You're absolutely right. I just went over my PT48 notes and found that I'd written about 700 words in my notes on Q12 alone lol. Basically tossing up this exact issue where in timed I'd selected C.

Good shit!! congrats!

Awesome job, really agree with your tips. Congrats on a great score!

Awesome timeline that reveals serious effort, congrats!

Thank you for such a detailed and very helpful response Kevin!

To answer your first question, and after doing passage 4 of PT52 again just now, I think I erred when I said I felt "rewarded". This is because, as you point out, you probably don't get any questions wrong with a reading of soft and implicit endorsement. And Q22 is indeed very good evidence that such a reading is actually intended. I remember at the time solving that question via POE without being very happy with it. I guess I was thinking of Q20 and Q27 primarily when bringing this passage up in relation to 82, because the principal thrust of the passage, as indicated by the answers, was to simply defend a theory against a couple of objections. It now seems to me, after your comment, that I may have gotten away with my more neutral reading in 52.

As to 82. Therein lied my confusion on the timed run. I simply couldn't find any answers that supported a reading of neutrality in Passage A. By the time I'd realized something was wrong during timed, I just didn't have enough time left to go back and redo the answers with an amended interpretation. A bit like when you think you're solving a logic game and then suddenly realize from multiple possible AC's that you've mis-mapped a rule. So in my blind review I flipped over to an implicit reading and managed to identify the correct answers. And I definitely have no qualms with bending my knee to the LSAT when it comes to realigning and rehashing my intuitions or even my fundamental approach when presented with good reasons to do so. And you've definitely managed to allay my concern as to why I couldn't initially.

As to the language in Passage A, I would say that by identifying the "problem" inherent in the prudential defense, the author is indeed making an evaluative claim. But not towards judicial sincerity per se, rather to the prudential defense itself. So if asked a question on a neutral reading, it would seem appropriate to say that the author advocates a moral defense of judicial sincerity over a prudential one but is not necessarily arguing for or against judicial sincerity. Similarly, I would say that the author makes a normative claim as to truth telling in a non-legal setting. But whether this should or should not have any bearing on the judiciary remains somewhat ambiguous. It will certainly inform the moral defense, but does it actually raise the position of the author on judicial sincerity to the position of positive advocate? Perhaps it does in soft sense (and that's all we need), given that we're told that the author believes that "truth is an independent constraint on our actions", and so that constraint would hold in all settings, legal included. That in combination with the formal arrangement of the text, e.g. presenting an opposing opinion and then dedicating text to partially rebutting it. As well as the wording used to distance the author from viewpoint of the critics in the first paragraph by constantly reminding us that it is in fact "their" opinion (and not his or hers) thus creating at the very least a starting point for positional departure. Definitely somewhat strained and I feel that I could make a compelling argument for a neutral reading in both 82 and 52. But that's definitely not the job required here. We just need to find the consistency that informs an interpretation from the text AND the answer choices. I think my approach from here on out, until proven otherwise, will be to retain my hesitancy to not over imbue meaning but not quite to the absolute extreme.

Once again, I really appreciate your response which would have taken quite some time, so thank you.

I mean some of these RC questions in this test are just flat out ridiculous. Q13 from the LHB passage and now Q20 of this one...So in order for A to be right, and for us to make any use of the study's results, we have to assume that the relative value or percentage allotted to imported TV programs actually reflects in at least some sense the access to such programs. How on earth is this is line with the type of reasonable assumptions they implicitly espouse in all their other questions. LR questions test this type of exact type of thing explicitly too. E.g. A developing country could have 100,000 minutes per year allotted to imported TV shows, yet in that nation perhaps 0.001% of the population actually has ACCESS to a TV. Conversely, a similar developing country might only show 1000 minutes per year, but 80% of their population has a TV. How does access differ in these two countries? Well who tf can say, may as well flip a coin. There's just no way to legitimately answer this question and Q13 from earlier is even worse far out...

Q13 is just too funny.

AC A literally does nothing btw, here's a few reasons why. 1) It actually tells us that there is in fact a very minute amount of evidence, but evidence nonetheless, that Mars DID experience an increase in intensity of projectiles striking. Granted, this could be explained away by other factors, but it doesn't explain the evidence away. 2) Even if there was 0 increase in intensity, Hypothesis 2 (which supports inner system), could explain why perfectly. Hypothesis 2 predicts that there would be a continuous DECREASE of heavy bombardment over time from billions of years ago to the end. So despite those two reasons, the writers just thought hey for fun let's add D while we're at it, which is an objectively better AC by a country mile, and just say D wrong and A is right! This is a question if ever I've seen one that deserves to be omitted.

Hey dz, I think your intuitions as they stand may be what's causing your confusion here. You can definitely represent these types of statements conditionally, but they should be represented as bi-conditionals. E.g. Most Real (---) Most Truthful. This then means the same thing as Most Real = Most Truthful. The reason why it's a bi-conditional rather than the way you mapped it above is probably best illustrated through a visual example, but I can try give you a written one. Let's pretend that there are only 10 pieces of art in the whole world. Let's say that pieces #9 and #10 are the most realistic of the bunch. Now that would mean that #9 and #10 are also the most truthful, right? So that means that #9 and #10 both share the same 'highest' qualities of realism and truth. That is to say, no other painting can be either more truthful or more realistic than those two. Then, hopefully you can see that any piece that is the most truthful is in fact the most realistic and likewise any piece that is the most realistic is the most truthful. Or you can use the equal sign to say the same thing. Hopefully that clears it up a bit for you.

@ said:

Claim that has consequences: A > B

Consequences proven false: /B

Found claim to then be false > /A

Conclusion: /B > /A

This is not as simple as just negating A, because the AC states that claim (sufficient) > consequences (necessary). I think this is still just the standard contrapositive. Claim is made with attached consequences. Consequences are then negated, then it concludes that the claim can not be true.

Hope this makes sense!

Hmm interesting, I can see how you can use that mapping and that it may be more pertinent in regards to an actual lsat question. Perhaps this is a bit futile without an actual stimulus. But taking lawgirl's comment in isolation, I'm inclined to interpret it as: The truth of A has consequences that are not true. Where A is just any claim, conditional or otherwise. I think a good example is my one from above, but I could also imagine something similar in Peter Unger's "I do not exist" claim. Whereby if the claim is true, it can not actually be made (thus having consequences that are false). Interesting point anyway and I reckon we'd both arrive at the same answer in a test though--- but happy to discuss further if you want to.

Your latter diagram is correct. It's M or W ---> MP. What do you mean you say you "know" it should translate as the former one? I think you might be getting confused by the 'ands' and the 'ors' in your first translation since it doesn't quite capture what's going on in the English statement as you picked up yourself. You've basically answered your own question, so take confidence in that!

Hi there. My first bit of advice would be to know what score you're chasing and whether say around -8 on LR is compatible with your goal score. Given that your posting here I'm going to presume that it isn't. Since you're making ~7 errors in a section post BR, to my mind, that indicates a level of misunderstanding that needs to be redressed at the more fundamental level. If I were in your position, as I once was in fact, I would be asking myself what concepts, rather than question types per se, do I feel unsure about. E.g. Are you confident and fluent in conditional logic when it starts to get messy via verbose language and syntax? Are you confident in identifying and distinguishing a premise from an intermediate premise and either of those from a main conclusion in any given argument? Do you perceive the unity within the logical reasoning framework? etc. If your answer is no to any of those questions, or any question similar, then I would recommend attempting to hone those skills through your resource of choice. So in my view, it would be worthwhile to get back to the basics before doing more timed stuff atm.

Bring in 5 pages of A0 paper and you're set!

I'm doing October but I'll have done every PT from 36-present to timed conditions, while drilling and learning from 1-35 untimed

That's a bit weird since weaken (like all question types in LR to a degree) is only superficially different from strengthen. I would say try to identify what you think it is that is making you feel confident in strengthen questions. That will carry over to weaken questions. How about your flaw question type? If you're struggling there as well, it may mean that you're limiting your critical thinking about an argument in only one direction. You might be subconsciously starting from a point of "how do I make this argument better" rather than a more neutral state. Some traps to be wary of in weaken questions, as well as in flaws, are AC's that look attractive but crucially circumvent the bad or flawed reasoning structure. You can also think about weaken questions as one step removed from necessary assumption questions. What I mean is that the correct AC that hurts, if not ruins, the argument is just a necessary assumption that the test writers have negated for you.

I avg -1 (only on PT's though and haven't taken the real thing yet) and I never finish with time left over, not so much from time pressure, but because this is how I can do the questions most effectively. For me, going back to a question after having read other passages would be fairly futile without rereading the passage again. I much rather devoting time upfront and not rushing as I read, whereas in LR I generally read a lot faster. With that said, I will skip within a passage and then come back to it before moving on.

Not being confident in MC questions would be a big indicator imo and I would focus on labelling every single part of the stimulus until it becomes automatic. After all, main conclusion questions are really the foundation of LR, given that being able to identify the premise(s) and conclusion of any stimulus is necessary for high accuracy. Fluency in LR, especially the newer tests would also translate into better RC scores. And I would most definitely say, given your current average, that a jump into the 160's is possible and in fact likely! gl :)

I haven't noticed any difference between 70s and 80s. I have noticed a different between pre 70s and post 70s though. LR gets more convoluted via denser language and typical phrasings of answer choices are rehashed to say the same thing as they did in the older tests but in quite different ways. Strengthen and Weaken questions also get a lot softer in terms of how much they do for an argument. RC just gets slightly harder while LG has been fairly easy ever since the 40s. I think familiarizing yourself the wording especially of the LR sections of the 80s is the best approach, because LR fluency translates well in helping RC.

In timed I think reading stem first is good. But when you're in an untimed setting I also think reading the stimulus first can be a really valuable heuristic. It can help foster a sense of the broader unity of logical reasoning and the ways in which a given stimulus can lend itself to a variety of different stems.

@ No problem, you are most welcome. I definitely agree that the RC theory is lacking. But a rigid approach towards RC, like that of LG, is pretty much impossible. That's also part of the reason why I think LSAC are making RC harder and keeping LG fairly consistent. As to advice for RC, a few things come to mind. First, actually aim to make your mistakes in RC rather than LR or LG. 175+ is roughly 4 mistakes, so something like -1 in LR and -3 in RC I think is pretty achievable when LG is clean. I think breathing room in terms of mistakes made is best left for RC, specifically because of some of those hard passages, questions will have 5 pretty bad AC's, but one stands out as "better than everything else" rather than as "good". Secondly, I would actually avoid published stories that are condensed for ease of reading. This type of writing has done the hard work for you. I think there's some merit to using such sources to familiarize with the jargon, but it sounds like that's not the issue for you. My advice, and I would only suggest this to people aiming for that type of score, is try find some texts that are verbose, unfamiliar, and overwhelming. The first person who comes to mind for me is Hegel. I also think reading Hegel kills two birds with one stone, not only is his writing notoriously dense but his philosophy is somewhat relevant to the logic of the lsat. Let me give you a quote in a foreword to his Phenomenology of Sprit (online for free in pdf form) made by J.N. Findlay. "Hegel does not confuse the necessary with the unique...he does not identify a necessary sequence of phases with the only possible sequence that can be taken". Sound familiar haha? Just diving into a chapter will be incredibly overwhelming, but I think it could be valuable for you. Skip the preface and go to an early chapter and aim to take on a few paragraphs at a time and parse them out for a semblance of meaning. I guarantee it'll be far harder than anything that will ever appear on an lsat. Same can be said for the journals section on Science.org, where their target audience is not the average reader. A couple of paragraphs from such an article is way harder than any passage we could be given. Ok, and finally, I would say pay very close attention to the question stem in RC. Skim reading a stem, which you can generally get away with in LR, can result in tons of lost time and errors. Treat unique question stems in RC as their own little LR stimuli. Sink you teeth into little bits of those texts and I can say with some certainty, that you will find it easier to comprehend the RC passages and as a corollary the questions will be too.

Well there's a lot to unpack there. I'm going speak on two different cases. They differ in that they depend upon the score you're aiming for in timed. If your goal score is anywhere from mid to high 170's (if it isn't, just skip this lengthy paragraph), then the fact that your blind review is very similar to your timed score tells you that you're simply not ready and that you need to further your understanding in order to be capable of such a score. Whether it's because of reasons A, B, or C as you mention, they all fundamentally point back to a lack of understanding rather than a lack of time. Aiming for such a score, the fact that you're not changing answers from timed to BR means that there might be some faulty habits have become entrenched in your way of thinking about LR and RC, which presumably get exacerbated by techniques that the test writers use in more difficult questions (extremely dense language in stim and/or ACs, very subtle language shifts, answer choices that use the same core but are each modified slightly etc.) People in my study group aiming for 175+, where we BR between 178-180 consistently but by no means achieve such scores in timed consistently. But our philosophy is complete understanding as to why each and every answer is right/credited, and why each and every answer is wrong/not credited. It sounds like you are chasing that understanding but can't get their yet. So, you can throw in the towel and check the answers, saving time sure but thereby eliminating any chance you have of overcoming the thing that's causing you to hesitate by yourself. Or you can force yourself to realign your perspective, this is something many high level scores talk about and with which I must agree. You do this first in BR, and then eventually, you can actually employ the same forced perspective shift in timed sections as well. It's genuinely amazing and I've found that it actually works. Hyper-skipping questions during a timed section and then returning to them once you've finished the other questions is just the BR on crack. If that's something like your end goal, keep BR'ing properly, i.e. tracking answers to questions that you are 100% sure are correct AND also 100% sure that the other 4 are wrong. If you get questions wrong when this happens, as it sounds like it can in scenario B for you, you must take note of those questions, and to use JY's phrase, must quickly undo your reasoning. Distinguish those types from questions where you're 100% sure an AC is right, but can't articulate why another answer is wrong. Also vice versa for questions solved by POE. And finally, the questions where you're just lost, which sounds like scenarios A and C for you. A and C are objectively better stages to be at compared to B. At least you know that there's something missing. After all, the BR is an internalized Socratic method par excellence---you're honing your mind's ability (if it were a car) to quickly react to an oversteer, an understeer and every other type of possible misstep under the sun---but it is incredibly time consuming, mentally fatiguing, and quite often utterly frustrating. But if it were easy, we'd have a 180 mean score.

On the other hand, if you're consistently scoring at or above your target score. Then it sounds like the blind review has done its job. It's gotten you to the point where you want to be and that's awesome. In order to maximise the time you have left before your actual test, it may be worth pressing ahead to explanations of the questions that are causing you grief. Take in the explanation, see if their explanation makes sense and aligns with your reasoning. If something specific, such as RC inferences are typically troubling you, double down on the methods you are using (re-watch the RC vids in the curriculum, specifically some of the "harder RC passages" where you focus on inference questions exclusively through drills). Remember inferences are on the far end of the Explicitly Stated vs. Strongly Implied spectrum but they very much still require implicit support. I could give you plenty of little tips that pertain to RC inference such as trappy answers tend to copy verbatim parts of the passage, they also tend to go way too far by inferring primary causes etc. Learning these patterns may be more useful and applicable for your actual test rather than devoting significant time to any one question. So, assuming you're at or above your target score then I believe you are probably better off spending the majority of time shoring up the techniques that could gain you an extra point or two rather than spending it on a couple of individual questions during BR with your test coming up soon. That's a lot of words but hopefully at least somewhat germane.

I got to A through POE because everything else was unsupported. But I was definitely hung up on the term paradoxical like some others. To me there really is no paradox going on. We are told that the long historical view is necessary to understanding common law, that's fine. It's not like the modern study of law doesn't take a long view--we are explicitly told contemporary students go way back into the past looking at medieval cases, interpreting old maxims etc. The only difference between the two schools of thought about history is the academics view it as timeless, rather than as constantly evolving like our author thinks they should. Just a clash of methodology/interpretation rather than any kind of paradox.

I've been reading the full opinion on the overturning of Roe v Wade. Here's a link if you want

https://d3i6fh83elv35t.cloudfront.net/static/2022/06/19-1392_6j37-2.pdf

@ @ @

Great diagnosis by Kevin and great discussion thread. I have a marking in my notes on this exact question that reads "Interesting question re logical indicators...employing the sufficiency indicator blindly here actually runs you into confusion".

The way I mapped the first statement of the stim was also as a biconditional. Test this by simply omitting the words "the only". You are left with "Pizzerias are restaurants that routinely record the names, addresses, and menu selections of their customers". We can safely map P ---> RR from that. So we have to ask ourselves just exactly what function "the only" is serving here. The answer it seems is that it's playing an exclusionary role. It's saying that no other type of restaurant routinely records names, addresses and menu selections. So putting them together you get P (---) RR which allows for E to work perfectly.

Consider a more stock standard biconditional. "I walk my dog if and only if it's sunny". You can omit the "if" and map it as WD ---> S, but you lose some of the meaning of that statement if that's all you take away from it. That's definitely not to say that "the only" always indicates an biconditional relationship, merely that in specific contexts it can. "The only day I walk my dog is on Wednesday", for instance, is not a biconditional unless you actually focus on a slightly different aspect of the statement as Kevin points out. Something like Wednesday (---) Day that I can walk my dog. Just writing now, I believe this omission test may act as somewhat of a rule. If you drop "the only" from the statement in question and the conditionality doesn't change then it's probably not a biconditional. E.g. dropping "the only" in "Hard work is the only way to be successful" doesn't suddenly mean hard work is sufficient for success. Interested to hear your guys' thoughts on this.

I think this question also plays into a forgotten or ignored aspect of another type of conditional statement. Consider "Only A are B" type of conditionals. E.g. "Only humans are capable of happiness". By mapping it constantly as "Capable of Happiness ---> Human", one may develop the tendency to ignore the contrapositive and brush over the fact that we are simultaneously told that no other thing can be capable of happiness.

Absolutely agree and can vouch for this method anecdotally.

What A's got going for it is that it makes objectively fewer mistakes in copying the stimulus than does D. P1 and P2 of A both match the stim, but the conclusion doesn't. Whereas only P1 of D matches and both P2 and C are different. But, I think the biggest problem is that D actually captures the idea of beliefs in the stim conclusion vs. simply the idea that the state of affairs of the world are decreed with certainty in the conclusion of A. So we are forced to gauge whether the fewer mistakes of A outweighs D, despite D being closer in it's representation of/capturing the subjective aspect of the stim through the use of beliefs that A ignores. A presents a purely objective world, whereas the stimulus tempers such a world through the subjective lens of beliefs about the objective world in the conclusion. After all, a false belief requires two things-- a belief about the state of affairs and such state of affairs actually being false-- something being false, on the other hand, just requires one thing.

With that said though, I've definitely seen questions that are way worse and way more unfair and unjustifiable than this one when it comes to slightly bad AC's being credited.