After a disappointing 2022-23 cycle, I decided to retake the LSAT one more time. I scored a 172 in June 22. Although it's only a 2 point increase, I'm really happy and looking forward to applying.
Gotta thank @Mike_Ross for not only his tutoring help but his words of encouragement when I was so down. To anyone thinking of retaking, I know it's hell but it's worth it!
Awesome post as always!
What’s your LR BR look like?
Ensure you’re getting through the first 10 Qs fairly quickly so you can give yourself more wiggle room toward the end. The first 10 are typically the easiest so you shouldn’t 2nd guess yourself as much on those.
Most of the sources of info I know of require prerequisite Econ knowledge but I think if you learn the basic laws of supply and demand, you’ll be in good shape. You could use khan academy for that!
Thank you to everyone for the comments! I appreciate it greatly. I'm definitely in a better place now, though ofc it has its ups and downs.
Congrats and thank you for sharing your journey. These are some great general tips. Do you have any specific methods that led you to see improvement in your LR? I'm currently sitting at -4 to -7 consistently and havent been able to knock it lower. I have read the loophole but I need to revisit the concepts, as you mentioned. Do you remember something "clicking" as you went about doing more problem sets? Did you ever focus on certain LR question types or did you use a wrong question journal to track all the questions you got wrong? Thanks.
@ajamal2479 doing the translation drill was really what helped me most as I was finally understanding what I was reading, which is imperative to this test. I can't really point to anything that made stuff "click." When I first started studying I did sets by Q type but eventually didn't feel that was needed anymore. I used a wrong Q journal toward the 2nd half of my studies and occasionally, if a pattern emerged, would drill by type. You should ensure that you rarely miss a question on 1-10 and that you get to Q11 in around 12-14 mins. Well those are the goals I gave myself and they could work for you. Practicing drilling Qs 1-10 with those parameters really helped me get comfortable with moving quickly on early Qs.
Thanks for sharing your story and I'm sorry for your loss.
I just have one question. Did you study full-time for 2 years?
@jgarnica961 I studied full time for about a year and a couple months. I guess if there's a silver lining to the pandemic it was that UI helped me study full time.
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!
For example:
Conclusion: Maddy can't wait to eat her delicious food tomorrow morning.
NA: Maddy will be able to eat tomorrow morning.
In my example, you can see that if the conclusion is true, the NA HAS to be true, too.
A question you can ask yourself to find the NA is: If the conclusion is true, must this NA also have to be true?
I hope this helps :)
@madelyndomek912 Hey thanks for your response, though I’m not sure the NA in your example is correct. Even if Maddy doesn’t have the ability to eat tomorrow morning for whatever reason, she can still be eagerly waiting to eat.
A better version of your example, I think, would be:
C: Maddy will eat delicious food tomorrow morning.
NA: Maddy will be able to eat tomorrow morning.
But @estebanb3d194 I really like the end of your post about thinking about NA ACs as if this is what the argument is assuming. My performance on SA and NA are polar opposites, and in general I'm just least confident in NA questions and going through the AC's.>
@kevin734-1 thanks! It works for me. It’s what I did to get a 172 on this June’s test!
Thank you all for your responses! All very insightful and helped clear things for me. I completely forgot about this post. I made one night at like 2am when I couldn’t fall asleep loll
I think I reasoned my way though this as I wrote it out. Figured I’d post it in case anyone might be helped by it. Please point out any issues.
I get that every NA is an assumption the argument actually makes. Why? bc for an argument to work, the NA must be true which entails that if the argument has a NA, the argument is obviously making that assumption. But is the inverse also true? Is every assumption the argument actually makes a NA?
My understanding is that most SAs are assumptions we impose on the argument, not ones that the argument actually makes. Sometimes the assumption the argument makes happens to also be a SA. Eg
P: A
C:B
A->B is the NA as well as SA. This seems to affirm every assumption argument actually makes is a NA.
Is it wrong to think of SAs as assumptions we impose on the argument?
Are there times an argument actually makes an assumption that isn’t necessary? I guess technically there could be an assumption within a stimulus or argument that’s unrelated or irrelevant to the conclusion’s reasoning and therefore it being false wouldn’t wreck the conclusion and isn’t needed. LSAT typically doesn’t do this though.
Okay I think I figured this out. Just bc the argument assumes something doesn’t make it a NA but every NA is something the argument assumes. So to check whether a NA Q ac is wrong, ask if the arg assumes that AC. If it doesn’t then eliminate. 8/10 times if argument does assume AC, it’s the correct ac. That’s typically what I do when I’m a bit unsure on NA Qs instead of negation test. More intuitive for me.
@andrewyang9999298 said:
@millisajous1934 said:
@andrewyang9999298 Do you mind sharing what you currently avg on RC?
I'm still trying to narrow down my variance in my RC scores. Right now, it's between 2 - 6 questions wrong per section on average. Sometimes I have a bad day and get 8 questions wrong. Sometimes I have a really good day and get 1 or 2 questions wrong. But before this, I used to get around 10 questions wrong consistently!
Coming back to this after some time and was wondering whether you read passages in a specific order or if you do them as they come up, 1-4.
Damn I thought figurative art would mean it were more abstract lol slowed me down during the read
@andrewyang9999298 thanks! My RC varies so much. I’ll start trying your approach and see how it goes!
@andrewyang9999298 Do you mind sharing what you currently avg on RC?
Is there a specific name for this type of bias?
#help (Added by Admin)
@itanajbt94 said:
@itanajbt94 said:
@itanajbt94 said:
it's the same thing
Thanks! Just read your old post asking sagers if you should be taking PTs on law hub or 7sage and the responses. Curious what approach you recommend taking now?
Hey! All personally I've kept everything in 7sage because of the tracking. I'm taking May 2020 Flex tomorrow and I'm gonna do that on LawHub as like the final practice exam before the real one.
Ah okay. Yeah, the analytics on 7sage is so valuable. Well good luck next week!
@itanajbt94 said:
it's the same thing
Thanks! Just read your old post asking sagers if you should be taking PTs on law hub or 7sage and the responses. Curious what approach you recommend taking now?
I started taking sections on the LSAC’s Lawhub site to try to gain some familiarity with its user interface and one thing that struck me was how difficult it was to use the highlighter tool. I would try highlighting one word and next thing you know half the paragraph was highlighted. Super annoying. This issue occurred during RC sections, which I change the line spacing to its minimum bc is feels easier for me to read. This might very well be the reason for this issue but I’d rather not increase the line spacing.
For those who’ve sat for the digital LSAT/Flex, how similar is Lawhub to the actual test? Did you find difficulty using the highlighter tool like I did on Lawhub?
Recognizing the causal reasoning is key here.
Organic factors cause some type of effect in symptoms of mental illness. There's variation in incidence of symptoms in different countries. Therefore, organic factors in countries must vary also
Argument assumes the only factor affecting symptoms of mental illness is organic factors. What if there are other factors that affect symptoms of mental illness?
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
Not sure there's a list of C-C Qs to drill besides what's on the syllabus, unfortunately. What aspect of that concept aren't you understanding? Do you get how a correlation doesn't always lead to causation? Are you confused on how to strengthen or weaken a C-C argument? When I first started prep I struggled identifying that a given stimulus even involved correlation causation logic. Same with Phenomena stimuli so I made a list of phenomena indicators
Understanding the comparative was brutal on my first read
Thanks for all the comments! When I say low gpa, I mean low compared to the medians at the schools I applied to. Mine is 3.6