You shouldn't feel bad about postponing your education. If you look at Harvard's J.D Class of 2023, the vast majority of them have taken time off after college, with 23% of the class being out of college for 4 or more years. Spending time off after undergrad makes you the norm, not the exception.

However—and I say this without knowing all your the details about your life—what worries me is hyperbolic discounting. This refers to our tendency to increasingly choose immediate and smaller rewards over longer-term but bigger rewards.

There are many examples of hyperbolic discounting when it comes to test-taking. Even though undergraduate students will have weeks to study for a exam, they tend to only start studying a few days prior. So by pushing your test date back, you also decrease your motivation to study. It's entirely plausible then that by the time the 2022 LSATs come around, you still haven't studied enough.

The main takeaway from all of this is that you shouldn't feel guilty about the decision to postpone your LSAT, but you shouldn't then use this decision as an excuse to start slacking. My advice would be to make a study schedule here on 7Sage. With a year to study, the schedule will be very forgiving when it comes to the weekly hours. Then, I'd share your 7Sage account with a friend or family member who both deeply cares about you but is also an extreme hard-ass. That way, they'll make weekly periodic checks on your study schedule and keep you on course if you start to waver.

Gl on your future endeavors!

harvard class facts: https://hls.harvard.edu/dept/jdadmissions/apply-to-harvard-law-school/hls-profile-and-facts/

We tend to overestimate what we can do in a week, and tend to underestimate what we achieved in a year.

If you were to judge yourself narrowly by only looking at this week's performance, then you may see yourself as lazy.

But if we look more broadly and consider that you've been studying for 7 months, and have probably spent over 200+ hours studying at this point, then the answer for me is no: you are not a lazy babushka :smile:

Good luck in August!

For people who have trouble understanding why A is correct, it may be helpful to understand "cohort effects".

A "cohort" is a group of people who share a life event at a particular time (i.e year of birth, year of entering college). For instance, all the people who graduated high school in 2020 is considered a cohort. On the other hand, 'high-schoolers' are not a cohort, since we don't know the particular time they were high-schoolers (in 1800? in 2010?).

In this case, we have two cohorts: people who are young at the time of the study, and people who are old at the time of the study. For the sake of argument, we will say the cohorts are baby boomers vs. millennials.

A "cohort effect" happens when a effect unique to the cohort is mistaken as effect of something else (i.e age, education). In this stimulus, the unwillingness to share financial secrets may be effect of baby boomers, but the researchers believe this unwillingness is the effect of oldness.

The reason the cohort effect exists is because each cohort shares life experiences unique to them, and these unique experiences influence the cohort's behavior. For example, perhaps living through the Cold War has influenced baby boomers to be protective with their financial information. On the other hand, millennials did not go through such experiences, and so are not so protective. Thus, being protective with your information is a consequence of living through the Cold War. It is not a consequence of your age. This is the possibility the researchers do not consider, and is the flaw in their argument. Their flaw is a cohort effect.

Studies are suspectible to the cohort effect when they only sample people at a particular time (i.e 2021). The way to rule out the "cohort effect" is to follow a cohort through time. This would involve following millennials as they grow older to see if their opinion changes. Or looking at baby boomers when they were younger to see if their opinions were any different. This latter suggestion is exactly answer choice A. Choice A is saying that the researchers should have asked the baby boomers when they were younger to rule out the possibility of a third cause (the cohort).

I may not have explained things as easily or as clearly as I could have, so I will leave this link for anyone who wishes to inform themselves more.

Hope this helps anyone!

https://www.thoughtco.com/cohort-effect-definition-4582483

-