@ you should BR just as you would for LR.

Second that.

In addition to looking for the same things you would in an LR question (irrelevant subject matter being discussed, the wrong opinion being given, a shift of wording or strength of wording between the question and the paragraph) get good at spotting the questions that ask you about things that are directly supported by the text (which of the following was mentioned/not mentioned, all questions that start with "according to the passage/author/studies cited" and so on) and don't move on until you're sure you've found the EXACT textual support for the answer you think is right. This is sometimes quite difficult to do under time pressure, especially because we get flustered and forget to identify these questions as such (oh, this is a "directly supported" question, let me find exactly where the support is).

Do you do blind review (BR) at all? That means that when you take the test you circle the questions you're not sure about. Then you go over them after the test (BEFORE looking at the answers), preferably on a clean, unmarked copy of the test, and take as much time as you need to be sure of your answer. Record those answers as your BR answers.

It is much more beneficial to find out why an answer is correct on your own (or at least try very hard) without time constrains rather than passively look at someone else's explanation, which may work great for the way they think, but not for the specific way you naturally go about finding the right answer.

BR is where the biggest gains happen, so if you don't do it you're shortchanging yourself

@ totally agree, it is a pretty unmemorable topic lol. The stim started by mentioning how people/surveys(?) claim that success required something (good luck, I think?) and then argued that this was wrong since success actually required hard work. It was a flaw question and I think it was trying to play on sufficient/necessary confusion, but wasn't quite sure. Sorry I don't remember much else, but hopefully it might ring a bell? Really hoping it was experimental... couldn't get a grasp on it for some reason!

That is starting to ring a bell, actually. Survey said something else (seed money maybe?) was needed for success. So, unfortunately it was probably real.

@ Just a quick question, since you seemed to have only gotten 2 LRs -- do you remember having a question about success requiring hard work (flaw question, I believe)? Trying to see if that one was experimental or not... Thanks!

I'm so sorry to not be able to help - I don't remember a question about hard work, but it's also not one of those topics where I can say for sure I remember NOT having a question about hard work (like fairy circles - I'm sure I'd remember that, so I can say with some level of confidence that I didn't have it). Hard work is just such a "vanilla" topic, and flaw questions are also kind of unmemorable at least for me. Do you remember anything else about it?

@ I had 3 LR so thought I'd add in a few questions that I haven't seen mentioned yet. One talked about aliens communicating with Earth. Another talked about a benefit from eating cereal. The other was about diabetes.

I had two LR and I'm pretty sure I remember something about intelligent aliens close by communicating with us. Also about how people who do something good (can't recall exactly what) eat cereal. I'm not sure about diabetes - there's always something on diseases, so I'd need a bit more context to remember for sure.

@ 3 LRs here as well. I've gotten a lot of feedback on reddit confirming my suspicion that the following questions were experimental: the question about Mexican stone masks with quartz residue in them and then the question about AI making good music. Could anyone else corroborate this (e.g. if you had 2 LR and don't recognize these)?

Can't recall these from my 2 LR sections, so I'd go with experimental

@ it's 63.1.19. I completely forgot to point that out....

I'm in the quick read camp as well. Of course ideally you'd want to work on your timing and moving on strategy to make sure you're not in this situation, but let's assume you're already doing this and asking for the odd occasion when it might still happen in spite of your best effort.

You should be able to give the passage a reasonably thorough read in 2 minutes, and have 3 left to answer questions - 30 seconds per question, give or take.

That's where it becomes crucial to move quickly - if the answer doesn't jump at you immediately, pick one of the answers you haven't eliminated (assuming you CAN eliminate at least a couple quickly) and MOVE ON.

Don't look at your watch - that wastes time - just move as fast as you can, bubble your best bet, move along.

If you find you've reached the end and time still hasn't been called, then you can go back and read through the questions you couldn't answer confidently on the first go.

I was in this exact situation in June. Not something I expected, I don't generally have trouble finishing RC, but it happened. The proctor called 5 minutes and I still had one question left of passage 3. I answered that as fast as I could and moved on to passage 4. Luckily it was a straight forward science one so a quick read took probably took less than 2 minutes, and I was able to get through all the questions. There was even enough time to check on a couple where I picked what looked like the right answer without checking the remaining ones. I got the last question of passage 3 wrong, but I got all of passage 4 ones right, so 5 minutes CAN be enough.

Don't give up on the passage and don't give up on any of the questions without at least giving them a quick look. Chances are, if you usually finish in time and this one time you didn't, there was a hard passage that used up a lot of time, so chances are good passage 4 will be much easier.

So, for a "principle" you need to think the same way you would for a SA question (that's why 7Sage calls them pseudoSA questions). We are looking for the principle that covers/justifies the whole gap (more than the gap is OK, less is not). Unlike for a SA question, where the resulting argument needs to be airtight, for a justifying principle/PseudoSA there can be slight "misalignments" as long as they don't involve the core of the issue (the thing that needs to be "justified").

Answer A doesn't cover the whole gap because it says "show people doing things that endanger their health", whereas the argument talks about "promoting" in general.

You can promote smoking in many, many ways that don't show people smoking, so that's a pretty big loophole that's not addressed by A. (Incidentally there are laws in parts of the world that prohibit on screen smoking but stop short of banning all advertisements for smoking).

Answer E fills the gap and then some "advertisements should promote only healthful products" is definitely more than we need, because it might lead to a ban on advertising for cars and bank accounts, but it does bridge the gap completely.

If smoking is unhealthy AND advertisements can only promote healthful things, then the government should ban ads promoting smoking.

You might notice that there is a slight disconnect even in E (that's why it's a "principle that would justify" rather than a pure SA). There's a slight leap between "advertisements should only do A" and "government should ban ads that do /A". This is OK. The principle that "advertisements should only do A" would indeed justify the actions of a government that would choose to ban advertisers from doing /A.

Interbreed means that they can mate and have viable offspring.

The reason I think this question is so hard is that I feel like it relies on people being aware that interbreeding is only possible in species that are genetically similar enough (although what's similar enough can vary greatly - for instance horses can interbreed with zebras even though they are different species with different numbers of chromosomes, but certain species of crow don't interbreed with each other).

It also relies on people somehow realizing that it's this impossibility of interbreeding when the genetic differences are too great that's the crux of the argument. Essentially you have to read the premises and "translate" them to mean

"The genetic difference between modern humans and Neanderthals are too great to make interbreeding possible, therefore we think that the difference between homo sapiens and Neanderthals were also too great to make interbreeding possible".

Once you get to that, you can see that the assumption is that the differences used to be at least as big as they are now, which is what C is saying.

It's getting to this translation that is the difficult part - I think a basic knowledge of genetics helps you interpret the premises the way the authors want you to interpret them. In the absence of such knowledge, eliminating the other answers would get you to C. Like I said, I eliminated the other answers and only when I was left with C it dawned on my why it was right, because only at that point I realized what the premise meant.

This is a very hard question, and the only way I arrived to C was to first eliminate every other answer - fortunately the wrong answers are quite obviously wrong.

But why is C right?

There are many reasons we might consider deciding whether or not Homo Sapiens interbred with Neanderthals (proximity, presence in modern humans of traits present in Neanderthals but not Homo Sapiens, genetic compatibility between the two "old" species that would make interbreeding possible, etc).

HOWEVER, the argument only gives us one consideration, basically stating.

The DNA of current people and that of Neanderthals is quite different.

That means that the ancestors of current people did not interbreed with Neanderthals.

The only way that (somewhat fuzzy) premise supports the (very strong) conclusion is if you take it to mean "the DNA of modern humans is different enough from that of Neanderthals to make interbreeding impossible" (the same rationale you'd use to argue that horses don't interbreed with giraffes).

Notice they don't say "there's no trace of the Neanderthal's DNA in modern humans so we don't think they interbred", although that's how a lot of people would interpret the premise. They just say "there are big differences". How big? We don't know. But we do know they are big enough for a specialist to conclude there was no interbreeding.

Answer C eliminates the potential objection that maybe the DNA of homo sapiens was closer to that of Neanderthals, so even if a modern human wouldn't be able to interbreed with a Neanderthal, a homo sapiens still could.

I think JY diagrams it as /Y-->(/L(--)O)

Alternatively you can diagram it as /Y-->(/O(--)L), which is the same exact thing, just showing the contrapositive of the embedded conditional.

I like having the rule in one place as opposed to separate lines, because as soon as I see /Y I know I need to trigger the relationship in parantheses.

If you're not comfortable with the biconditional you can also notate it as

/Y-->L/O (where L/O is supposed to be whatever your notation is for "L and O are not together". For me I put them in a vertical box with a slash through, but I can't do that in this text box, so I typed them as L/O).

And you are right, the contrapositive states that if you have both L and O in or both L and O out then Y has to be in.

This might be one of the instances where it's worth writing down the contrapositive.

I'd write it as

LO -->Y where "LO" are supposed to be on vertically on top of each other and boxed to signify they are together.

I hope that's clear enough.

Essentially, Y out triggers L/O apart and LO together triggers Y in, however you want to notate it.

@ Can anyone confirm whether the LR section that started with the baby monkeys imitating scientists was real or experimental?

Real

@ Not sure if this question is from the experimental section or not:

It was something like a socioculturalist talking about telephones, television, and mass media don't think critically and something about only protection from political degogaumetes (no effin clue) is critical thinking and it was a could be true EXCEPT

That's from a real LR. I only had two and definitely had this.

I think this comes down to JY's advice to always look how a new rule interacts with existing rules. That's exactly what JY is doing: writing down K(Monday) -->G(Tuesday) and immediately looking how that combines with the other rules. We already know that G and H are separated, taking up two days and that the (LP) group takes the third day, so now you know that G is taking Tuesday, K is on Monday and therefore LP have to be Wednesday. H can't be with G, so it's also on Monday, and that leaves S for Tuesday.

Same for the other conditional.

So, it's not so much that he's decided to write down a fully solved board for the conditional, but that he looked to see how it interacts with the other rules and realized that it results in a fully solved game board.

Incidentally, for me this game illustrated the power of the FoolProof method. I don't typically watch JY's explanations unless I'm really at loss for a game, but every time I do a repeat of the game I try to do the best job I can solving it (as opposed to just remembering how I solved it last time). At some point during my foolproof efforts it clicked for me that this is how you do this game most efficiently - not because I'd seen a similar game before, but because practicing countless games countless times I'd gotten better at quickly pushing rules together and the inference just jumped at me in a way it hadn't before.

I think you can say that the phrase about the Greeks is where the author is going with the argument. However, the "meat" of the argument is going to be over the distinction between an individual having the power to decide and a collection of individuals having the power to decide - so the flaw to be matched will be in the connection between the premise and the "subconclusion". All answers have some sort of intro sentence/overall conclusion, so they all match the original in that respect.

I think it would be highly unusual for a "match the flaw" question to have two answers that match the huge, glaring flaw between the premise and the subconclusion perfectly and are distinguished by how well they match the connection between the subconclusion and the overall conclusion.

I think that's why JY is identifying the "it is no less wrong" sentence as the conclusion - to let us know that this is where we need to focus our attention.

If this were a question about "what's the conclusion of this argument" I think you are right that the first sentence is trying to be the overall conclusion, but I have a feeling the connection would have been a bit tighter and more obvious (like "Greeks erroneously believed democracy was morally superior").

Hi, @.lopez - it is never the case that one answer is "more right" than the others. There is always only one right answer, and 4 very wrong answers. This is a general rule that comes in very handy because it changes the way you think about reading answers. Never try to find how an answer (other than the one right one) can, maybe, perhaps be right - focus on confirming what exactly makes it obviously, hopelessly wrong (obvious for LSAT questions is a lot more subtle than real life obvious).

Now, for the question at hand.

The error in the stimulus is an illegal negation.

If it were not legal to litter-->city should provide trash cans.

Inference:

If legal to litter --> city doesn't need to provide trash cans.

So, they take

/A-->B

and infer

A-->/B

For answer A, there's no such illegal reversal. The flaw there is mistaking a necessary for a sufficient

If holiday -->bakery closed

Inference:

If bakery closed-->holiday

If A-->B

wrongly infer

If B-->A

To have A match the flaw in the original stimulus, the inference should have said "but today is not a holiday, therefore the bakery will be open"

Answer D has the same flaw as the original

If flight not on time-->miss meeting

Inference

Flight on time-->not miss meeting

/A-->B

infer

A-->/B

I think it's clarified some things about flawed arguments, so I am now able to better articulate why an argument is flawed, rather than go by "gut feeling". It's also made me a lot more aware of the precise use of words to convey specific meanings, not just by LSAT writers, but by other people who are very aware of the impact their words can have and watch what they say very carefully (you can really notice this with politicians, especially those with a law school background - the heavy overlap is not accidental).

I would have made the same deduction, and I think "exactly" does mean that there is at least one witness each day. Otherwise why use "to take exactly three days, M, T, W" and not "to be conducted M to W"?

In this case fortunately it doesn't matter, because the rules place at least one witness on each day, but I think you're right.

Congratulations on the 176 average!

And I echo the suggestions of others - do whatever you need to do to not freak yourself out before the test. Your knowledge is all there, the mastery is there, the sharpness is there and they'll stay there with 2 PT's a week.

The only thing standing between you and that 176 on the real thing is your mental game. Not a couple of extra sections of drilling, not a quick revisit of the curriculum, but how closely you'll be able to replicate your PT performance on the real day. So, do whatever you like to do to stay calm, cool and in control and direct all the nervous energy of waiting for D-day into something positive.

It's true that we don't know what you specifically are capable of. That's why nobody will say it's impossible to achieve what you're trying to achieve. But based on real life data, it's very unlikely.

Only 2% of all the people taking the LSAT get a score above 170.

I'd venture a guess that a good chunk of them are "unicorns" - people who scored >160 on their diagnostic.

I'd also say that the vast majority of the remaining ones studied longer than 2.5 months. That's certainly the case for a lot of the people on 7Sage who achieved scores >170.

This leaves a few open slots for semi-unicorns: the people who started with a low diagnostic because they really had no idea how the LSAT works, but saw amazing increases after going through some form of studying because everything went click, click, click chapter after chapter - somehow they had the fundamentals, but didn't know how to apply them to the LSAT, and a couple of months of studying showed them how to do just that.

If you feel you're in the latter category, and your 146 to 157 increase came from going through a quarter of the curriculum and being able to 100% get the questions relating to what was covered in that quarter, then I'd say keep doing what you're doing and you're in good shape.

If the increase came after going through the whole curriculum and some practice tests, then please keep in mind that points do become harder and harder to get the closer to get to 180, and the next 13 points just might take longer than the first 11. You don't need to make a decision to withdraw now. You can keep a steady study schedule (1-2 PT's a week, thorough BR, use the analytics, review and drill your weakest spots, read dense material and FoolProof the games) and make a decision mid-September. If by then you're scoring consistently >170, go ahead and take the test. If you're not, postpone to December and give yourself more time.

The worst thing you can do is to panic and start cramming like 60 hour weeks or 5 PT's a week or something because you feel that you absolutely need to jump those 13+ points in 45 days.

That will just burn you out and you'll be left feeling discouraged because "you gave it your all" and it still wasn't enough.

You can get to the 170 - maybe in a month, maybe in 3, maybe in 6. It's hard for you to know which one it's going to be, and it's even harder for us to know - but go for the score, not for the timeframe.

I would be weary of making generalizations about this being true of every case, or not being true. It is important if it changes the argument in a substantive way (I know that's a wishy washy answer, but it's best to think through each problem rather than rely on shortcuts about what's allegedly "always" the case).

In a lot of cases the correct answer hinges on a shift - it would certainly be one of the first places I'd look. In this case, once you read through the answers you realize that none of them talk about that shift, so whether or not it's important to the validity of the argument becomes kind of irrelevant. You could spend time thinking about whether or not it's a shift that damages the argument (and I believe it doesn't, in this case, because if you can't solve any problems you definitely can't solve the most important ones), but that's not time well spent. Instead you need to quickly regroup, realize that the answer you were looking for is not in the 5 answers provided, and move on to identify which one of them does address a real flaw.

And yes, you are correct, A is the negation/ contrapositive of the premise ("problems can generally not be solved" becomes "few problems can be solved") and the author thinks that's the only cause, while A says that there can be others.

Just as an aside, A could have gone a step further and said "The author doesn't take into account the fact that more people chasing Pokemons could also be a factor in decreasing voter turnout" and it would have been correct, because it would address exactly the same flaw: the premise is not THE ONLY possible cause.

@ I know the material, I just get too focused on time I guess. Any suggestions? If I could fix that, I would be right where I need to be.

You can try and make yourself not look at the watch more than say 4 times in a section (after each game/passage, at the 10, 15, 20 and 25 point for LR). Try to go at a fast but comfortable clip, and skip if needed. See how you do without a lot of focusing on time. This helps find a natural rhythm for answering questions where you know whether you're on track with time without having to check your watch every few minutes.

And yeah, I 100% agree with @ there is no such thing as a "careless mistake", especially if these are questions that you have flagged for BR (I'm assuming they are, because if they were overconfidence errors your BR score wouldn't be much higher than your timed one). Reading mistake or not, something didn't sit quite right with you when you were going through the question but you went with it anyway.

Now that you know you are prone to these mistakes, make it part of your process to check for them. Before you circle and move on, do a quick check - is it something obvious I'm missing here that makes all these answers look wrong, or that makes two of them look kinda right?

You might need to retool your skipping strategy to make time for these checks, but it might be worth skipping and losing a couple of time sinkers that you weren't going to get right anyway for the sake of bagging a couple of the "careless" missed points that would otherwise be easy.

@ Reviewed the mirror passage, but still not sure whether the author agrees with the 1st group of scientist..

The author agrees with the first group and disagrees with the second, as evidenced by two key statements:

lines 22-23 : "this explanation (the second one) is clearly based on a false premise"

lines 48-52 which state that you need to take into account both the object and the observer - that's exactly what the first group of scientists do.

These are the sort of things you should be looking for in a passage - indication of opinion and indication of strength of opinion (clearly based... is different from potentially based... in terms of strength)

These are skills as fundamental as the ability to identify the conclusion in an LR stimulus. Once you know what the author's opinion is, it will be a lot easier to answer the "main point" question, because the main point is generally the author's opinion, and at least 2-3 other questions that relate to that opinion.

Besides that, pausing after each paragraph to summarize what you think it's about, like other people mentioned, is really helpful. You might want to try JY's "memory method" where you write those thoughts down, just to get a handle on how the process works. You won't have time to write things down during the test, but after some practice you should be able to do the summary in your head.

Knowing where the information is because you have an outline of the passage in your head would help answer some of the more "detail" oriented questions.

If you have the time, it might be beneficial to take a break from games before delving back in and implementing the great advice from the people above. Right now it looks like you're psyching yourself out of being able to do well, and continuing down that path could make things worse and might cement the internal belief of "I'll just never be good at games, I know I'm going to mess this up, I always mess this up..."

Focus on something else for a week or two, then come back.

Not with a timer, but with a stopwatch (counting up from 0 instead of down from 35). Tell yourself that you're going to take all the time you need to get it perfectly.

Then start working, focusing on "form"

-are you checking every rule as you write it down? Are you making sure you're reading ALL the words and not just skimming and adding your own interpretation.

-are you going over the rules one last time to make sure they match the stimulus

-are you looking over the rules to see if they can connect together?

-are you taking a little time at the end of the board setup to see if you can remember, from similar games, whether there should be some kind of inference you ought to be making - see Nader's points about games being similar and the same inferences jumping out of the same setups over and over.

-for each question, work through it calmly until you're satisfied that you've eliminated all the wrong answers and you've confirmed the correct one.

Do the "form" exercise until you get yourself back to 100% correct - don't worry how long it takes. It's impossible to think about some of these steps when you're panicking and thinking about the clock. Only after the steps become second nature should you start worrying about the clock.