@Kevin_Lin I think the resulting essays are fine, but both commentary videos serve as examples of how not to spend your prewriting time, and as a result of that the structures of both essays are constructed on the fly. The first video goes into more detail about this, but both examples spend most of their time summarizing the perspectives as apposed to formulating arguments or outlining their essay. They are saved only by the persons highlighted being good writers and managing to write quality essays in the allotted time with little to no outlining.

As someone that struggles to write like that under time pressure and needs every second of planning I'm given, hardly any of what they did is helpful to see except as an example of how not to approach this.

It would be really helpful to have an example of someone who is familiar with the "new" style and approaches it in the way that the lesson in this section talks about. That way we can see what a good prewriting process looks like and how we should be spending our time.

It's not often that you see a correct answer that is factually incorrect, and on a MBT question no less

Maybe it was true at the time nvm it was still false in 2018, but in 2026 everyone should be using strong passwords with a password manager (I couldn't tell you most of my passwords if I wanted to lol)

I chose (A) because I was going with the assumption—and relying on assumptions is required for this question—that maybe there are fewer documents because his enemies destroyed any and all evidence that would interfere with their narrative, and so they just destroyed everything.

But there are 2 problems with this that make (A) clearly a wrong answer:

1. It doesn't actually strengthen the conclusion (Caligula not bad). Sure, it explains where there is fewer documentation—some of which may show that he did non-cruel things—but it doesn't add any support that he wasn't cruel. And there is evidence that alleges he was cruel, and that isn't weakened at all by this explanation.

2. This probably isn't something that you'd be thinking on the test, but just to entertain the assumption, it doesn't even really suggest that the documentation was destroyed by his enemies. Any documentation suggests that there aren't may records of things like merchant ledgers, tax records, or personal writings that would be decentralized and infeasible to be destroyed to the magnitude applied. The assumption lends more credence to there being a disaster like a fire or a city sacking or some administrative reason like poor record keeping or a ban on writing.

Anyone confused by the answer or complaining about the question should watch Mike's explanation video (or at the very least the c and takeaway sections).

The takeaway section specifically is some of the most helpful LSAT advice I've received for dealing with tricky questions like this.

I get what (D) is going for (that the subduction angle is the only factor that determines the size of the contact plane), but it wouldn't (D), as written, being true also mean that the size of the contact plane is not related to the amount of resistance between the planes? And wouldn't that destroy the entire theory underlying the steep vs. shallow angle?

I often have a problem with reading things too literally, but how am I supposed to know from just that sentence that "related" here means "determined by" and not, like idk, "has a relationship to"?

I get why (C) is right (and from a reverse-engineer-the-question test taking perspective, a better AC), but imo (D) isn't wrong. I would love for somebody to correct me.

@MatthewTodd But wear and tear and corrosion over time aren't impacted by the change in policy, only what happened in the past, so the principle wouldn't apply. This policy change can't do anything about the cars having already been corroded, and there's nothing in the stimulus to suggest that older cars are any less protected than newer cars, only that they weren't before.

@Bruh As the explanation says:

[W]e don’t know that Passage A believes the integration of study of women’s history into the mainstream is not complete. Passage A never suggests that this integration still needs some way to go before being complete.

@christophergiordano I think the conclusion could be better stated as "parents should be given additional votes to cast on behalf of their children in order to receive fair representation'"

The issue is that they support each other, and the support-conclusion relationship is a one way street. Saying they should get more votes doesn't make sense without saying doing so would provide fair representation, and saying they would receive fair representation doesn't make sense without saying because they're getting more votes.

This probably doesn't apply to anything on the LSAT where you have to identify the conclusion, but the conclusion shouldn't have to map directly onto sentences. You could rewrite the stim. without changing the meaning, but that doesn't mean the conclusion changes. It's just often easier to state the conclusion using the exact wording given (and relevant LSAT questions tend to map the conclusion directly onto a sentence).

For people like me that ruled out C because the stimulus says "there is nothing new in this idea of restricting growth", there's a difference between new ideas in the proposal and new reasons for the proposal

Here's an absurd example that's hopefully more illustrative:

Alice: I don't like people having fun; we should ban people swimming in the lake

Bob: That's dumb. City council is justified in deciding against that proposal

five years later

Carol: There was a toxic waste spill into the lake; we should ban people swimming in the lake

Dave: Since there is nothing new in this idea of banning swimming, I oppose the regulations.

Dave's argument does not make sense since the circumstances around the proposal have changed.

This is one of those questions where I get frustrated and confused about how literally we're supposed to read the stimulus and answer choices. Because based on what the stimulus says, I don't think any of the ACs are right.

Looking at the explanation for D (emphasis mine):

The author assumes that the association between Jennifer’s presence and winning, which is something that has been true about the team’s past games, will continue to be true in the future.

Nowhere does the stimulus indicate that there is an association between Jennifer and winning, only not Jennifer and losing. It's possible that they haven't won a single game and Jennifer hasn't played. I know that sounds like a stretch based on, like, the way language works and people talk, but I swear there have been assumptions even more subtle that you have to read very literally to come to the right answer.

I get why D is a better answer than A, but it's hard to evaluate that when you're being timed. It's also something we shouldn't have to evaluate according to the lessons because "There is only ever one right answer choice and four massively, horrendously, embarrassingly, wrong answer choices." (That same lesson also says "You're not going to find anything new that tens of thousands of people just like you only with way more riding on the line haven't found before." so if anyone can explain to my why my reasoning is wrong—or any tips for how to read literally but not too literally—I would be immensely grateful)

@lastminlsat Hypothesis 2 argues for an period of very intense bombardment following a period of declining bombardment:

They claim that the Moon's evidence merely provides a view of the period concluding billions of years of a continuous, declining heavy bombardment throughout the inner solar system. According to them, the impacts from the latter part of the bombardment were so intense that they obliterated evidence of earlier impacts.

While not explicitly stated that the impacts toward the end were more intense than the impacts throughout the period during which bombardment is decreasing, the way the statements are written lend more credence to that interpretation than to the interpretation that the impacts that "were so intense [so as to] obliterate evidence of earlier impacts" were actually the weakest impacts of the whole period.

I just want to point out how useful the "Split Method" is even for questions where it seems like you can't know what to eliminate on just the information in Passage A. If you look at the answer explanations, you can see that answer choices A,B, and C can all be eliminated almost entirely on the basis on Passage A alone. The explanation for AC B is the only one that mentions Passage B, but only referentially (if you remove "...in Passage B" the explanation still makes sense). You can also get a good sense that D will be wrong, since Passage A talks about how more recent scholarship focuses more on the significance of gender, so D runs in the opposite direction of author A's argument.

It's worth mentioning that, according the the analytics (as of the time of writing), only 51% of people answer this question correctly and the two most frequent wrong answers are A and C. That means that if you can eliminate those options on the first pass, you make this question significantly easier for yourself than the 5 star difficulty it's labeled as.

@JoyelleBaek You should be able to cross out A, B, and C. If you read the given answer explanations, you can see that they can be eliminated almost entirely on the basis on pA alone. The explanation for AC B is the only one that mentions pB, but only referentially; it's still possible to eliminate it without reading pB at all.

@RobertWay Yes, but the logic is the same. You could write it (and the contrapositive) as

SAS → /AA

AA → /SAS

But this says nothing about /AA, so the argument is still invalid.

Something I noticed about the way negating works with these indicators is that the structure of the conditionals will always be the same based on whether one, both, or neither of the conditions are negated, regardless of which condition is sufficient or necessary

If neither is negated (eg. You will fail unless you study) only the sufficient will be negated

/X → Y

If both are negated (eg. You will not get lost unless you don't follow directions) only the necessary will (still) be negated

X → /Y

If only one is negated (eg. You can not play games unless you finish your homework) then either both conditions are the negated or neither are.

X → Y

/Y → /X

Note that X and Y are not interchangeable on this last one, so it's not as useful as the others for quickly translating, but it could still be helpful as a sanity check

I don't know how helpful this will be to anyone (myself included) so if this is more confusing, please ignore it

@pinky One of the ways they phrased the translation rule in the video at the start of the lesson was: (paraphrased)

"'unless' indicates a necessary condition with a negated sufficient condition"

So

A unless B

becomes

/A → B

The reason the "take either one" rule works is because when you take the contrapositive—negate both conditions and swap their relationship—you negate the condition we just negated

/B → //A

But the double negation cancels out so you're left with

/B → A

Which is the same as if you had followed the "take either one" rule, which is why it's nice to use as a shortcut so you don't need to think about this every time.

Are the 6 indicator words listed the only ones that come up on the LSAT? When learning conditional logic (albeit for discrete math) we we taught to say A->B as "A implies B".

Ex:

If you have eyes, you can see.

Having eyes implies you can see.

Having eyes -> You can see

Does it not being one of the 6 listed mean it doesn't really show up on the LSAT, or is list of words given supposed to be non-exhaustive?