable situation question, so I think you might be talking about Q19? Q19 gives us an additional premise that F drives exactly twice during the week, and that F doesn't drive on Tuesday or Wednesday. The situation you have above only has F driving once, so that is why (D) is incorrect. Since it was not violating any of the original rules but instead the one given in the premise, that might be why it looked correct.

Other way to see (D) is incorrect: Since F already can't drive on Monday, that only leaves us with Thursday, Friday, and Saturday as the possible days for the two Fs. Since they can't be consecutive that means F must drive on Thursday and Saturday. J must drive on Wednesday or Saturday, and so if J can't be on Saturday, it must be on Wednesday. Thus, G can't drive on Wednesday.

The stimulus says that the British government has been criticized for not releasing info about UFOs, and that requests for information about them from researchers have been ignored. From these premises, the essayist concludes that this behavior makes us think UFOs are from other planets.

AC (B) and AC (C) are almost identical. AC (B) says that if the British government withholds UFO info, then the UFOs have been established as coming from other planets (check the conditional logic lessons if this translation from "only if" to "if, then" doesn't make sense). AC (C) says that if the British government denies requests for UFO info by civilian researchers, then the government has something to hide.

Both of these sufficient conditions are stated to be true in the stimulus, so the conditionals trigger. AC (C) therefore tells us that the government has something to hide. What does it have to hide? We don't know, that's all it tells us. The government could be hiding some super advanced military technology that it doesn't want to tell anyone about. You might want to assume that the government is hiding aliens, but that's not in the AC.

AC (B) doesn't have us make this assumption. Its necessary condition tells us that the UFOs are from other planets. This is exactly what the conclusion says we would think, and it doesn't force us to make any other assumptions.

I'm in a similar situation recently where my most recent practice tests have been among my lowest scores. The tests I took were in the 80s, and some of those have a little bit of a different feel than some earlier tests. There's always going to be tests that align better or worse with your strengths, which will cause your score to vary a bit. The biggest thing to do is to check in with yourself and assess whether or not you feel like you've improved, regardless of the score. Do you understand the concepts better, and are you able to better see what you're doing wrong? Taking and reviewing practice tests should allow you to identify these areas, and are not just to check to see if your score is going up or down. I'd also recommend slowing down and maybe doing some untimed practice, or single sections to focus on a problem area/build confidence that you can bring into your next PT.

I think it depends on your comfort level within each section. Logic games is usually said to be the easiest to improve in, which I think is accurate. Completing the 7Sage logic games curriculum, really engaging with it, and foolproofing games can get you to score consistently at -1/-2 or better on most logic games sections.

On the other hand, reading comprehension is usually said to be hardest to improve in, and the amount you can improve varies between people.

Logical reasoning is a little bit in the middle, but I'd say its probably closer to logic games than reading comprehension in that you can improve a lot once you develop your approach a little more.

I think the best mindset is not to expect a certain score increase, but to be honest with yourself about whether or not you are learning to understand the test better. After doing the curriculum and practicing, do you feel more confident that you know what you're doing? Can you identify areas where you could improve? Thinking about that can help you identify what your personal room for improvement is.

The conclusion is that judges should never mitigate punishment based on motives. Why? Because motives are not clear cut facts, and a judge might mistakenly reduce someone's punishment because the judge thinks that person has good motives when they really have terrible motives.

Because the political theorist thinks that this proves their conclusion, the political theorist must believe that this consideration outweighs the possibility that people with good motives sometimes deserve less punishment.

AC (B) clearly supports this line of reasoning.

The argument concludes that watching yourself exercising can cause you to exercise more (in general), whereas the premises only concern comparisons between those who watched themselves and those who watched others. What if both groups exercise less after watching the videos, but those who watched others just drop more?

I thought this was a more pressing concern for the argument, so I was drawn to AC (C) over AC (D). But AC (C) is still consistent with the argument because the conclusion is such a weak claim: "watching a recording of yourself exercising can motivate you to exercise more," not that it must motivate you to exercise more. Watching the video could still cause everyone but the most motivated to exercise more, thereby raising the average.

I also thought that AC (C) in Q6 was not ideal, but after considering the conditional it contains, it makes a lot of sense. As JY said, it contains two claims: 1) the movie should have subtitles, and 2) the movie should have subtitles only if faithfully translated.

If we take the contrapositive of the second claim, it becomes: not faithfully translated → should not have subtitles. This is almost exactly what the author states in the passage!

As to the first claim, the author never comes out against subtitles in general, only poorly done subtitles. Thus, it is reasonable to assume, alongside the qualification in the second part of the claim, that the author would be okay with this AC.

We actually do have AC in Wisconsin a lot of the time

Each weaken AC can be seen as attacking some part of the long conditional chain that makes up the premises. AC (A) attacks "increased disp. income→increased consumer goods" because increased prices means that consumers might only be able to buy the same amount of goods as they did before, even if they have more money.

AC (B) attacks "increased consumer goods→increased jobs (in Country X)" because if most goods are produced outside the country, then any of the jobs created to satisfy this demand has no effect on the jobs inside the country.

AC (D) attacks the unstated premise that connects the chain to the conclusion: "increased jobs→increased employment." If the cost of the min wage increase is made up by reducing the workforce (cutting jobs), then any increase in jobs caused by the increased demand for consumer goods might be wiped out by the reductions.

AC (E) attacks "increased (demand for) consumer goods→increased jobs" since if there is a surplus of unused consumer goods, factories can use up this supply before they have to hire more people to increase the amount of consumer goods they are making.

The language in AC (C) is what told me it was incorrect. "Many" is very weak, because for all we know, the vast majority of factories in Country X could pay their workers far below the minimum wage. In this case, even though AC (C) might be true, it has not effect on the argument. That is why it does not weaken.

If you can sit at it like a normal desk and don't press the button, you should be fine. Worst case, they could ask about it and you just explain.

I had an issue that some others had where a notification kept flashing in the top right corner during the test. It was really distracting, so I asked my proctor and they told me to close out of the program, fix it, and log back in. I did and had to wait over an hour to get back in while four different proctors connected and disconnected from me without explanation. I eventually got back into the test and finished without any other troubles, but it wasn't exactly a smooth experience. I'd assume LSAC and Prometric will devote more resources to remote test takers to avoid a similar embarrassment in September, but if you would prefer more certainty, you could try to go in person.

You probably won't run out of PTs by October or November, so you could start doing PTs in the 70s or later. Some of them are quite different from older tests, particularly the 80s, and it would be helpful to familiarize yourself with those newer concepts so you can prepare well in advance of your test date.

Clearly mapping out the argument in comparisons helped me see the assumption better. The conclusion is a comparison between families that use simplified language (SL) and families do not: not SL is equal to or better than SL at learning a language. The premise is a comparison between the same two groups: not SL is same or better than SL at mastering grammatical structure. This makes it clear that we need to bridge the idea of mastering grammatical structure with learning a language.

If you wanted to express these two conditional statements in a single statement, you would write (picked or good) --> ripe. This keeps the information from the original conditional relationships without adding anything else.

(picked and good) --> ripe does not work because it is more restrictive than the two original conditional relationships were separately. If an apple must be both picked and good in order to be ripe, we lose the possibility for an apple to be ripe just because it was picked or just because it was good (these were both possible from the original conditional relationships).

Additionally, when taking the contrapositive of conditionals with and/or components, or becomes and, and and becomes or. E.g. for (A and B ) --> C, the contrapositive is ~C --> (~A or ~B ). Here I'm using "~" to mean "not. For the apple example, the contrapositive of (picked or good) --> ripe is ~ripe --> ~picked and ~good.

I didn't know what the "Tetris effect" was, but now that I've looked it up, it definitely happened to me with LG. I often noticed myself thinking (both in dreams and in real life) in ways that were similar to going through LG problems. I don't think it's super harmful, but if you're worried, you can always take a break to focus on something else or do something fun, especially if it is messing with your amount/quality of sleep. In that case, it would probably be more beneficial to take a break than it would be to get another LG practice set in.

Thank you JY for validating the many feelings I have toward Q7.

Definitely would have chosen AC (D) if I hadn’t read “favoring one literary critic’s beliefs” instead of “favoring one of the literary critics’ beliefs”