Update for anyone following, I tried using external monitor + keyboard + mouse + camera plugged into a docking station that was plugged into a closed laptop computer. It passed the first 6 "compatibility" checks where it makes sure your operating system, screen resolution, camera, etc. are compliant, but then ProProctor said it couldn't "secure" the testing interface and forced me to quit.

I tried a second configuration with just the external camera and mouse plugged in, and that both passed the compatibility checks and did not trigger an error message. Fingers crossed that will be enough and the proctor won't make me pretend to be a giraffe for 3 hours.

@mkos99 That is actually really reassuring to know, and that you can double check everything with both proctors before starting the clock. My camera is totally fine on every other app and also from the ID verification setting of the ProProctor app. Thanks so much for the info!

I didn't find either video explanation to provide a super helpful methodology for not getting a question like this wrong in the future. Here's my shot at one:

This question is weird because the conclusion actually talks about completely separate terms from the premises.

· Premise: Global warming –[c]→ higher temperatures –[c]→ greater % precipitation is RAIN than snow

· Conclusion: more rapid + earlier mountain snowpack melting –[c]→ more spring flooding + less storable water

The premises would only establish a conclusion that talks about the precise ideas in it. The conclusion goes beyond the premises. Hence, the conclusion needs to be supported in an almost independent way, perhaps by an answer choice that shows the conclusion does in fact happen in the real world. Answer choice B supplies this.

Takeaway: Be ESPECIALLY mindful of new terms that pop up in the conclusion which aren’t in the premises. Here, the conclusion was itself a causal relationship talking about things that are not mentioned in the premises. A strengthener would provide independent support for that information being posited.

fuck this passage

Not sure if anyone else had this experience, but I sunk a ton of time into this and got it wrong because I was erroneously trying to figure out which of the answer choices would possibly allow the conclusion to be valid. That's obviously the wrong approach, especially here because the argument is genuinely so shitty that I'm convinced the LSAT writers just wrote it so badly to try to waste the time of people who fall into the trap of trying to comprehend it. The benefit of the golden negation rule on NA is you don't have to comprehend it, and only C stands under that test.

@carolyn.zaccaro It would be "entirely reliable." (1) Easiest way to see this is the negation is just stripping the "not" away. (2) Imagine saying "my GPS is not entirely reliable." That suggests that it's SOMETIMES reliable, just not ALWAYS reliable. "Not entirely" already encompasses "sometimes." The negation is that it's ALWAYS reliable.

@Cristina180 Ok now that I've had a bit more time to think about it, I do think there were a few habits I consolidated between the 169 and the 179:

LR:

1. Read and understand every sentence of the stimulus before you move on. I would sometimes speed-skim because I'm stressed and think I'm understanding it, but I'm not. Investing the extra 5-10 seconds to really deeply understand the stimulus on the front-end meant that I could rapidly reject wrong answer choices and speed through the ACs very fast without needing to re-read or double-check in like 95% of cases.

2. Predict, predict, predict for every single question. I'd previously mainly tried to predict only on weakness, necessary/sufficient assumption, parallel reasoning, and main conclusion questions because I feel like that comes more easily there. But when I started pushing myself to aggressively predict even for causal strengthening, most strongly supported, weaken/strengthen/evaluate, and all other types of questions, it honestly felt like a game-changer. I think something about forcing yourself to predict the AC makes you think in a more efficient way. Instead of trying to remember the various rules you've encountered from your wrong answer journal every time you look at each answer choice, it puts you in a state of being able to immediately see why every AC is wrong except for the right one. And at least 2/3 of the time, the right answer is exactly the one you predicted. On top of that, I saw my speed on questions (especially easy ones) increase a ton as a result. It feels really effective at preserving mental energy and making sure you don't fall for trap answer choices. I honestly think this skill probably only comes from copious drilling, but if I'd tried it sooner maybe I could've broken through sooner.

3. If you have even the slightest hint that you need to diagram, you should diagram. I was previously losing some easy points because I thought I'd gotten good enough at conditional reasoning that I didn't always need to diagram, but the LSAT is designed to exploit that feeling and make you regret it. You can spend ~3 seconds glancing quickly at the stimulus and answer choices to tell if you need to diagram, and if it's not like the world's simplest single-arrow, two-variable conditional statement (and sometimes even when it is), just diagram it.

RC:

1. 7Sage RC outlining method is generally helpful.

2. Similar to above, read and understand the purpose of every sentence, even if you're not slowing down to deeply process the information. There were times when I'd read a passage, have a very rough grasp of the factual claims it was making, but I hadn't read or dug deep enough to really understand what the author was saying or why they were presenting things in a particular way. I think that cost a lot of points.

3. At some level, you can also predict for RC questions, and I think I was just subconsciously doing that but I don't have a ton of insight into which questions that works particularly well for (maybe stated/implied?). I think the more you predict, the more you force yourself to understand the test, and that just has to be paying dividends somewhere.

@Jake1776 Darn! Something about that test!!

@Jdunni I honestly still don't know for sure. I finished each section with ample time left over and felt like I wasn't diving into the questions deep enough / falling for trap answer choices probably / not reading deep enough to really process the questions. I guess that all just boils down to test day nerves.

I think in the last 2 weeks especially, I've been drilling while really trying to practice consistently predicting the answer before I even look at the answer choices, and also slowing down to really read and understand every sentence of a prompt/passage (within reason, of course). My hope is that those skills, if drilled enough, can be a stronger baseline that holds up under test-day stress, but I guess I'll find out during my retake in June!

B says the consultant might be wrong about what caused the reduced sales.

A says the consultant might be wrong about what "ill conceived" means. It's a much weaker attack.

If C were the right answer, the argument would have had to say either of the following:

·       Premise: H → AA + CM; conclusion: AA + CM → H

·       Premise: Effective → CM; conclusion: CM → effective

It does not say those things. The argument says:

·       Premise 1: Humorous (H) → attract attention (AA) + convey message (CM)

·   Premise 2: Effective → CM

·       Conclusion: Effective → H

For people who want to voice their displeasure at the atrocious changes LSAC has made to the August format, they have a feedback form at https://www.lsac.org/send-us-your-feedback and actively monitored email inboxes at LSACinfo@lsac.org and accessibility@LSAC.org. I sent in a strongly worded complaint across both email and the feedback form yesterday and got responses from named customer service reps within 24 hours saying they'd incorporate the feedback into their design process. Who knows if they'll actually listen, but odds are higher the more vocal we are about this.

I think you hone the skill through drilling. You should read the question stem first, and let that dictate your strategy on every question. Is this happening for you on LR or RC? There are different strategies for each, but on LR you'll learn a bit by question type. For example, "main conclusion" questions oftentimes don't even require you to substantively understand what the passage is saying, just to use keywords from sentences to figure out what the purpose of each sentence is and then pull out the MC. On parallel reasoning questions, you can reject some answers if you just see that the premise or conclusion of the argument doesn't match up to the stimulus (i.e. stimulus says "some X, some Y, therefore all A"; answer choice says "all X, all Y, therefore some A"). I guess it's more about honing the strategy of where you can read quickly or slowly.

Until you get to that point, it's best to drill without a timer and just get to the point of being able to answer the questions correctly and deeply understand a question type. Speed builds in naturally from there. Don't sweat it for the first few months, you've got plenty of time to prepare.

For RC, I found the LSAT Lab RC video curriculum to be particularly helpful. They have modules on how to read efficiently and annotate effectively so you both are comprehending the passages without spending too much cognitive load remembering/getting bogged down in tiny details.

I picked B because elsewhere in the passage it says: “skeptics note, dowsing to locate groundwater is largely confined to areas where groundwater is expected to be ubiquitous, making it statistically unlikely that a dowsed well will be completely dry.” Accordingly, if rainstorms have saturated the ground in an area being dowsed, it felt reasonable to infer that the dowsers would have a higher success rate, if skeptics are noting that they have high success rates when dowsing in areas already saturated with groundwater. This felt like a reasonable inferential leap that the LSAT would require on some other questions, but the key issue here appeared to be that the passage explicitly says that dowsing is used to located things other than water sometimes, and I just didn't recall that from annotating/high-level reading and didn't Ctrl + F search for that. Not sure if there's a systematic way to prevent this kind of error ;-;

Two ways to get this question right (because I also picked C mistakenly after thinking all the "Borges said X," "Borges said Y" qualifications indicated that the author sought neutrality):

First, attribution language is neutral on its own. LSAT passages commonly devote tons of paragraphs to explaining a particular view, which the author then downstream states is something they agree with or disagree. Look for the downstream signal—either a pivot toward challenge or an evaluative statement toward endorsement—to determine the author’s actual stance.

Second, think concretely about the actual textual support for answer choices A and C.

The evidence in favor of C is the assumption, from the author qualifying their statements with “Borges said this,” “Borges said that,” etc., that they were trying to create ideological distance between themselves and Borges, recounting his ideas while not necessarily endorsing them. Many LSAT passages will have long expositions talking about the thoughts of one perspective, then declare the author’s actual perspective later. The author could well have been giving all these qualifications to give scholarly credit to Borges and distinguish between what Borges said versus what the author is saying. The suspicion that the author could disagree with Borges, given all these qualifications, is only correct if the author indicates anywhere else that they actually do disagree or don’t embrace what Borges is saying. That doesn’t happen anywhere in the passage.

The evidence in favor of A is the text JY pointed to, which says that Borges’s “account also draws our attention to an insight into the general nature of literature.” In a sentence where the author is clearly commenting upon/assessing the impact Borges’s claims in their own words, they positively state that he provides insights into literature. This supports agreement, absent any actual contradictions to that in the text, like other language noting this agreement is just a concession, etc. (which don’t exist).

I look at written explanations first, then watch videos if those don't explain it well. I sometimes jump to the video first if a question was really hard and I just want to watch someone explain it step-by-step. It's oftentimes more useful if the written explanations offer both the explanation given in the video AND a different way of reaching the same conclusion/eliminating the wrong answer choice/selecting the right one. That way there's multiple ways of understanding how to get to the right outcome.

Answer choice D weakens the second theory because it undermines the idea that our understanding of gravity breaks down over large distances. If objects' velocity is directly proportional to their distance from each other, that reaffirms Einstein's general theory of relativity, and undermines the idea that gravity acts in a way inconsistent with our current understanding/predictions. However, unless we're explicitly told that two explanations are BOTH mutually exclusive AND cover the whole universe of possible explanations (and we're not, here), weakening one possible explanation for phenomena does not inherently strengthen another explanation, which is what we're being asked to do here. Only answer choice A directly strengthens the first theory, which is why it's correct.

D is wrong because it only tells us that the situation fails ONE OF the criteria to NOT be legitimate.

Argument: Jest -> NOT legitimate

Proper contrapositive: Legitimate -> NOT a jest

NOT THE CASE: Not a jest -> legitimate

You CANNOT conclude that just because it's not a JEST, it's LEGITIMATE. D only tells us that it's not a jest. It doesn't tell us the offer was otherwise legitimate. Yet, the offer being legitimate is a requirement for the contract being valid. Lea accepting a possibly illegitimate offer still means the contract is not valid.

Answer choice A is incorrect because it just gives support to the arguments made by proponents of harsh punishment. It doesn't directly attack the reasons the author gives for being against harsh punishment, as E does.

The passage has a clear discrepancy between the premises and the conclusion. The conclusion is "those who claim that Shakespeare did not write the plays ... are motivated purely by snobbery." Then as support, it says "many of those who argue that one or another of these aristocrats wrote the plays are the aristocrats' descendants." We have to make an implicit assumption that the so-called snobbery motivating this group stems from the fact that they are descended from the aristocrats who have alternative claims to authorship. But even if we accept that, if it's only MANY and not ALL of the alternative-authorship proponents who have these motivations, the argument is still making a critical error, because what about the minority of people who are not motivated by snobbery (i.e. not descended from aristocrats) but do have legitimate reasons for discrediting Shakespeare's authorship? That's why D is correct and B is not (in addition to the fact that B has a logical contradiction; someone who is motivated "purely" by X by definition cannot be motivated by something else.)

Suggestion for an improvement to the explanation of why B is wrong, which states: "Not supported, because we have no reason to think Author A cares about attention given to masculinity. She never suggests we need more attention to masculinity in our scholarship." I think that's rather overstated.

Passage A itself says: "Since gender relations involved turning to an exploration of the social systems that underlay the relationships of men and women, the shift seemed to many historians to be a retreat from the effort to uncover the history of women per se. The new work took several forms: Articles about men evaluated the role of masculinity in shaping thought and action, and articles about women gave way to explorations of how an imagined domesticity, or separate sphere for women, shaped culture and politics."

While masculinity isn't the main focus of Passage A, I think it's a stretch to say that "we have no reason to think Author A cares about attention given to masculinity." Passage A talks about how the overall shift from the study of women per se towards gender "offers analytic framework within which to analyze social and political structures" which affected both men and women.

I feel like the main issue with B is that it says "equally important role," which would be a stretch as Passage A does not talk about men extensively.

@JY