- Joined
- May 2026
- Subscription
- Core
Admissions profile
Discussions
Just finished taking the August LSAT and unfortunately ran into technical difficulties. I got kicked out of the exam twice; each time it reset the answers I had crossed out (but not the answers I had chosen for some reason). First time I was able to continue immediately, second time it forced me to take an additional 10 minute break. It was in Section 3, so I had already taken my break.
Has anyone experienced technical difficulties like this in the past? If so, would you recommend contacting LSAC? I’m not sure what they can do, but I feel like my testing process was disrupted and unfair.
Since J.Y. loves using the term so much: cookie cutters featuring beloved 7Sage characters (i.e. Mr. Fat Cat)!
Takeaway: Do not treat causal relationships like conditionals!
If it is said that a lack of A causes a lack of B, we can reasonably infer that A causes B.
Ex: A lack of Pokemon cards causes people to be unhappy.
Inference: Having a huge collection of ultra-rare Pokemon cards causes people to be happy.
This is not a sufficiency-necessity confusion!
@PritikaNanra I would suggest trying to either visualize it or summarize it in your head -- hypotheticals help too.
For example:
There's a civil war going on in Iraq! Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of the UK said she would send in British troops. But the UK Parliament voted, saying they condemned this statement! One MP said that they weren't trying to speak out against deploying troops, however.
Puzzle: If not for being anti-war, what was the reason behind this statement?
@faizcon I would view it as an alternate explanation of the observed phenomenon (tourism-adjacent profits up more than tourist attraction itself because they're just visiting more often and don't need to pay multiple times for the attraction) separate from the tourist attraction leaders' explanation (THEY MUST BE ILLEGALLY SHARING THE PASSES!)
Our task isn't to prove that tickets aren't being shared, but rather that there is some explanation consistent with that theory and the facts we observe.
TLDR: Completely ignore the explanation they gave us. Don't try to weaken their explanation. Try to find an alternate explanation (E) that makes more sense.
In hindsight Answer Choice C seems really obvious, but under timed conditions I didn't put two and two together that banning TBT = no more killing of bad oysters. The double negative really got to me -- I was like "The bad oysters are dead, so what?
@tfghahi004983 Sure! This is how I broke this question down:
There's a group of crops (C) that includes cranberries. They can be pollinated either by bumblebees (B) or honeybees (H). Bumblebees are more targeted (small circle with 3 plants) vs. honeybees (large circle with 6 plants).
A: Not necessarily, it's not just about the variety but also the area (small vs. large)
B: Makes sense intuitively. If the honeybee has to go from Plant 1 to Plant 2 to... Plant 5 to cranberries, it would be less efficient vs. a bumblebee going from Plant 1 to Plant 2 to cranberries.
C: We don't know. It kind of depends on the distribution of the plant species -- are they all in one small corner? Spread out?
D: Like C, we don't know. We just know that honeybees have a larger area, not that honeybees are less likely to visit cranberry areas. We don't even know where cranberries are more likely to be found.
E: This was just kind of word vomit to me. It seems to be saying that the bees that are most likely to come pollinate cranberries are the most efficient, but we just don't know that. It could be the case that a bee that takes forever also prefers cranberries the most.
I was hesitant to choose C because of the phrase "all literature."
Process of elimination definitely helped:
A and B are wrong because Dostoyevsky wouldn't have a third position if he simply agreed with the critics.
D has no support anywhere; do we even know that the critics fail to distinguish between reality and fantasy?
And E is about the radical view, so it can be eliminated too.
@r.wang1 The way I visualized C that helped is as if Ruth and Stephanie are having the following conversation:
Ruth: I won't vote for a politician unless they are a minority! I'm tired of old, white men running this country!
Stephanie: But Kamala Harris was an awful vice president! Clearly, then, it's not enough for them to simply be a minority!
I was really looking for an answer choice that said sufficiency-necessity confusion. Process of elimination definitely helped with this question.
@crorosco02956 Could you give an example of what you're talking about? With regards to this specific question, my approach was diagramming everything before the final sentence (conclusion), reading the conclusion, and then asking myself why it didn't follow from the premises (the diagram).
Diagrammed the question correctly and identified that the gap was a sufficiency/necessity confusion between having a beehive and having bees. Looked to the answers and saw B (no pun intended) had the words "necessary" and "guarantee". Didn't realize that it was talking about pollination instead of having bees. Well played, LSAT. Well played.
I think this question is confusing mostly because age and generation seem to both be measuring the same thing (how old you are). What I didn't account for (as J.Y. notes in his explanation video) is that an 18 year old in 1970 is 18 the same way an 18 year old in 2026 is. But we'd be wrong to suggest that they were born in the same generation. A bit of a tricky distinction, but (A) makes a lot more sense when you look at it this way.
@Appellant Were there any big takeaways from the lesson that weren't addressed in the explanation video? My understanding is that E requiring you to make one of the assumptions isn't ideal, but it doesn't prevent it from being the correct answer.
Total red herring with the mention of fatty foods. Also a rare instance in which 4 of the 5 answer choices use the word "should". In hindsight, I should have picked up on how "prevent" and "outlaw" are not synonymous.
@Appellant I see what you're saying and I would recommend watching Kevin's explanation if you haven't already -- he does a great job of explaining how E requires you to make the assumption that we are not experiencing the moral perspective of the novel's characters.
The strategy that I used that worked was focusing on the first sentence and asking myself "Is there an inherent connection between lack of social significance and entering the internal world of the novelist's mind?" Kind of? But reasonable minds could disagree, which is what led me to E based on how it connects the two concepts.
I really don't like the wording of B. If it had said Amusia IS ASSOCIATED WITH... (rather than RESULTS), I would have definitely picked it. I was stuck on the causal mechanism of how an inability to discern pitch could possibly cause a disorder rather than be a symptom of it.
Main takeaway: a potentially flawed/falsifiable hypothesis is still more strongly supported than an extreme inference (D).
What an insane question.
My first instinct was to choose C, but then I thought, "Okay, but what if for some reason these tyrants just happen to favor doing the same thing? Or what if Caligula decided he wanted to be the next ruler known for (insert bad thing)?"
I ended up picking A thinking that, perhaps, somebody manipulated the documentation such that only the negative (or most negative) portrayals of Caligula remained. I guess this hypothetical doesn't necessarily follow from the information we're given.
Overall, not a fan of how the correct answer choice required us to make an inference that in turn could have multiple explanations, yet we're supposed to believe the "recycled-idea" hypothesis is the most plausible.
This question was really confusing to me. Nowhere did I read a favorable impression of subtitles: the passage states that dubbing is "even more damaging" implying that subtitling is at least somewhat damaging.
Given the 3 options (do nothing, subtitle, dub), we know that subtitle > dub, but how do we also know that subtitle > nothing? (Full comparison: subtitle > dub > nothing) Couldn't showing the original version be considered to be the "most authentic," per the author?