Doing well on the LSAT entails a unique and specific way of assimilating, synthesizing, and responding to information. If the stated answers to a scenario make no sense and offer no clarity around the correct answer, it is important to re-read and very deliberately study the entire question - the stimulus, question stem, and answer options - to understand and make new connections in your brain regarding the approach taken by the designers of the test. Most people's brains don't work in a way that aligns naturally with the idiosyncratic verbal and logical profile of LSAT questions. Continue to trust your native intelligence; sustain that confidence in your ability to do well. But also recognize that if the material is presently confusing and seems nonsensical, it becomes necessary to grow beyond what has worked for you thus far. I certainly had to rewire my brain and practice thinking and perceiving differently from how I had ever approached word and logic problems before, and I even already have a background in the legal field. The 7Sage curriculum itself is challenging to learn, let alone apply in context; I had to go through it twice, end-to-end, before the concepts truly sank in and became applicable to LSAT test questions. This isn't a one-time, flip-of-the-switch scenario. It typically requires diligent, iterative study and repeated practice over time. Developing a new cognitive skill is quite similar to developing a new physical one, including discovery and growth of new mental muscle, attacks from different perceptual angles, and application of new knowledge that will enable you to break past barriers that would be impenetrable sans said new growth and development. You have to practice - a lot - over time. Conventional wisdom suggests that strong and effective prep for the LSAT means 5-6 months of dedicated study; many law school applicants begin their prep and study literally a year in advance. People less confident and less gifted than yourself have taken this approach and scored in the 170s. I began my journey feeling exactly as you stated: "LSAC must be designed to make people fail, because none of this makes any sense." Beyond all other successful attributes within you, including confidence in your intelligence and you ability to grow and adapt, is your innate ability to persist. Keep reading the 7Sage curriculum, doing the exercises, trying and failing over and over again. Then re-read the lessons that pertain to those failures and try again. It will start to click. You will start to understand, and the pieces will come together organically. As long you keep trying and don't give up, there is no such thing as failure. You either succeed, or you learn (and sometimes even both at the same time), and then you try again...

The conditional statement, "Birds cannot sing unless pastries cook themselves” is just another universally valid way of expressing all A --> B relationships. Remember our very first one? "If the animal is a Cat, the animal must be a Mammal." In lawgic: Cat --> Mammal. Another way of expressing it is, "The animal is not a Cat unless it is a Mammal." Every A --> B conditional relationship can be interpreted and phrased this way, including your initial correct answer: "Birds can sing → Pastries can cook themselves." Thus: "Birds cannot sing unless pastries cook themselves”. It's an application of the Negate Sufficient process.

The very first section for the November LSAT, an LR section, was discernibly more difficult than any other part of the test. I consciously noticed this, in retrospect, while making my way through the remaining three sections. I strongly suspect that the initial section was the unscored experimental one, and the remaining three sections were the scored part of the test.

You wrote, "Also, when you’re reading the passage, don’t look at the timer." If you left-click on the timer, it will disappear and remain hidden for the duration of the drill. This is also true on the actual LSAT, except for the final five minutes (if I remember correctly), when the clock reappears (like it or not) and counts down the remaining five minutes.

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The principle in the stimulus states: “When none of the fully qualified candidates for a new position at Arvue Corporation currently works for the company, it should hire the candidate who would be most productive in that position.”

The principle is telling us the specific and exclusive scenario to which its prescribed actions can be applied, i.e., only when none of the candidates already works for the company. If there is even the possibility that one of the candidates already works at the company, the principle goes immediately silent and is rendered inert, i.e., it has no answer for that situation, no opinion, and can offer no guidance. We’re left in limbo and have no course of action.

Answer B suffers exactly from this. It begins with, “Of all the candidates who do not already work for Arvue…”, leaving open the possibility that at least one of the available candidates does work there. It doesn’t tell us otherwise. It fails to eliminate a possibility that violates the principle. Thus, the principle goes silent and we’re left blind, with no idea regarding what to do or how to proceed. One of the other answer choices fills this gap, making it a better option:

Answer E complies with the principle by explicitly stating that none of the candidates works at Arvue. It goes further by specifying that Delacruz would be the most productive in the new position, which is another one of the principle’s required criteria. Answer E aligns most closely with the narrow conditions of the principle, without violating any of them, in which case its prescribed actions can be applied.

This is how you answer this kind of question: be able to distinguish among the answer choices those that violate any of the principle’s specified criteria, either implicitly or explicitly (implicit violations can be tricky to spot; answer B, for example, implied it by omission... ugh). Answer choices C and D, for example, violate the principle by indicating explicitly that at least one candidate does work at Arvue. For this particular question’s stem, we would eliminate options C and D immediately from consideration.

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Yes, this is an important semantic understanding, and it applies in many scenarios. Going forward, you will become sensitive to similar statements whenever you see them. If the statement says, "Does not weaken," that means it does one of two things: the correct answer either... (1) Strengthens, or (2) Remains neutral, which was why Answer B was correct in the above scenario. You will see different flavors and variations of this concept. For example, the statement says, "Is not greater than..." which, again, means one of two things: it is either... (1) Less than, or (2) Equal to. Being equipped with - and practicing application of - this insight, is actually really helpful. After choosing a "neutral" answer correctly a few times, you'll steadily eliminate the bias from your brain that "not weak" must equal stronger, or that "not more than" can only equal "less than". Neutral is always there, waiting, your other valid possibility for every question stem that specifies a limit in one direction.

Many people had (and continue to have) the same question that you did. Now you know that it's just an alert, encouraging students to review and learn from their mistakes.

Lol, yes, that's an especially bitter pill.

You're going to wait a very long time, because your causal chain is backwards, i.e., only questions that are answered incorrectly are marked "High Priority".

This reply is for more recent readers (since you left your comment 2+ months ago and may have already taken the LSAT). Your comment is quite valuable, because it highlights an important reality: much like voting in politics, these LSAT questions will sometimes put us in the position of choosing the "least bad" candidate among a limited set of options. All five of the answer choices for this question were really weak, leaving us no choice but to identify the "least weak" answer among them. That's why answer A is correct. It still sucks, but just enough less than the other four options to be the correct one. This is an important skill in which to develop comfort and confidence. We won't always be spoon-fed a strong sparkly option among the available options; sometimes we'll have to choose the least-smelly choice among a group of five that all stink.

To reiterate the explanation offered by "gusmadero03": you have reversed cause vs. effect. Answers are not categorized as "high" vs. "low" priority before you answer them. Instead: incorrectly answered questions are marked "high priority" after you get them wrong, informing you that they require your special attention (i.e., to determine and learn from why you chose the wrong answer / didn't choose the write one).

Always begin with the assumption that everything in the stimulus is true. The only way this changes is if an answer choice introduces information that directly contradicts a statement(s) in the stimulus. That should be seen as a potential trap or red flag, i.e., it represents a rewriting of the scenario; you should be initially suspicious of those answer choices. Keep in mind: the stem always asks you to choose the best answer option among the five provided; this should be your guiding principle. It is possible that four of the five options are so weak relative to the instruction provided in the stem, the one making changes to the stimulus is truly the best answer for the problem. You should be very confident that this is the case before going that route. Your initial starting point should assume that the optimal / correct answer choice will align with the conditions of the original stimulus, not alter the scenario to retroactively manufacture an explanation. LSAT writers are not often in the habit of employing deus ex machina.

Your causal chain is backwards. Getting a question wrong is the reason it is marked "high priority", i.e., "give this question high priority ~ determine why you got it wrong."

You wrote, " If the passage doesn’t exclusively address it, then it’s silent..." Did you mean "explicitly"?

This is it exactly.

In my opinion "vivi02", yes, Waller's omission of skeptics in his argument is the deciding factor between the correct vs. incorrect answer choice. More specifically: Chin differentiates granularly between (1) the "cultural elite", (2) the "popular media", and (3) the "public" (i.e., public opinion). Waller speaks only about public opinion. His failure to mention and account for the cultural elite (i.e., the other "skeptics") means that answer B is incorrect by omission, i.e., Waller asserts no opinion or position in either direction re: whether cultural elites could be convinced of the existence of ESP. Answer D then becomes the correct option, for a strongly related reason: Chin's explicit mention of the cultural elite. Waller believes that convincing the general public alone is sufficient evidence that ESP exists; Chin doesn't believe it is sufficient because, in his/her argument, the cultural elite are the deciding factor, not the general public, i.e., "So long as the cultural elite remains close-minded to the possibility of ESP... public opinion will always be biased in favor of the skeptics." (Note: I chose B too and got this one wrong.)

"Bruh..." (rhymes with Duh...) I couldn't care less about the videos; not my learning style. Perhaps you should do something constructive, like submit a complaint to JY and 7Sage about the vids, instead of presuming to tell other people what you believe they should think is important.

Pro-tip regarding the time crunch: read the Question Stem and Answer Choices first, before reading the stimulus passage. It primes the brain to ingest the stimulus in a purposeful way, sometimes even already knowing the correct answer by the end of first reading, so you can go straight to it and choose it. People who go "in order", i.e., reading the stimulus first, often end up needing to read it a second time after getting through the stem and choices, which consumes a lot of time.

Agree. The foul language is immature and unprofessional, impugning the credibility of the material for LSAT preparation. I'm reconsidering whether to continue paying for this program, let alone recommending it to others (and there are already some reasons against that).

If we phrase the negated condition as, “It is not the case that all dogs are friendly,” I’m unclear regarding why our inference from the negation is, “Some dogs are not friendly.” Why are we using the plural expressions of “some” and “dogs”? Isn’t the correct (or at least more accurate/incisive) inference of our negated expression simply, “At least one dog is not friendly”?

If we phrase the negated condition as, "It is not the case that all dogs are friendly," I'm unclear regarding why our inference from the negation is, "Some dogs are not friendly." Why are we using the plural expressions of "some" and "dogs"? Isn't the correct (or at least more accurate/incisive) inference of our negated expression simply, "At least one dog is not friendly"?

My first choice was the "some" option. Don't forget that "some" relationships are bidirectional, i.e., an arrow pointing outward from both sides of the "s".