A good method of filtering is asking them how long it took them to get to their desired score. If the time is quite short (e.g. 2 months for a 175+) that might suggest that they will not be good tutors. The reason is that a person who is a natural talent in the skills the LSAT requires does not need as much work to get a 175+ as does the rest of us. In other words, they simply „get it“, without thinking much about the process of „getting it“, or what exactly happens in their brain every time they answer a question correctly. Consequently, they might struggle to encounter people who just „don‘t get it“, simply because they rarely have been in their shoes.

Just as an analogy (recalling the words of my undergrad professor in solid mechanics, who was trying to explain the concept of Geometrical Moment of Intertia as well as illustrate how hard it is to explain):

You know what a „surface“ is. You have seen and touched it multiple times in your life. You never actively thought about its exact definition. Now, imagine a person who is blind and can‘t sense anything on his/her whole body. I bet it will not be an easy task for you to explain him/her what a surface is.

The above is especially true for Reading Comprehension. Only a small minority of high-scoring tutors can actually teach RC effectively. The #1 reason for that is that the vast majority of them never really struggled with RC, they could naturally read dense material fast, without losing comprehension. Thus, it is difficult for them to help people that struggle with reading, simply because they probably never encountered such difficulties themselves. Oftentimes, they resort to standard-bullshit tips like „read for structure“, „learn how to speed-read“, „aim for finishing first 2 passages in 15 minutes“, „skim the questions before reading the passage“ etc.

My advice would be to look for tutors who have the nuts to tell you „Hey, I got that 17x, but it took me a year and 3+ attempts to get there“. It is an indicator that these people not only have a good score, but also know how to get there, what works and (more importantly) what doesn‘t work. These are the people who will help you most.

My 2 cents on whether extended time is unfair or not:

I think it is fair since, as stated above, it would be otherwise discriminating towards people who have been diagnosed with AD(H)D. Provided that time extension is calibrated based on individual intensity of the disorder, I think it‘s fair to say that everybody starts from the same starting point (everything else being equal).

That said, I believe that practice is unfair to international test takers with AD(H)D, since the barrier to get a diagnose in another region outside the US could be higher.

For instance, I got my Master‘s degree from a US university, and because I had been facing issues with staying focused for years, I decided to visit a psychiatrist there. After the first session, she already prescribed me Adderall (and I am sure that it could have been Ritalin had I adjusted the discussion accordingly).

After my studies, I went back to my home country (EU), and visited another therapist there. She shockingly let me know that Adderall was illegal in the EU. After me bringing AD(H)D into the discussion, she told me that in order to make a diagnose she would need all my grades from elementary school, since AD(H)D is in most of the cases apparent from childhood. I told her that I got straight A‘s in elementary school, though throughout my school time needed double the time compared to classmates with similar GPA. She ignored this information...

Obviously, for me it would be impossible to take an AD(H)D-quiz from the internet, go with the results to a doctor, and get it diagnosed, as was suggested a few posts above...

If you are PT'ing in the 165/166 range, and have only "recently" started to use 7sage, I think it is better to stick with 7sage for a while and rigorously blind review your PT's using the video explanations.

7sage probably contains the most exhaustive LSAT package, and no tutor in the world can provide you with detailed explanations for every single LSAT question out there (unless you are a multi-millionaire). Plus, it's incredibly useful when it comes to drills, e.g. synthesizing your own question drill package, target times for Logic Games/RC passages/LR questions, indicators of difficulty etc. I simply cannot imagine a tutor being as effective and efficient as 7sage.

That said, hiring a tutor might be helpful for the last fine-touches to break from low-170's into mid- or high-170's, for which 3-5 tutoring hours could be sufficient. However, once you reached that level, you should be careful with choosing your tutor, as there are very few good ones out there (despite their high scores).

I also had the same problem at the beginning of my studies, and I think a lot of students struggle in exactly that manner, no matter whether they have ADD or not.

The root-cause of this problem is that LSAT passages are constructed for precisely this purpose, to make you feel bored and distracted: they contain topics virtually nobody cares about, and contain difficult words and convoluted sentences to make matters worse.

A game-changer for me was drawing mental pictures in my head while reading the passages. Simply because a lot of the words/sentences I read in the passage are words/sentences I rarely encounter in casual reading, and thus my brain fails to associate those with anything, thus failing to retain them.

Another useful practice I discovered is, whenever I am confused about something, to actively realize it and consciously make the decision to either flag the line & move on or try to find the root-cause of confusion, which is typically one of the following:

I misread a word.

I misread the referential phrasing.

I did not link the Information up to information in earlier paragraphs.

I did not know the meaning of a word.

The most important question is: what is your score goal?

In case it is 170+ and you‘re not remotely there yet, I would honestly postpone the exam and take it more slowly and strategically if I were you. Cramming all the information in 2 months is not a good plan for most of us.

Please don‘t let your timeframe dictate your score goal, rather do it vice versa. And please don‘t take the August exam for the sake of taking it, the number of attempts for each candidate is limited.

Sorry, did I understand correctly that you get 18-19/25-26 in LR untimed?

If so, that means you get 6-8 wrong in LR untimed. That indicates that there are some things you have to work on with regards to your fundamentals. Therefore, I would for now leave practicing under timed conditions aside and work on my fundamentals if I were you.

Have you gone through the 7sage core curriculum? If not, that's a very good place to start with. Generally, in each LR question you do untimed, your aim should be understanding the following things:

Why the right answer choice is right.

Why all other wrong answer choices are wrong.

(In case you got it wrong) What made the wrong answer choice so attractive that you chose it and the right answer choice so unattractive that you did not choose it?

Keep practicing untimed until you get max. 1-2 questions wrong, and only then move to timed practicing. It is a slow process, but it helps you 1000x more than simply moving from LR-section to LR-section and doing them timed. If you don't deeply understand your mistakes and develop a strategy how to avoid them next time, you will never improve.

I asked HLS admissions office via email and can confirm that this is a lifetime limit.

I also asked Yale, Stanford, Columbia and Chicago, none of them have a cap in number of applications.

I always read the question stem first. I believe it really does me a favor in terms of time management. For example, if I see a question of the type „identify the conclusion“, „identify the role of sentence XY“, „parallel reasoning/flaw“ etc., I try to identify the structure of the argument and hunt for the right answer choice, and de-prioritize reading for precise meaning.

I still get these questions right, and the time saved can be utilized for harder questions which require more in-depth analysis.

@kacypana839 said:

Powerscore Podcast: super hard RC section of RC LG RC LR was experimental. I can breathe now ….

Did the podcast also cover the international June LSAT?

How did you find the international LSAT?

How did you manage to read 15 books in parallel with studying for LSAT, having a kid & a parallel job? Personally I'm not sure if I've read this number of books in my whole life...

Got Q5 wrong because I missed the referential phrasing in the text (thought that the musicians themselves produce the finished pieces out of (another) tape, which did not really make sense to me). If you get the referential phrasing the question is totally doable.

Best thing you can do here is try to understand it from the context, i.e. continuing reading the paragraph and trying to grasp its main point. The whole point of the paragraph is to give evidence that the musicals are different from what Bordwell describes. Means „anomalous“ probably means something related to „different“.

I think it would be correct if it said something like "If everyone had access to exactly two newspapers, this problem would be eliminated". I am not sure if it would be correct if it simply said that everyone should have access to exactly two newspapers, since while it does not 100% solve the problem, it is still a better scenario than having access to only one newspaper.

JY touches upon the surface regarding why A and B are wrong, but here's my reasoning (since they were popular AC I think some elaboration would be helpful):

A: this is tricky and an enticing trap if one has not understood the stimulus. The historian does not have an opinion on whether the claims are true or not. He only addresses other people's source of motivation.

B: I think this AC is actually by definition not a flaw... If one is PURELY motivated by snobbeery, he or she is by definition not motivated by anything else, therefore also not by historical evidence. Therefore, the historian is right in taking that for granted.

#help

I am not 100% sure how "software algorithms" is meant to be understood. Are they algorithms already encoded (= software), or are they simply algorithms in a non-encoded form which are meant to be transformed into software?

I tend to the latter meaning, since it is the only hint in the text from which I can confidently answer Q26. The issue is the following:

Based on my understanding, patent proponents actually never explicitly claim in the passage that algorithms should be protected. They only talk about the encoding (!) of those (=software), which, under their view, should be patent-protected since it is analogous to process design.

The author's response is: process design is indeed patentable, but only if it is genuine invention, not a generic principle. Software algorithms are general principles, so they should not be patentable.

The only scenario where the authors' response would hold is that the patent proponents' claim implies that either

a) if software is patented, then the underlying algorithms are also patented

or

b) algorithms are not generic principles.

Neither a) nor b) are specifically mentioned as the proponents' viewpoints though in the passage, therefore we need to assume that the author believes that the proponents' argument implies one of a) or b).

Under this assumption, Q26 D is correct, and Q26 B wrong (since we don't know whether the proponents have the same opinion as the author on whether algorithms are generic principles or not).

Can someone verify whether my reasoning is correct here?

Struggled with eliminating 14E, though here is the reason I came up with during BR:

Objectivism rests upon the assumption that there is a type of discourse uninfluenced by personal experiences, values and beliefs. But according to the passage, this type of discourse doesn't exist. Therefore, all types of discourse have at least some influence from personal experiences, values and beliefs. We are given no hint in the passage in terms of how much more or less this influence is in personal stories.

Easy to be misinterpreted, but once you parse out what E is actually saying, you realize that it is gibberish.

2B: the direct support is basically the main point of the passage. The 1st paragraph says there has been a lot of psychoanalytic study, but not much political. Though, although he did portray his personal struggles, his art also shows his views about Mexican politics that time.

"Complementary" means they fill each others' gaps. Psychoanalysis misses out the political part, political analysis misses out the personal (related to psyche) part.

To answer my own question, I now realize how terrible this AC is. It would only be right under the assumption that the vast majority of the citizens use community gardens and not personal gardens (like, 99% community vs 1% personal), which is obviously too large of a leap. It could be e.g. 60%/40%, or 50%/50%, then both would grow decently.

B is a cookie-cutter wrong AC: it states a coincidence and baits you to interpret it as a correlation.

AC B says "Back then, when prices were low, gardens were big". If it said sth like "Historically, the higher the produce price, the smaller the personal gardens", then it would arguably weaken the argument because it shows a negative correlation between produce price and personal garden planting, which goes against what we say in the argument and thereby suggesting that there might be an alternative cause of increase in planting personal gardens.

But B merely states two data points. Which, by the way, does not even slightly weaken our argument, since we don't know whether the produce price now is higher or lower compared to decades ago. The stimulus only talks about a produce price spike, though compared to what? 1 year ago? 2 years ago? 10 years ago? We don't know.

Daaaamn chose A for precisely the same reason!

I might misread/overlook something, but isn't C pretty easy to eliminate just by the first half of the sentence? Who of those two says/implies anything about how many theoretical projects reveal practical benefits?

#help (Added by Admin)

The reason why 19B is wrong is the following:

What the author from passage A assumes is: if I can show that a human behavior promotes the respective genes' proliferation, then promoting the respective genes' proliferation has been the cause of that behavior.

In conditional logic: if X, then Y.

AC B wants the author to assume the following: promoting the respective genes' proliferation has been the cause of all human behavior.

Based on the conditional logic scheme above, it would mean: Y is always true. This is obviously nowhere indicated in passage A.

The reason why I eliminated 13B is the following:

We don't need to "show that genes promote their own self-propagation" in order to explain altruistic behavior. This is actually a general assumption evolutionary psychology is based on. What we need to show is how altruistic behavior and genes promoting their own self-propagation (= Evolutionary psychology) are compatible.

How I justified the correct AC in Q24: "... to show that they are serious about collecting those debts." Like, if they recently had applied this measurement too, it either did fulfill its purpose (= they do not have to do it again) or it did not (= why bother do it again?). Actually, apparently it didn't, since if it had then the author would not bother write about this problem anymore, would he?