Hello! I am reaching out to my 7Sage community folks because I really need someone to look over my personal statement. I do not necessarily have people around me with solid writing skill due to my non-traditional background. If anyone is willing to provide me with a good critique, I would be more than grateful for your generosity.
Thank you
just in case, leave 10 PTs unsolved (half from old and half from recent). Also feel free to solve the LG section since re-doing LG section can only help but do not touch the LR and RC sections. I am re-taking soon and those 10 extra PT I did not solve have really helped me see where I stand.
When studying for re-take, try to solve all of the available ones again since some of them won't be fresh in your memory and solve the 10 unsolved ones after you have finished studying and weeks before your scheduled test day.
Hi 7sage community,
I just want to share a little story that might help some of you who are in a similar situation as I am.
Never have been a smart kid in my life and I was mainly fascinated with lines and colors so I assumed I would grow up to be an artist. After graduating, I did become an artist and I was fairly content with my occupation.
But somewhere along the line, I found myself taking more pleasure in drafting contracts and negotiating with my clients. After much thoughts and research, I decided to enter law school to specialize in design copyrights. But before I could set my feet in the school, I needed to take this freaky monster called the LSATs. This test was like encountering an extraterrestrial deformed monster from Dead Space. Each question attacked me with its ugly testicles and claws. Not fun at all.
But I sticked through to no avail.
I knew how to attack them, theoretically, but when I was out in the field, my hands trembled and quickly they ripped me apart with their slimy trickeries.
Main problems for me were that I could not stop stressing about the test and the meaning of the score I would eventually receive. But then I realized that this was just a test and I could not allow this test to dictate my own self worth as a person. After this conviction, I solved through PTs with clam hearts, without stressing myself.
And lo! I was in control. I sliced through the trickeries and punched each question with efficiency and I ended up getting 1 question wrong for LR, which is my weakest section.
So the moral of the story would be this; don't stress out and solve the questions without the fear of receiving low scores and know that there is no causal relationship between the score and your intelligence.
Hey, I was in a similar situation; struggling with time, getting at least 6 wrong per section on questions that was hard or because of a careless mistake. I was on a verge to call it a quit but proceeded with drilling and memorizing questions. But even with all of my ardent efforts to raise the score, I was left with a score that really did not reflect my effort: 157.
But I realized one thing as I went through all the PTs and that was I could not read fast enough to make inferences or recognize patterns and hence make really silly mistakes. So I started to read, I mean read like there was no tomorrow. I read NYT, WSJ and just about every articles that was challenging to read. Also I have trained myself to read with my eyes; I have been reading out loud in my head and that actually is not an efficient way to read since registering letters with eyes are the quickest way to absorb information ( there are video tutorials on how to read with eyes on youtube if you are interested ). Other important things I did were solving puzzles games like sudoku that enabled my brain to bring out inferences quicker, relearning complex ways sentences can be constructed and also reading articles on topics I found boring and hard-economic and physics. I did this for three months.
So LSAT penalizes you if you do not have a really solid grasp on English because in order to make the test difficult, they like to manipulate the language in a manner that people might not notice. Also having a basic knowledge of science, history and economy will make your LSAT journey easier because when you encounter topics in a question you do not know well, the question will slow you down ( I HIGHLY recommend reading SCIENTIFIC AMERICA for understanding any scientific topics).
After doing these, I re-visited 7sage and began following the lesson and now I am able to read and answer with great accuracy and speed while anticipating the right answers. I have not taken an actual LSAT yet, but from doing sections I now get about 0 to 4 questions wrong for LR and RC and I do not need to time myself because now I naturally solve them quickly.
So this has been my approach and there really isn't a quick fix to raise one's score for this test. I hope this was helpful.
I was not a very talented reader and have been struggling but I found correlation between my ability to understand the content of this book and my ability to read RC passage with accuracy.
It is called Cleopatra: A life by Stacy Schiff.
I did not major in History so understanding the flow of this book was a challenge but and also this book is written in a manner that required identifying tons of referential nouns and also drawing out inferences.
I recommend this book for those who did not major in English or History and are struggling with understanding complex passages. Just read during your break or before going to bed!
Just keep on doing BR and eventually you will develop your own methods for recognizing patterns and flaws. You will find yourself finding the right answer choices quicker. But remember to note common flaws you often make and remember them as you take PT.
I actually think reading the LR BIBLE and watching JY's logic lessons are sufficient for you to fully grasp the understanding of formal logic for the LSAT. For the Some and most relationship topic, I found it easier to follow the Bible's technique but JY's lesson strengthened my understanding of the relationship.
I think reading a book on Formal Logic might be helpful to read before studying for the LSAT.
I was in a similar boat as you- getting questions wrong even without being timed. But things have improved so much after I began reading excessively. I was out of school for a bit and I majored in something that did not require much readings. After acknowledging my weak point, I began to read NYT (the opinion section), The New Yorker, Economist and Scientific America EVERYDAY.
Read while identifying all the referential pronouns and embedded clause and after each paragraph, in your head, summarize the topic. Placing a pen on a page to guide your eyes to read the letters will help greatly-reading out loud while reading is not very helpful with speed later on.
Always summarize the whole article after reading- the author's main point and the supports she is giving you.
Also, re-do the RC questions, especially really challenging ones. RE-doing them will help you understand the way the LSAT writers want you to answer their questions. I have been redoing RC questions under timed-condition and now I get 1 or 2 wrong per section. It is a gradual process, read as much as you can and try not to rush your improvement.
I understand the flaw of the the answer (C). I actually wanted to know the logicality of converting unreasonable to reasonable since J.Y did not immediately eliminated (C) after reading the unreasonable part of the premise and I thought there was a logical connection between being reasonable and unreasonable. Thanks though
one of the answer choices states that it is unreason able to believe that 1000 consecutive coin flips will turn up heads,
so is it logically reasonable to believe that 1000 consecutive coin flips will not turn up heads?
http://classic.7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-28-section-1-question-03/
I eliminated (C) for a wrong reason-I thought it was not following the argument of the stimulus: it is reasonable that X, thus it is reasonable that X. But after a review, I realized the flaw was not found in my initial thought process.
The flaw of the stimulus is having one set of an example and concluding that each member of the set all contains the characteristic of the example. (C) does provide similar example of 1000 coin flips but the conclusion does not equal the flaw of the stimulus;
"This never happens" meaning, 1000 coin flips turning up heads will never happen. The author of (C) concludes that the event of the example will never happen instead of stating all coins in coin flips will never turn up heads.
hopefully this is a right reason to eliminate (C)
I find a choice (E) actually really tempting because it actually partially describes the way this argument handled the counterexample.
A generalization in the stimulus states that -ee words designate the person affected in the specific way by an action performed by someone else and later on the author redefines that generalization by placing a conditional rule-if a word...it refers to the party at which the other party's action is directed.
so, (E) does contain some of the elements described in the stimulus and that is why (E) seems attractive
but notice how similar the two statements, in the stimulus, are
it is about defining the party being affected by the action of other party but the last statement "narrows" the scope of the application of the generalization by placing the sufficient condition of the word referring to one party in two party transaction.
So it is not about REPLACING the meaning of the generalization but about setting a limit of the application
Doing a light stretch session and listening to feel-good songs before taking the tests helped me out extremely. Also eat some dark chocolate before you start :)
ok, I see what is going on here...hopefully I can elaborate on this question.
so the p: W--->L
c: PT--s-->/W
we need to find a way to connect the premise and the conclusion right?
what can I do to make PT--s-->/W from W--->L?
remember the conclusion, we HAVE to find a way to make PT--s--> /W
so let's flip the premise, to suit the order of the conclusion.
/L --->/W
now we know that there has to be a certain connection between
/L and (some) PT
we know that /L can guarantee /W for sure so we have to arrange the (some) PT
in front of the /L in order to arrive at the /W for the conclusion.
And since there is "some" factor in the conclusion, we have to arrange it like:
PT--s-->/L
let that arrangement sink in for a bit.
so if PT--s-->/L, we know that /L--->/W as well then it follows
PT--s-->/L--->/W!
So the sufficient assumption here is some PT --s-->/L
But we know that "some" can be stated in either direction (--s--)
so we can also state some who do not L have PT.
The reason why (A) is wrong is because it is stating about the students
who do not have PT and the stimulus is not interested in some students who do not have PT but those who have PT.
This question is not purely logic based but also about some and most relationship as well.
thank you so much everyone for the replies, this really means a lot to me!