To add on to why (C) is wrong: (C) might very well be useful in explaining this trend if we were told whether Jones's theory is a line of research that scientists in the field generally accept. That would possibly help explain why more scientists are doing research along the lines of Jones's work, and if the scholarly consensus is that Jones is correct, and she is in fact correct, then it is reasonable that these additional data points (corrections) are in line with Jones's thinking. But we aren't told whether Jones's theory is regarded as such.

Combine that with the issue the written explanation points out and I think you get a strong reason for rejecting (C).

This question is basically getting at why it's important to have a control group when assessing whether some experimental condition causes a change.

Here, there are other potential reasons for why fewer pears were lost to insects with the use of the new pesticide compared to the previous years. Perhaps winters were colder, meaning there were fewer insects alive during the warmer months to eat the pears. By having the control group described in (C), we can more meaningfully deduce whether the change we noticed with the use of the new pesticide was actually do to the pesticide or some other confounding variable.

This is an interesting PSA question in that the argument has two gaps, only one of which is addressed by the correct answer. Makes me feel like it would have been written better as a strengthen question, but of course, LSAC didn't ask me :) And that fact doesn't keep (E) from being the best answer here.

#feedback

I think the better explanation for why (B) is wrong is that (B) is way too grandiose and sweeping of a claim. This is only a single study! To then infer that, in general (notice that the (B) isn't restricted to bounds of the study the stimulus is describing, unlike some of the other ACs) guessing what came before is more accurate than guessing based on a perceived pattern is way too hasty of a generalization.

The actual theory for why (D) must be true is pretty abstract and more complex than I originally gave it credit for. JY does a good job explaining it via boundary cases in the video. But the reality is I think that method would take way too long during an actual exam. What probably works best here is using process of elimination to note the blatantly wrong aspects of A, B, C, and E, noting that D uses "some" (a favorite for MBT correct answers), that the situation describe in (D) seems very likely, without having to get into the nitty gritty of the math involved, then moving on. The confidence with which we can eliminate the other answer choices here makes it, at least in my view, unnecessary to fully dive into the math here during a timed exam.

Did anyone have a pre-phrase that worked for them before heading to the answer choices here? (C) makes sense but didn't pick up on anything in my pre-phrase. I spotted that the modern historians are assuming 1) that there is a connection between document volume/amount and cruelty and 2) that the fact that the histories we have today were written by Caligula's enemies makes those histories less likely to be accurate. Neither of those assumptions seems to be strengthened by (C).

Maybe it's that (C) makes the first prong of the modern historians' evidence -- the scarcity of documentation -- even stronger by suggesting that even the scarce evidence that survives shows similarities to earlier works?

"A few" should be treated as "some." So "A few A are B" becomes A <-s-> B.

7Sage's Core Curriculum is very mapping-heavy -- and if that works for you, then great! But I've found it helpful to practice internalizing the Lawgic rules so that I can reduce the amount of transitions I need to write out by hand during a test.

For example, take "unless": "I won't like you unless you are nice to me" becomes "If you aren't nice to me, I won't like you," or /nice --> /like.

Or "no": "No apples are oranges" becomes "If something is an apple, it's not an orange," or apple --> /orange.

While writing these out can be helpful, I find it more useful to practice translating in my head (when I'm walking to class, etc), especially regarding things I see around me. Doing so has helped me internalize the rules more than diagramming by hand has. But of course, it's important to write things out when you're first learning the rules.

You can do the same exercise for any conditional indicator, as well as for taking contrapositives.

What prep are you doing in between your PTs? A plateau like this could indicate that you might need to change what you are doing between your practice tests -- while BR-ing is great, I haven't found that it alone is sufficient for significant improvement. I've recently been taking more timed sections and then blind reviewing them and have found that helpful, as well as targeted timed and untimed drills (all with BR afterwards).

For RC, I've also been doing some passage-mapping drills using old passages that I've already taken, especially for ones where I missed questions.

(A) conflates the price of a manufactured good with the cost of the materials used to make that good. Even though the fallacy of division/composition (part<->whole) isn't directly being tested here, the lack of careful reading for issues let (A) get me here.

In addition to what @ said, I have recently started asking myself two consistent questions in BR/wrong answer journaling: 1) what did I fail to see wrong with the incorrect answer that I originally chose and 2) what did I miss/fail to see in the correct answer? These questions, combined with the approach-based questions of method/timing/etc., have been helpful for me.

I'm not sure what you mean by determining if something is an argument or not in LR questions. If you mean determining if something is a valid argument on LR, we mainly deal with valid arguments only on the "objective" question types like parallel questions (the non-flaw ones), main conclusion, role, and MBT/inference. But even for those questions, we aren't asked explicitly to identify whether the argument is valid.

All the "subjective" question types (the types where we are being asked, either implicitly or explicitly, to critique the argument -- think flaw, NA, SA, PSA/Principle, strengthen/weaken) involve flawed arguments. So when I approach the LSAT, I rarely/never approach a question by asking myself "Is this a flawed argument or a valid argument?" Instead, I assume that the argument is flawed for all of the subjective question types and start by finding where that flaw(s) is by poking holes in the reasoning. That first step applies for all of these subjective question types.

I have never seen a question where we are asked explicitly "is the argument above a valid argument?" I may have missed what you were really asking -- let me know if so!

For more info on the "subjective" vs. "objective" question types, check out this post by Mike Kim summarizing some of his LSAT Trainer content. I find this framework helpful: https://www.trainertestprep.com/lsat/blog/logical-reasoning-question-types

For me, it helps to think in terms of broad trends instead of fixating on specific question types (don’t come at me — I still think in terms of question types, but let me explain).

For any subjective question (NA, SA, PSA/principle, S/W, flaw, parallel flaw), you’re being asked—either implicitly or explicitly—to critique the argument at play. In other words, you’re being asked to figure out why the premises don’t actually guarantee the conclusion. So I begin my approach to these questions the same way: 1) read question stem (which of the following, if true…), 2) go back and read the stimulus, 3) figure out why the premises don’t actually guarantee the conclusion, then 4) choose the correct AC based on the type of question being asked. The variability among subjective question types only really emerges in the fourth step.

For example, here’s a stimulus: “If someone fears climate change, they avoid using fossil fuels. Ryan does not fear climate change. Therefore, Ryan does not avoid using fossil fuels.”

Now look at the following stems that could feasibly accompany this question:

-The author’s reasoning is most vulnerable to criticism on the grounds that it? (Flaw)

-Which of the following, if assumed, allows the conclusion to be properly inferred? (SA)

-Which of the following assumptions is required for the argument? (NA)

Let’s pretend like we’ve stumbled upon any of the above question stems for the argument above. Here’s how I would think through things, after seeing this is (regardless of which stem of the 3 above it is) a subjective LR question: 1) read stem (done—this is subjective), 2) read stimulus (done — I’ve seen this logical fallacy before…), 3) figure out why premises don’t guarantee conclusion (…the author assumed that because A—>B, /A—>/B. In LR fancy-speak, that’s “confusing sufficiency and necessity,” since /B should allow us to conclude /A, but /A should tell us nothing about B…i.e. could still be B or /B). 4) NOW I engage with the question type.

For the flaw stem: my prephrase is something like “confuses sufficiency and necessity” or “assumes that the absence of the sufficient condition guarantees the absence of the necessary condition.” Flaw questions are pretty much directly asking what your answer to part 3 of the method above was.

For the SA stem: I need to “close the gap” and get the premises to guarantee the conclusion. My gap is between “not avoid fossil fuels” and “not fear climate change.” So my prephrase is something like “all people who don’t avoid fossil fuels don’t fear climate change,” “the only people who do not avoid fossil fuels are those who do not fear climate change,” “only those who do not fear climate change do not avoid fossil fuels,” or any other lawgic way of saying that /B guarantees /A.

For the NA stem: I could use the negation test or MBT test (my preference) on the ACs. The question I’m asking is “what must be true for the conclusion to follow from the premises?” (MBT test) or “which AC, if it isn’t true, makes my conclusion not follow from my premises?” (Negation test). In this case, the answer may very well be the same as the SA prephrase above but could also be something less obvious.

Sorry for the long-winded answer, but hopefully that shows why I think it’s helpful to think in terms of broad patterns and then focus on the specific question type towards the later part of your process, assuming you recognized the broad “subjective vs. objective” category upfront.

Whenever a causal relationship is asserted (especially in a conclusion), I put my "jerk" hat on. Train yourself to be so skeptical of an asserted causal relationship that you will immediately start trying to poke holes in the relationship when you see one. Of course, valid causal relationships do appear on the LSAT, but they're in the small minority.

For example, "Rising water consumption is associated with more ER visits in town X. Therefore, greater water consumption in town X increases the likelihood that someone will go to the ER in town X." When I see this, my mind goes straight to trying to provide other possible causal relationships other than the one asserted (to show that the causal assertion is unjustified as is). For example, perhaps the water consumption rises because more visitors are coming to the town, which increases the net number of people in the area and therefore means more people are going to show up to the ER (an alternative explanation).

In short, I approach all "subjective" questions (i.e. ones where you are asked to critique the reasoning at play) by trying to point to flaws/assumptions in the argument. For causal reasoning, that often means thinking of alternative explanations that haven't been considered/ruled out.

In my opinion, getting SA questions down requires a strong command of conditional reasoning (since that's what many assumption questions, especially SA, play on). I'd recommend working on getting an intuitive sense of what sufficient and necessary conditions are. I like to think of this in the context of daily life. So if I'm driving around, I think "The speed limit is 65, so driving 65 mph or less is a necessary condition for lawful behavior. But if someone is driving 65 mph or slower, does that guarantee lawfulness (the sufficient condition)? No -- because someone might still be texting, which is another necessary condition for lawfulness." That might sound silly, but it really helped me start to get comfortable with SA. Once you internalize what sufficiency and necessity mean in graspable, conceptual terms, I think you'll probably find SA questions more manageable.

We can also think of this question as a S/N mistake. The counselor establishes that comparing oneself to more able people (COMA) --> self-disparagement (SD), and comparing oneself to less able people (COLA) --> dismissive of others (DO). Then the counselor concludes that /COLA and /COMA means /SD and /DO (assuming also that /SD means self-accepting and /DO means accepting of others, which is indeed another vulnerable assumption).

So the counselor is essentially saying:

COMA --> SD

COLA --> DO

------------

/COMA and /COLA --> /SD and /DO...

Which is the oldest mistake in the book, confusing sufficiency and necessity! Unfortunately, no ACs instantly match that prephrase...but that's simply another way of expressing what answer choice D is getting at. When we confuse sufficiency and necessity like the counselor did here, we are assuming that one trigger of an outcome is the only trigger of that outcome...thereby neglecting the possibility that the NCs stated can have other triggers.

#feedback I don't think approaching this as a quasi-conditional reasoning question (like JY does in the video) is safe to do. While his reasoning gets you the right answer to this problem, the reality is that the stimulus is essentially setting up something that could be understood as a mathematical function: let's call it A(I), or the "Aesthetic-pleasingness (A)" as a function of the "impression of success at attempt (I)." Let's say this relationship is a straight line with a positive slope on a graph. In that case, more I (impression of success) means more A (aesthethic pleasingness), and the other way around works too...less A means less I. I understand that the stimulus says "tends to" here, but the same reasoning applies. For that reason, I would still eliminate B, just not for the main reason that JY says (the SC/NC mistake), since there isn't technically a conditional relationship here. Rather, I would eliminate B for a different primary reason (which JY does mention): B doesn't discuss impressions of success at an attempt but instead discusses the actual intent, which is different.

One reason (C) can be appealing beyond the reasoning given is that it resembles an NA. If (C) said “all of the large mammal species that exist today existed in the past,” that would be an NA — because the argument breaks down if there is a disjunction between the species of today and the species of yester-year (this would disturb the analogy). But that’s not what (C) actually says.

#feedback

The written text under the videos is helpful and I’d love to see it added here!

For PT117.s3.q9 specifically, I don't think you need to write anything down, as the question is not actually asking you to identify conditional reasoning explicitly.

But as for your broader question: I diagrammed more when I first started prepping for the LSAT but have diagrammed less and less with time, such that now I diagram only once or twice per LR section (I'm sure others differ in this). A lot of times, you can identify the correct answer to, say, a sufficient assumption conditional reasoning question by noticing what term is in the conclusion but not in the premises...your answer will need to present this missing term. Usually, that narrows you down to 1 or 2 ACs. From there, you just need to make sure that the term is on the correct side of the arrow (i.e. sufficient condition or necessary condition). That can often be done without needing to write anything down.

All that to say, I try to push against the gut instinct to diagram Conditional reasoning whenever I see it (since that's very time-intensive). Instead, I try to internalize the rules for conditional indicators (especially "unless," "only if," "only," "no") so that I can quickly translate those in my head when needed. Sometimes, I do end up needing to write something down, but I try to translate in my head first.

Not sure if that helps, but that's sort of how I think about this!

I originally chose B, incorrectly. At first, I thought that knowing whether these readable signs were more expensive to manufacture would help us evaluate the argument. But on BR, I realized...B is talking about the different in cost between the currently installed signs and the readable signs, not between the hypothetical non-readable replacement signs as compared to the readable signs. If we were told the latter, then that could be useful...but the former is useless for evaluating the argument.

Suppose that sign A (original) costs $10 a sign. The new, readable signs cost $100 a sign. The new, non-readable signs (same design as original) now cost $100, too. In this case, the answer to the question B asks doesn't tell us anything about whether this replacement is a waste of money.

With all that being said, I came to realize why C is correct on BR: sure, C doesn't tell me everything I'd like to know to determine if this plan is a waste of money, but it does tell me whether this replacement plan will sharply diverge from the number of signs we already plan to replace in the next decade.