Hi all!
First off, I want to say thank you to the 7sage community and the various tutors that have helped me along the way, @Mike_Ross @"Heart Shaped Box" , and @BinghamtonDave . All of them have been invaluable in the process of “taking down” this test! Couldn’t ask for more.
I imagine some of you might wanna know how I got here. Allow me to explain.
Well, it started in July 2019 with a Testmasters course (terrible decision I know) and consisted of about 2 years of actual studying. To say that it’s been a rollercoaster of emotions would be an understatement. Since undergrad was fairly easy, I thought I’d study for 3-4 months and ace this test like usual. Boi was I wrong!!!!
It was difficult, I felt incompetent, & I wanted to give up. But, (I know, cliche) I persisted. I drew motivation from various posts here which pushed me to continue. Simultaneously, I began to search for other sources for help. The most useful for me were:
The Loophole by Ellen Cassidy
Khan Academy
Manhattan Prep's forum
I'll explain what from each of those sources were most helpful, starting with The Loophole.
While the book doesn't necessarily offer anything novel in terms of LSAT "theory", it did have 2 aspects that I found super beneficial. The first being how the book teaches you to find the assumptions in an argument. I struggled with this a lot before reading the book. It asks you to find the loophole (the thing that would ruin the argument) by asking "what if...this bad thing is true?" For whatever reason, asking "what if" after reading an argument helped me get to the assumptions easier. Eventually, I stopped having to do this as I imagine I internalized it and assumptions were just so apparent then.
The second element of the book and probably most beneficial to my studies was the translation drill. At its core, the drill asks you to read a stimulus once and then write out what it said w/o going back. This does two things: it improves your memory but more importantly, for me, it examines whether you actually understand what you're reading and it turned out I didn't. In my experience, it was a combination of reading too fast, nerves, and not being focused that were isrupting my comprehension. I had to force myself to slow down and to focus on the subject and verb predicate (I also tried to visualize as I read). The nerves went away with successful repetition.
Khan Academy
I was thoroughly pleased with their RC strategies. The most important thing to success in RC is that you understand the function of paragraphs with respect to the others and the function of sentences with respect to other sentences. The former is pretty straight forward so I'll just explain what I mean by the latter. Sometimes you'll come across a sentence within a paragraph that seems to not fit within the given paragraph that it's in. But, the thing is, it absolutely fits. You just didn't understand its function in relation to the rest of the paragraph. This is by design to confuse you. Your goal is to connect the dots to the other sentences.
KA advocates that you think of why the author included something, which is really just asking what the function of something is.
Manhattan Prep Forums
I'm not sure this needs any explaining. Whenever I felt I still didn't quite understand an LR question after watching a 7sage explanation vid and perusing the comments, I would go straight to their forums. Great written explanations there.
Those are the highlights of my journey. Of course, lots of drilling and BR and thoroughly examining my weaknesses on spreadsheets.
If anyone has any questions, feel free to message me!
And before I go, I just want to say to anyone barely starting off or if you've been at it for a while that it's normal to feel overwhelmed or discouraged. Remember, progress is not linear. You're capable. And with diligent study, you can reach your goal score!
What worked best for me was when I began to read to understand. IE reading with the purpose of understanding exactly what it is I was reading. Your comprehension should always be your priority (tho on certain Q types the degree of analysis varies eg MCs). You'll be surprised how much you read w/o actually capturing what the sentence is saying. This confusion is exacerbated with the introduction of new concepts, such as UQs and EQs, and focus on Q type strategies. A great drill for this is the Loophole's Translation drill. Essentially, it has you paraphrase every sentence after/as you read it. You can find out how to do it on reddit. Do a section a day for 2 weeks. This will help on pretty much every stimulus, not just C-C. The list of phenomenon indicators also helps. These can all indicate a phenomenon or correlation:
-An event
-An occurrence
-A %
-A statistic
-Comparative statistic
-A Date
-A Trend
-A correlation
Typically, the stim will deal with a correlation and will directly or indirectly imply a casual relationship between the 2 things being correlated. Realize that most of the time, they're not gonna tell you "hey look this is a correlation. Therefore, A causes B." Make a list of causation indicators as well