Thanks Julia this is really helpful!

I occasionally will use it to take quick notes, but eventually I transfer everything to an excel or google sheet. it's much easier to analyze patterns and review past journal entries that way.

The point on over inclusiveness is a good one. I'm glad you guys included it in the CC as it's something that every student inevitably figures out when they blindly apply the rule without understanding the exceptions where the rule doesn't work. Ask me how I know haha...

I'd love to see a lesson that goes over some exceptions, and shows how words that are almost always indicate a premise or a conclusion can sometimes play a different role based on sentence construction.

#help

if there is a statement that says X is true because of Y, but there are no assumptions... does that mean the statement is not an argument?

See first sentence of

PT 31 S3 LR Q26:

"The media now devote more coverage to crime than"

It's totally normal. Don't worry about it. You will get faster as your study more but how you study affects how quickly you improve with speed.

The key to getting faster is including both timed and untimed work. Timed work helps with building focus & endurance, skipping strategy, and being able to execute your process. Untimed work is where you build the fundamentals and hone your process. It's actually very hard to build fundamentals under timed conditions... so when you're starting out the mix should be tilted more towards untimed work and increasing the percentage of timed as you get better and the test date approaches.

are you redoing the 7sage curriculum for LG or just looking at the video explanations? The 7sage approach to LG i feel is quite different from the other test providers.

Having a study buddy or someone else going through the same process that you can rant to and commiserate with is really helpful for maintaining mental well being.

Everyone i've talked to who has studied for this test has experienced burnout at some stage. It's normal. A study buddy or even better, a tutor, can help with motivation and diagnosing unproductive habits you might have.

As for slow progress on LR, this was the hardest for me to improve on. There's a steep learning curve to figuring out how to study for it and that's half the battle. You just have to keep at it and see what works for you.

Also LR progression isn't linear. You'll go up and down as you learn new concepts but then start making new mistakes or as you encounter new question patterns. There will be large stretches of time you feel like you're treading water or even regressing and then a breakthrough will happen.

Going to do some LG is a good idea. Progression in LG is much steadier and a direct function of the work you put in. And the path to improvement is much more obvious. Good luck and hang in there!

@ said:

I've read all of these comments and concerns. Is there someone who can speak to how to use this the right way (essentially if they are looking to go in order) and not have an overlap in what they drill vs what they test? And the exact steps on how to create the drills not using any material from the new tests? It's still unclear to me #Admin

drilling feature only uses PTs 1-35.

Thanks for the help and tips! I really appreciate it and found it useful!

To others... @-1-1 was super helpful.

Good luck. I'm in the same boat as you, my gap was even worse and I'm still working on it.

check out this thread on time management

https://classic.7sage.com/discussion/#/discussion/27356/finishing-a-section-right-on-time-v-early-and-doing-a-2nd-round

Awesome

Thank you

The approach is 90% the same. But I take a slightly different emphasis depending on the passage.

For science passages that focus on a phenomena which are conceptually complex, I'll emphasize trying to visualize the phenomena to wrap my head around it. Happens a lot with physics and things like biology / genetics. Law related passages can present similar conceptual challenges, where you have to take a step back from pushing through the passage and make the connections.

The other type of complexity RC trades on is the organization of elements and points of view. Happens a lot in humanities passages where there is a category X and it can be hard to track whether elements A, B and C belong in category X. This often coincides with there being multiple points of view belonging to the author and different "experts". For passages like this, I'll focus more on highlighting individual elements and points of view, and keep tracking of what belongs where.

Science passages can be organizationally complex, but rarely is a passage both conceptually complex and organizationally complex. You can tell what type of complexity you'll be facing by a quick visual scan through the paragraph. If there are a lot of air quotes, italics, repeated proper nouns, you know its organizationally complex. That will dictate how I approach the passage.

For LR, 1h (2x) on br is and 1hr on review is fine. Everyone’s different but 1h is close to the max I would spend on BR though. Final Review I’ve spent more than 1h.

For LG, depending on where you are in the curriculum it might not be worth spending that much time BRing. Give yourself some time to work through your process without time constraints but it’s okay to throw in the towel if it feels like you’re brute forcing it. There’s likely something you’re missing in the setup and inferences anyway and if you’re spending way too much time solving it you’re probably just reinforcing a bad technique.

RC BR is the most straight forward. Shouldn’t take as much time as the other two.

Your times will go down across the board as you get better and you get more questions right. I wouldn’t be so concerned about how much time it takes… the goal is to learn, not do as many PTs as you can. The learning process is the important part and the PT is the means to identify what you need to learn.

That’s a really great thread

Thanks for sharing

Thanks guys! I took a break from Lr for the past week to focus on Lg but will check these out.

I don’t think there’s a consensus on how best to tackle the curriculum, even among tutors.

Chronological is a safe bet. LR is good to start (it takes a while for some of the concepts to marinate) and RC best done after finishing LR.

You’ll also need the basic conditional logic lessons in LR to be able to do LG as the curriculum builds on it.

The only change you might consider is that once you’ve finished conditional logic lessons in LR you could consider jumping ahead and weaving in some LG lessons to mix it up a bit. This helps you from burning out on Lr and also gives you more time to absorb LG… especially given your tight timeline. Both Lg and Lr benefit from spaced repetition and some time away.

Was super valuable! Looking forward to the next one.

If you go down the path of focusing heavily on one section, just don't make the make mistake I did of not doing enough maintenance work on the other two sections. I like the prior poster's suggestion of carving out targets for spending time on the sections you are not focused on. Early on in my studying, I went through a one month cycle of focusing exclusively on LR and my LG suffered a lot. Then I did the reverse and LR suffered a lot. It took more time to regain it than if I had just done some regular practice.

Highlighting a lot is helpful in the beginning, especially when you are building up your fundamentals in RC. I used different colors for a while too, and it helped me learn to create visual maps of the passage.

While you're in the earlier stages you can use your highlighting strategy more as a developmental tool to help you build your skills. As you progress and the test date approaches, you can switch your highlighting strategy to something more tailored to game day -- pare back the amount you highlight if you think it's not worth the time it's taking. I stopped using different colors after a while but I know there are 170+ scorers who highlight intensively using multiple colors and those who barely or don't highlight at all. It's a highly personal choice and I think RC opens itself up to a lot of individual styles.

Great advice, thanks for sharing

I would have intuitively read it the same way as JY, because in my subjective understanding the term “as many” is inherently vague and does not imply “exactly”.

But it’s a close call and your reading would more closely reflect the dictionary definition of as many.

That being said, the LSAT is written by phds in linguistics and philosophy… the correct answer choice would never hinge on the meaning of a phrase with such an ambitious idiomatic usage. That’s not what they are testing. Even if you read it the way you did, you would end up with the same answer choice.

Which question is that? Would be easier to say for certain if we could see the answer choices, but i'll take a guess.

It sounds like the stimulus consists of individual premises. (X, Y,, Z)

The answer choices are individual conclusions. (A, B, C, D, E)

You can construct an argument by combining each individual premise with each individual conclusion. Ie. X -> A

Y -> E

(note I am using the arrows in a the sense of whatever form the reasoning of the argument takes place, not conditional logic necessarily)

The correct answer is the answer choice which combines most poorly with X, Y, Z to produce a strong argument. Ie the weakest argument that results.

Definitely do not do every practice drill. JY has explicitly said not to do this in the podcasts and that the practice drills were not intended to be used in this manner.

It's a balance between reinforcing the material until you have some basic comfort with it and getting through the curriculum at a reasonable pace based on your test date.

When and how many PTs you should do is also very subjective. Depends on how you learn and who you ask.

If you haven't finished the core curriculum though, it's unlikely you should be spending much, if any, time doing PTs. You're just wasting material before you have the fundamental base to solve it. Full length PTs is for building endurance and test taking strategy. That comes after the foundation has been built.

This is a fun quirky one.

Biologist: Forest continues to disappear at present pace --> koala approaches extinction.

Politician: Stop deforestation --> save koala

I suspect the tricky bit here is the translation of the politician's statement into conditional logic. Especially if you are using the core curriculum techniques to mechanically translate "All that is needed to save the koala is to stop deforestation", it is tempting to reverse the sufficient and necessary terms.

The sufficient condition is actually stop deforestation because of the referential phrase "all that" is referring to stop deforestation.

I think the remainder of the question should be clear now,.

Answer choice B gives you:

Deforestation stopped --> koala extinct

This isn't inconsistent with the biologist's statement because continuing disappearance of the forest is a sufficient, not a necessary condition. Something else can cause koala extinction even if deforestation is stopped.

B is not consistent with the politicians statement because the same sufficient condition gives you a different outcome.