I know PSA is a subset of Strengthen, but how are you guys telling them apart? the only ones I missed were confusing PSA for Strengthen and Vice Versa.

This is what I worked out and found out that I was wrong because I took the conclusion as a premise. My initial (WRONG) instinct was to just take the conditionals out of context. If we take these conditionals out of context they would read:

Individual Freedom→Rule of Law

Individual Freedom →Social Integrity

Good Life → Social integrity

I can combine those to get multiple right answers:

A

There for it is true both that

/Social Integrity→/Individual Freedom→/Rule of Law

/Social Integrity→/Rule of Law

or

There can be no Rule of Law without Social Integrity

AND

B

/Rule of Law→/Individual Freedom→/Social Integrity

/Rule of Law→/Social Integrity

or

There can be no Social Integrity without Rule of Law

AND

C

/Rule of Law→/Individual Freedom→/Social Integrity→/Good Life

/Rule of Law→/Good Life

or

One cannot pursue the good life without the rule of law

You get the point; I was like yeah all these are true and you're an idiot and guessed. BUT these are wrong because it is not what the QUESTION IS ASKING US TO DO. it is saying that given:

Individual Freedom →Social Integrity

And

Good Life → Social integrity

Prove that:

Individual Freedom→Rule of Law

is true

WE CANNOT USE "Individual Freedom→Rule of Law" TO PROVE THAT "Individual Freedom→Rule of Law" IS TRUE. The only way to do that without simply declaring it is to connect something to social integrity. that is as simple as drawing a line from social integrity to rule of law.

Social Integrity→Rule of Law

or

There can be no social integrity without rule of law. B

This is the simplest way to get to that conclusion in this argument.

TLDR: Don't try and use the conclusion in proving the conclusion.

What has helped me is, like others have been saying, reading very very slowly. I don't move past a comma unless I know what has been said so far. The second it being a pedantic asshole. These go hand in hand.

These questions are hard because the assumptions are so subtle that your brain fills them in automatically because you are being a good interlocutor and assuming the best version of the persons argument. Don't do that. Question every little step, no matter how small, and the answers should become more obvious.

Some clues that you can use are subtle shifts in wording. Like in this one, it says nothing about artistic merit in the first sentence, just links critics' opinions to viewers' pleasure. If you are reading word by word, 'merit' in the second sentence should throw up alarm bells because it is a categorically new idea. This means there has to be some bridge between pleasure and merit. That bridge is probably held up by assumptions that you need to make explicit. Therefore A.

My understanding is this is mistaking Sufficiency for Necessity. First, we are in the domain of people who have eligibility, which means they have to have an exemplary record. So, C and D are out right away. Next we look at the logic:

This year + Went above what is asked + saved someones life → Should get the award

This only tells us ONE way to get the award. There could be other ways of getting to the award. What if the one piece of information we don't know is that Penn died in the line of duty and had served the police force for over 20 years? Could that be another set of circumstance that mean he should get the award? We just don't know so we can't say.

The rule is very specific about having a good record being sufficient AND necessary to be eligible for the award. We know that if Penn doesn't have that exemplary record, it doesn't matter if he literally died fighting Hitler while saving 1 million babies, he cannot be eligible without an exemplary record. Which means, no matter what, A is always a safer bet than any world in which both officers have exemplary records.

The contra positive is:

Should not get the award →Not (This year + Went above what is asked + saved someones life)

Even if you take the contra positive it doesn't tell you that Penn should not get the award. It just tells you things about someone who should not get the award. Which is not the same thing as saying, because you have these things you shouldn't get the award. E is saying because you didn't do these things, you shouldn't get the award.

I've started to think of these as if someone was arguing a point to me and I had the stick of truth and all I have to do is repeat their logic to them and it becomes true.

Supplicant: This is a mammal if it is a cow

Me from my Throne of Truth: All Cows are Mammals

LSAT Writer: Yay, you did it

Where's the lie?

I put E too, took a break and came back to it and it was clear as day. C and E have the same structure, but in one being positive and the other negated flip their sufficiency and necessity. I think it's easier to see this if you take away demorgans law (which would just turn your 'Ands' into 'ors', negate, and flip) and just look at the necessary conditions like this:

C="Any Journalism that... (Insert sufficient conditions here)... is good journalism (necessary condition)

Which translates to:

(Stuff in the middle) → Good Journalism

The contra positive is

/Good Journalism → /(stuff in the middle)

E= "any Journalism that.... (insert sufficient conditions here)... is not good journalism"

(Stuff in the Middle) → /Good Journalism

Contra positive:

Good Journalism → /(Stuff in the middle)

This is how I had to look at it to understand that E does not give me a rule that tells me anything about what is sufficient for good journalism. It only tells me that good journalism is sufficient for whatever is in the middle. I need a set of rules that give me the outcome desired, which is the conclusion, which is that this was good journalism. Therefore, I need to know what is sufficient for good journalism, not what good journalism is sufficient for. E is wrong in form even without getting into the specifics. C is correct in form which means we need to look into the details.

C was written by a potato trying to finish a 1,000 word count essay.

I think it mostly has to do with a greater focus on conditional logic instead of causal logic or argument from analogy. Lots of the questions seem like if X, then Y, then Z, but in the question it will be Stimulus: X happened then Z happened, Question: Choose the appropriate Y.

This is the advice I got that helped: 'don't compare answers to each other, compare them to the stimulus'. I only think about one answer at a time because that's all my little brain can handle. Remember, there is never a time where there are two answers that could be right, so you must have misunderstood or misread something. Don't get frustrated at the test writers, they are probably right and probably don't care what you think.

If you're left with two or more answers after doing POE. Slow down, Re-read the stimulus, re read the question, re read your answers again, word. by. word. usually it will pop out. If it still doesn't, guess, mark it, and move on. Come back at the end if you have time.

The most popular wrong answers are just a result of misreading the question, not what he says is the trap answer (which I agree is the intended trap). This is one of the last questions in the last section and is a true differentiator between the 160's and 170's. The LSAT, at the top 10%, is more of an endurance and attention to detail test than a test of overall logical capabilities IMO. I firmly believe that anyone who can score in the mid to high 150s timed could get almost every question right if you gave them the test with unlimited time and breaks.

Yes, I have stopped caring about the clock and my accuracy has gone way up. My times are also starting to creep down. I think of it like why we play Tee ball before we play baseball. If you can't hit the ball 100% of the time when it's standing still you will be hopeless when it is moving. And I really think you have to hold yourself to a near perfect standard with no time limits.

So is it a fair thing to say that if we have multiple premises, and one of them is much stronger than the other, it is almost always better to weaken the stronger premise? Like in this one, the similarities between a car and a city are huge and comparison's between a city and another city will naturally be smaller. Therefore, arguments from analogy between cars and cities can never be as strong as an argument from analogy between city and city. So inherently, the second premise is stronger and if we weaken that one we will weaken the argument more?

How this would play into the test would be this strategy: if we can identify the strongest premise in the argument (it just has to be strongest in the argument, doesn't have to be a strong or airtight argument) then we should weight our answers towards those that attack the stronger premise?

I don't think B talks about the new product, it talks about new products in general, which is a super set of drug companies' new products.

Another way to think about it is this: my newest car 20 years old, does that mean that I should listen to advice given about 'new cars'? We have no idea how old newest is to this company. 'Our newest' is relational to us and what we possess; 'new' is relational to all things whether I possess them or not.

The trend of getting every level 1 and 2 wrong and way over time, but getting every 3, 4, and 5 right and under-time is still holding strong.

Hello there!

This is a weaken EXCEPT question, which means they all have to weaken the argument (even slightly) and one either has to strengthen it or do nothing at all to do with the argument.

A very charitable reading of C could say that strengthened the argument kinda in the way you say. "sometimes people get hiccups when they get Ebola, we have records of people sometimes getting hiccups, therefore they all have Ebola" is a weak sauce argument, but it doesn't weaken the argument. It is really just kinda consistent with what we know or irrelevant. Either way, it doesn't weaken the argument where every other answer weakens it in some way.

C is kinda like we are talking about the best baseball team ever and I just out of the blue say, 'Some of the Red Socks players use baseball gloves and the best baseball team would use gloves sometimes'. Great. yeah. that's doesn't help me prove my point at all. It is just true

On these training questions, I force myself to look at each answer and explain why its wrong even if I'm 99% sure I have found the right one. The more exposure I get to wrong answers the better I get at picking them out on questions where I don't know what the right answer is. If I'm not 100% sure of why my answer is right AND all the others are wrong, I watch the video. Usually, I learn a new way the answer was wrong in the video, because most of these answers are wrong in two or three ways.

I'll worry about timing once I'm batting above 98% un-timed on questions. If I can't hit in practice, don't throw me the ball for the game winning shot.

I started using my cursor to move under EVERY single word and have massively slowed down my reading because I was so many questions because of this, and it has helped so much. It slowed down my reading by a lot, and it feels like I am moving slower subjectively. But I have started getting within 20 or so seconds of every single question's time limit and getting more correct.

I spend way too long trying to figure out what unrelated answers are trying to say and vainly trying to connect them to the answer. I don't know why B and C were different answer choices (probably a lazy test writer) and I was sure that I had misunderstood something. Why would the test writers give us two answer choices where one basically said 'I have 12' and the other said 'I have a dozen' when the question was "what is your favorite color?"

Receiving no treatment is VERY different than getting a placebo which is also VERY different than comparing to standard of care or standard practice. Placebo does NOT mean doing nothing, as it is often taught in high school science class. It means I did everything the same (within reason) in all groups except for the one variable for which I am trying to test. No treatment means simply that, I did nothing. I just left the subject alone and observed or asked some questions. Testing against standard of care or standard practice means, I am testing against what we usually do to treat this situation. Each one is different and can be useful for different things, but generally the hierarchy goes: 1. Against standard of care, 2. against placebo, 3. against no treatment.

For example, I'm testing a new pain relief pill. If I treat pill vs no treatment, I give half my new pill, and the other half I give nothing, I might not even see them just have them fill out a survey about pain at two different times. This is the lowest level of rigor because I have controlled for the least variables. This is what can be reasonably assumed they did in this example, and, therefore, better than nothing, but not an ideal test.

Testing against a placebo group is better. It would be giving half a new pill and half an identical pill but full of sugar. The act of giving a sugar pill is a treatment, it is just one that we can be reasonable certain will have no mechanistic effect on the test subjects' pain. It could have a psychological effect.

However, this still does not tell me if my new pill works better than aspirin. In this example it would be me hooking you up to a machine that looks, sounds, and smells identical to the magnets, but does not produce the magnetic effect.

Testing against the standard of care is often (depending on the variable you want to test) better than placebo. This would be one group with my new pill and one group with aspirin. This tells us that the new treatment works better or worse against what we are already doing. IDK what the standard of care is for chronic pain, but lets say its opioids. I would give one my pill and the other opioids. In this example it would be one gets magnets, one gets opioids, and ideally, one gets both.

Testing against the standard of care is a far more ethical way to test medicine (refer to the movie Dallas Buyers Club if you want an example of why).

Sorry for the long response, this is just something I am passionate about because the "natural remedy, seed oils are bad, and crystals will heal your cancer" crowd prey on people not understanding these distinctions (especially between placebo and standard of care) to sell their snake oil on Joe Rogan's podcast. Red flags when someone says their supplement preforms better than whatever doctors are telling you to take "in placebo controlled trials". It could mean that I got 10 people together and the 5 of them that took my snake oil said they got 100% better and the other five got a sugar pill. But the 1 million person study by real doctors on aspirin said they only got 98% pain relief vs sugar pill. This is also why the new NIH policy to do all of our new medical tests as ONLY placebo control group tests is unethical, unscientific, and going to lead to poorly informed laws and regulations.

Tomato Out

I was getting these all wrong on the diagnostic test, but haven't gotten one wrong yet here. I was thinking about the questions backwards and trying to undermine premises instead of support. I discounted every single correct answer because I was like 'no, that's just another way to explain this phenomenon; why would that weaken the argument'. It's crazy how just a little clarity on what the test writers are actually asking for can turn a question from impossible to fairly obvious.

My theory is holding true, difficulty is more about placement on the test than content. This question came from section 2 question 26 is a level 5. It seems like the difficulty is relying on you being in a rush and missing the fact that it was the same people polled, and the 'almost' in the first sentence. I bet if this was the first question people would take the time to read it and it would be a 3.

I feel like these 'difficulty' ratings have far more to do with where the question landed in the test than the actual difficulty. This did not feel like a 2 difficulty it felt trickier than that because A is the most popular trap answer and when you are crunched on time you are much more likely to just go with your first impression. I would guess that if it was in section 4 question 25 instead of section 1 question 6 a lot more people would be getting it wrong. Still, don't think it would be a four or a five, probably a 3, but all the fours and fives I've seen have been near the end of sections where a good portion of people are probably guessing anyway because they ran out of time.

Does anyone know if they take test order and answer order into account when assigning difficulty or is it just based off the number of people who got it wrong?

I had this same problem, I read but as and which makes it not true. Is there any good rule for telling what but means?

The only two pieces of information the about the current administration are contained in the last sentence of the stimulus and are:

1. The current administration has not protected the environment.

2. The current administration has protected individual liberties.

(A) states that the current administration is economically successful. There is just no information to say whether this is true or not. IMO, this question really relies on the student to be tired and misread environment for economic for its difficulty.

EVEN IF the stimulus had added that the current administration was a success, we still wouldn't know if the current administration was an economic success because the author's reasoning goes:

Economic Success AND Protected Individual Liberties → Administration Success

IF we knew the administration was a success that would tell us nothing about the Economic Success of the administration because of sufficiency and necessity:

Economic Success AND Protected Individual Liberties → Administration Success

DOES NOT MEAN

Administration Success AND Protected Individual Liberties → Economic Success

In other words "If I am a whale and I am happy I must be in the ocean", does not mean "If I am in the ocean and I am happy I must be a whale".