My larger problem is that I keep letting outside knowledge outweigh the support in the question. In the area of the country I live in, white pine establishes quickly, starts dropping pine cones in as little as 5 years, and reaches full maturity in as little as 30 years. We have a lot of farms that went under in the 70's, 80's and 90's, and much of this former farmland is now covered in dense scrubby copses of pine. So my mind immediately decided that was the more likely option despite being utterly unsupported by the question.

The glaring misapprehension that you're proceeding under here is that I am arguing or would argue with LSAC. I'm arguing with 7Sage, a service that I pay for, over the value of its instruction when instead of recognizing the defective nature of this answer choice, they choose to bend over backwards to gaslight their customers as to why the indicated answer choice is correct and their customers' reasonable expectation consistent with prior instruction to assume the plain meaning of a word is now wrong in this one particular instance.

For your benefit, I'm going to offer some advice based on 2 careers across 35 years: If you don't at least challenge clear error that puts you, your client, or your employer at a loss, then you'll spend a large part of your career relegated to a cubicle doing scut work. Agreeable people get steamrolled in competitive environments.

First, you've only been studying for a week? This takes time. There are people who study for LSAT for more than a year to get into the 170's.

Second, what does your study routine look like? How are you engaging with the material?

Same boat. I am making improvements, but it's been slow. And honestly I burned 6 months of study on an inflexible strategy that didn't address my areas of weakness, during which I did not improve.

My advice would be this: take the August LSAT, and expect to faceplant. You're going to lose money if you withdraw/cancel now. On average students perform 3 points lower than their practice test average on the actual LSAT, and that is in my opinion almost certainly due to test anxiety. What you'll get out of going isn't an LSAT score that gets you into Harvard, but the experience points of the mechanical process of taking the test itself, eg knowing where your testing center is, what their weird security protocols are (which usually don't match LSATs, or even what they put on their website), what the actual experience of taking a test there is like, etc. This removes that uncertainty from your second attempt and allows you to be more at ease. Also, law schools look at your highest score and your score history. If you eat it on this test, but then show a big improvement on your second run, most admissions teams register that more strongly than if you just took the test once, made a passing score, and rolled on. Lastly, chances are if you're taking the test in August, you're not planning to start law school this year anyway, as most of them have admissions deadlines in the first half of the year. The point is, you lose nothing but time. Yeet it.

Now with that albatross off your neck, you can look at your study strategy. The big change for me was to work the problem backwards - instead of just trying to power through lessons and drill until I got the results I wanted, I instead switched to taking a practice test, and using the analytics to guide me back to the concepts of study I needed to focus on. It turns out for certain types of question, I'm a genius. For others, I'm falling for some common and very obvious traps. I would say 50% of my score improvement came in the last 3 weeks. It also helps to link up with a study buddy. For one, they can provide insights you might not see if you're studying completely independently. For another, they can keep you disciplined and focused on your goals when you're tempted to slack off or be distracted. Study Buddies can be found under the Discussion menu item.

The other thing I'd recommend is to adjust your goal score to something that is realizable. 7Sage (and their competitors) brag about an average 15pt increase. So if your score range puts you at a 145, then hoping for a 160 is realizable. 175 is unlikely. (If you do blow your personal goal score out of the water, that just opens up more options.) With a reasonable goal score in mind, subtract 3 points (test day anxiety), and look at law schools where that score is the 25th percentile of their accepted range. The website LSD.law gives you a handy search tool to find those schools in your area. Once you've narrowed it down to law schools in your range, look at the admissions deadlines for 2025-2026, and whether they accept rolling admission. In my case, the law schools I want to attend will allow me to take the LSAT in April and meet either a priority admissions deadline or be considered on a rolling basis for fall 2025. So I have 8 more months to maximize my score.

Most of all, remember: you have time on your side. Make the most of it. Nothing worth doing was ever quick or easy.

Put the Dugin down and mind your Rothbard, youngster.

There is no context in which the word eradicate does not mean this. The meaning is unambiguous: "to get rid of or destroy something completely".

With respect to polio, there were 30 cases of wild poliovirus Type I in 2022 globally, 0 Type 2, and 0 Type 3. Claims of eradication of polio are applicable to the latter two cases, which the WHO confirmed in 2015 and 2020 respectively.

This is a bad question that has no didactic value and serves only to undermine praxis. You should strongly consider pulling it and substituting it with a question which doesn't require a student to completely toss both the common understanding as well as the dictionary definition of a word to divine what the LSAT authors wanted them to think.

I think the problem on this one is the expectation that local economies are zero sum, and any increase necessarily has to come from outside the community. But economic activity has limit functions like the availability of products. If the goods and services made available at the mall were made available elsewhere in the community, the economic increase would have been more distributed across the community instead of concentrated at the mall.

Just these tiny little differences that make all the difference.

Same. But this is dangerous because we will hit a subject to which we are naive or misinformed, and the tools for answering those questions haven’t been reinforced.

The problem I have with this is that answer choice A leaves open the possibility that white pine trees could grow within the shade of a mature neighbor. However, the passage clearly states that this is not possible because a mature white pine ‘intercepts almost all the light’ and they ‘ cannot regenerate in their own shade.’ Therefore, the difference in age between trees would have to be at least some amount less than the time it takes for the trees to reach maturity. A cohort of trees would grow to maturity together with a maximum difference of 100-x years between neighbors.

Make it make sense?

In the menu at the top, choose “Practice”, then “Drills”, then “Show Existing Drills”, and select the drill you want to review. Use the navigation arrows at the top to move between individual question reviews and the drill summary.

I thought exactly the same thing when I read it and it took me a minute to understand. This might be an area where some outside knowledge of the subject is useful. Conversely, you may have to really think about it using common sense. (Probably why I struggled. Badum tiss!) But the “privileged“ implies a small subset of the population which enjoys more benefits and rights within society than most. “Base” on the other hand implies a much larger thing (in this case a group of individuals) on which something else is built. Therefore, what would be the base of society is just the commoners or the peasants – the lowest class of individuals who also tend to be the most numerous. The privileged on the other hand, generally serves as the support base for a given regime from which they derive their privilege. Understanding that relationship is why “its support base” is referent to “authoritarian regime” and not “society”.

So there. Reading Noam Chomsky and Murray Rothbard paid off!

Some people seem to get hung up on the order of statements as being an indicator of premise and conclusion because that is the order we are taught to write persuasive essays in. But it is apparent that it’s not order that the claim is provided but degree of specificity of the claim itself. Premises tend to be more specific claims while conclusions are more general. So in this case, the general statement of “some mammals…pets” is a general claim that receives support from the more specific claim about “tigers”. We do have to rely on some outside knowledge (a tiger is a mammal, pets should be tame), but should not try to allow our outside knowledge to form premises (“not all mammals are tigers”, or “some tigers are tame”). So it’s probably useful in order to avoid confusion to mentally order claims by degree of specificity. The least specific claim is most likely the conclusion. Also, don't challenge the truth of premises. Rather, ask "if true, does it support the claim I believe to be the conclusion."

Does anyone see a flaw in this?