@selenesteelman792 said:

Former admissions officer here. I would strongly encourage you to write an LSAT addendum explaining your LSAT history and providing context for the number of attempts. Keep it concise and factual. Don't feel the need to explain how you prepared and studied for each exam. Good luck!

Would a double-spaced half-pager suffice? Always love to hear about insights from professionals!

@sonjabreda246 said:

And for context, my undergrad houses a T14 law school. They instructed me to include an addendum between 2-4 sentences.

Thanks, that's helpful!

Treating this like a LR question, I suspect there's some flawed causal inference going on here :wink: I think the half life of caffeine is supposed to be 4 hours, which means as long as you are not taking in any caffeine 8 hours before bed, your system should be cleared from any caffeine during sleep. It might be that you are not rested from sleep to begin with and you use coffee to keep yourself awake during the day. So you probably need to figure out what's in your habits that is actually disruptive to your sleep.

Although I'm a habitual coffee drinker, green tea is actually awesome for studying. It has both caffeine and L-Theanine which taken together gives you a focused and calm state. That's the place you want to be to tackle this one hell of a test.

@kevin734 said:

The short answer to your question is yes, everything the argument assumes is a necessary assumption.

I think the confusing issue you're running into is one of the big downsides to calling something a "sufficient assumption."

In the LSAT instruction/studying community, we've taken to calling some assumption questions "Sufficient Assumption" and others "Necessary Assumption".

This suggests that there are two kinds of assumptions. But logically speaking, that's not truly correct. There's only one kind of assumption: necessary assumptions. Anything that the argument assumes is a necessary assumption. In fact, outside the LSAT context, there's no such thing as a "necessary assumption" - there's only an assumption. They're one and the same. If something isn't necessary for the argument to assume, then the argument isn't assuming it.

So what, then, is a "sufficient assumption"? It's simply a statement, that if true, would guarantee the conclusion. Sometimes that statement happens to be also a necessary assumption. Other times that statement is not an assumption of the argument, but is just an idea that if true, guarantees the conclusion.

For example,

Premise: sammmm93 studied for the LSAT for 3 months.

Conclusion: sammmm93 will get a 180 on the LSAT.

"Anyone who studies for the LSAT for at least 1 day will get a 180 on the test."

That statement is sufficient to guarantee the conclusion. But it's not a necessary assumption, and logically speaking, we shouldn't even call it an assumption of the argument at all.

But then why do we call it a "sufficient assumption"? Simply because that's what LSAT instruction has taken to calling it. Basically, because the question stem of SA asks for what answer, "if assumed", makes the conclusion logically follow, we've taken to calling these questions "Sufficient Assumption" questions.

(If it were up to me, I'd push back on this classification. Have you ever noticed that some strengthen question stems use the phrase "if assumed"? But we don't call these "Strengthen Assumption" questions, do we? So it's odd that we call some questions "Sufficient Assumption".

I believe this is the reason Powerscore actually calls SA questions "Justify" and NA "Assumption". I think this classification is a good one, since SA questions aren't really asking for what the argument assumes, in the ordinary sense of the word "assumes". In some ways, SA questions are really more like "Strengthen-Plus" questions - strengthen, but in a way that guarantees the conclusion. Arguably they have more in common with Strengthen than with NA, although there are definitely good reasons to think of them as similar to NA, too.)

Hi, appreciate the breakdown. So are you saying:

Assumption = propositions that are necessary for a given argument to be valid

'Sufficient Assumption' = propositions that could justify the conclusion OR proportions that could justify the conclusion and necessary for a given argument to be valid

So 'Necessary Assumption' is actually redundant and 'sufficient assumption' is really a misnomer because, taken literally, it only covers the latter part of its definition?

I actually think vocalization and subvocalization can be helpful in comprehension if you know how to use it. I'm sure whispering some key words under breath should be fine. That's how I did it in my official tests and I didn't get in trouble for it.

@matthewtodd1212219 said:

I fully acknowledge that this might not be the "healthiest" way to fix careless mistakes. What I do though is I punish myself. 15 pushups and 20 sit-ups for every mistake I make. I found that this worked well for me.

lol the good old conditioning. Maybe I could wear a rubber band on my wrist and flick myself for every mistake

@wraith985-4026 said:

You can employ whatever tricks to achieve this goal, but ultimately it boils down to you having to slow down until the requisite level of attention to detail is a habit and not just a tactic. Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.

Think of it this way: the time you spend stuck on a question, finding out you made a mistake, redoing your setup, remaking your inferences, and redoing all of the questions you've already done up to that point not only washes out any time advantage you gained from going fast, in the vast majority of cases it's a huge negative. It's the literal doomsday scenario. Making sure that you don't ever have to go down that road is worth an extra 30 seconds of setup time per game. If the extra 2 minutes you're adding to your LG time as a result is going to torpedo your score (which, it won't), then you can always just get a tiny bit better at the actual mechanics of the logic games to compensate. But making sure that you're actually using the correct rules is literally the most important piece of the puzzle, so you never want to skimp on that.

Many of my best and most consistent LG students over the years haven't been anywhere near the fastest execution-wise, they just didn't do thoughtless things that require tons of extra time to go back and fix in the first place. Even when they made mistakes, it was limited to single questions because they made absolutely sure that their big picture conception of the scenario was correct before leaving the setup phase.

That's very true. I've been observing recordings of Leia doing LG on the explanation page, and she really took her time on every game. I don't tend to do mindless things and like to observe, but I should be more intentional in keeping a steady pace.

@claremont525 said:

A few things that have helped me mitigate some clumsy errors:

Read the rules in their entirety before writing anything down.

Write neat. Don't clutter your paper. I use an erasable pen for my games so that I can clean up my rules and/or board if needed.

For each rule that I notate on my paper, I make sure to highlight it on my computer. I would sometimes get stuck trying to answer a question only to realize that I had skipped over a rule.

If applicable, check each rule against the first question immediately after you have written it down. If you eliminate more than one AC based on a rule, that's a red flag that you have potentially made an error. Immediately check to make sure you wrote the rule down correctly.

I exclusively drill full sections. The mix between relatively easy and difficult games and having to manage time might help keep you more engaged.

The one with checking the first question after writing each rule is a nice trick. And tiny habits like keeping game boards neat and organized are definitely underrated. I'm guilty of routinely brutalizing them tho.

@claremont525 said:

lmao, this is me exactly after reading the reply above

Not exactly academic journals but the Oxford Very Short Introduction series is very academic and covers a wide range of topics. I would say it's quite similar to RC because it's both introductory and can be quite dense and analytical. Like they said 'Oxford doesn't write "introduction for dummies", they write Very Short Introductions'

#help I have a question about the explanation of B for I think it does help the argument, but it's weaker because it kind of boosts the premise. B says, ~similar→should not be moved to. Although the neighboring island doesn't trigger this conditional, it does imply that the compliment set of islands (not similar islands) shouldn't be moved to. Therefore, the neighboring island is the only possible option. If the last sentence of stimulus is considered as an accepted premise, answer choice B actually provides a rationale for it so it is kind of a premise booster. I didn't realized that it is a premise booster during live and chose B. But my question is, if we cover the last clause 'the move represents the only viable option', will B be considered as a possible strengthener for PSA question, since it didn't directly support the conclusion?