Hey everyone,

I'm having trouble clearly identifying the assumptions in logical reasoning questions. I understand the difference between necessary vs. sufficient assumptions, overlooked possibilities & mismatched concepts. But, during my timed practices, the assumption is not clicking in my head. Any advice or tips would be greatly appreciated. Maybe even a new way of approaching the stimulus?

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Basically, for each LG game that I get wrong or am off on time, I redo once and figure it out with a slight overkill on time. The second time, I get them right and am 2 minutes under time. Same with the third pass.

I stop after the third pass. I know we are supposed to print ten copies, but is there a minimum amount we can drill if we pick it up on a second retry for instance? Would you do one more? Go up to 5?

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It seems games can be mastered with practice,

is it the case with LR as well? Or perfecting LR just not a realistic expectation?

Hello,

I have a question, in my PS I discussed I have been interested in law for a long time, but I studied a totally different subject in grad school. There are several reasons and I did not study it for giving up law school, but should I explain that in addendum? Or do I look like I am making an excuse?

Thanks.

Sorry for the ominous title, but I'm really conflicted on what to do, and friends/family aren't objective enough to give me a solid response.

I am Canadian and applied to 7 schools across the country, I wrote the LSAT in December after delaying the September exam after studying for 4 months. I wrote in December because I felt like I had to, since I had already submitted all my applications and was dead set on attending law school in 2017.

I didn't feel great writing in December, and left the exam feeling like I would need to rewrite. I got my score back and scored 10 below my average, 155, and have a personal high of hitting 171 on a few preptests. My struggle section is LR by a long shot - average about 6-8 wrong per section, and -12 on the section on the December test. I'm not sure if my issue is stamina or lacking the fundamental knowledge for the question types. I average between 0 -4 on LG, and between -4 -6 on RC.

I recently decided, due to pressure from family/friends and myself to write the test in February because my main concern would be losing this application cycle and the money used to apply. My scores have improved slightly from taking a month long break, I came back and got 171 on my first PT since my break, and gotten 169, 168 etc since.

My main question for the community then is this, do I grind it out and hopefully save this application cycle, or sit it out and write in June or September and maybe still get accepted this year? I also emailed my schools I applied to and told them I would be writing in February and to put my application on hold, would it not look bad to then go back and tell them to change it back?

I haven't seen any kind of limit on length for these. Do you guys think that will be okay? I know personal statements are supposed to be 2-3 pages double spaced, so this will still be about half of the size.

Greetings fellow 7Sages :)

Since questions in each LR/RC section get harder, and since I start to feel mentally fatigued once I reach questions 18-onward, I was thinking of starting each LR/RC (and maybe even LG) section from the last question and working back to the first.

Has anyone tried this? Any input or advice would be much appreciated! (Sorry if this topic has already been covered).

The statements provide the most support for holding that Sandra would disagree with Taylor about which one of the following statements?

Answer: D) Some sciences can yield mathematically precise results that are not inherently suspect.

Okay, so I answered this incorrectly on the diagnostic, and watched the video explaining what the correct answer choice was. I'm still a bit confused. This type of question is a disagreement question, which means that the right answer choice has to be a statement that one of the two speakers agrees with and the other disagrees with. In this passage, Taylor and Sandra are arguing about whether or not all mathematically precise claims should be subject to skepticism. Taylor clearly holds that all mathematically precise claims are suspect, while Sandra believes that some scientific disciplines can obtain precise results which are not suspect.

D clearly aligns with Sandra's argument, but I am confused by the wording of this question. It says the statements above provide the most support for holding that Sandra would disagree with Taylor about one of the following statements. Doesn't that mean we are looking for a statement that Taylor believes in and Sandra disagrees with?

https://classic.7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-june-2007-section-2-question-16/

Alright so, I have already posted about having regrets, but now we are getting to crunch time. I am hovering around that magical 160- 165 PT range ( 161, 163, 163, 164, 164, 164, 165) which puts me right where I want to be for 94% of Texas schools. If I score like this on test day, I will most likely get into UH, Baylor, SMU, St. Mary's, while missing out on UT Austin. So here's what I can do:

Accept a (most likely) good sized scholarship from St. Mary's. They are not a great school, but have good influence in San Antonio. That is where I want to practice post graduation.

Possibly accept smaller money to go to UH, Baylor, or SMU. Be 2-4 hours away from my wife and dogs since they will be in the San Antonio area. So I will have to commute every weekend to see them. The drive is not that long, but it does stink to be away from the ones you love.

Most of my improvement has come in the last month. I shot up from a 153 to my current range, and I am beginning to see some improvement that could make jumps elsewhere possible. Do I forego this year, study for September, and go for the big Kahuna at UT?

Which option would you choose?

I like James Clear.

He's one of those people who's constantly trying to improve himself. I get his emails once per week, and they always challenge me to ask myself, "Could I be doing this better?"

This is his guide to Deliberate Practice (I've also provided a link because many of the ideas he writes about are hyperlinked to sources.) I think there's a lot here that could be applicable to LSAT. Take a read a let me know what you think. Maybe you have some specific ideas of how to deliberately practice the LSAT.

http://jamesclear.com/beginners-guide-deliberate-practice

The Beginner’s Guide to Deliberate Practice

by James Clear

Read this on JamesClear.com

In some circles, Ben Hogan is credited with “inventing practice.”

Hogan was one of the greatest golfers of the 20th century, an accomplishment he achieved through tireless repetition. He simply loved to practice. Hogan said, “I couldn’t wait to get up in the morning so I could hit balls. I’d be at the practice tee at the crack of dawn, hit balls for a few hours, then take a break and get right back to it.” [1]

For Hogan, every practice session had a purpose. He reportedly spent years breaking down each phase of the golf swing and testing new methods for each segment. The result was near perfection. He developed one of the most finely-tuned golf swings in the history of the game.

His precision made him more like a surgeon than a golfer. During the 1953 Masters, for example, Hogan hit the flagstick on back-to-back holes. A few days later, he broke the tournament scoring record. [2]

Hogan methodically broke the game of golf down into chunks and figured out how he could master each section. For example, he was one of the first golfers to assign specific yardages to each golf club. Then, he studied each course carefully and used trees and sand bunkers as reference points to inform him about the distance of each shot. [3]

Hogan finished his career with nine major championships—ranking fourth all-time. During his prime, other golfers simply attributed his remarkable success to “Hogan’s secret.” Today, experts have a new term for his rigorous style of improvement: deliberate practice.

What is Deliberate Practice?

Deliberate practice refers to a special type of practice that is purposeful and systematic. While regular practice might include mindless repetitions, deliberate practice requires focused attention and is conducted with the specific goal of improving performance. When Ben Hogan carefully reconstructed each step of his golf swing, he was engaging in deliberate practice. He wasn’t just taking cuts. He was finely tuning his technique.

The greatest challenge of deliberate practice is to remain focused. In the beginning, showing up and putting in your reps is the most important thing. But after a while we begin to carelessly overlook small errors and miss daily opportunities for improvement.

This is because the natural tendency of the human brain is to transform repeated behaviors into automatic habits. For example, when you first learned to tie your shoes you had to think carefully about each step of the process. Today, after many repetitions, your brain can perform this sequence automatically. The more we repeat a task the more mindless it becomes.

Mindless activity is the enemy of deliberate practice. The danger of practicing the same thing again and again is that progress becomes assumed. Too often, we assume we are getting better simply because we are gaining experience. In reality, we are merely reinforcing our current habits—not improving them.

Claiming that improvement requires attention and effort sounds logical enough. But what does deliberate practice actually look like in the real world? Let’s talk about that now.

Examples of Deliberate Practice

One of my favorite examples of deliberate practice is discussed in Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin. In the book, Colvin describes how Benjamin Franklin used deliberate practice to improve his writing skills.

When he was a teenager, Benjamin Franklin was criticized by his father for his poor writing abilities. Unlike most teenagers, young Ben took his father’s advice seriously and vowed to improve his writing skills.

He began by finding a publication written by some of the best authors of his day. Then, Franklin went through each article line by line and wrote down the meaning of every sentence. Next, he rewrote each article in his own words and then compared his version to the original. Each time, “I discovered some of my faults, and corrected them.” Eventually, Franklin realized his vocabulary held him back from better writing, and so he focused intensely on that area.

Deliberate practice always follows the same pattern: break the overall process down into parts, identify your weaknesses, test new strategies for each section, and then integrate your learning into the overall process.

Here are some more examples.

Cooking: Jiro Ono, the subject of the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi, is a chef and owner of an award-winning sushi restaurant in Tokyo. Jiro has dedicated his life to perfecting the art of making sushi and he expects the same of his apprentices. Each apprentice must master one tiny part of the sushi-making process at a time—how to wring a towel, how to use a knife, how to cut the fish, and so on. One apprentice trained under Jiro for ten years before being allowed to cook the eggs. Each step of the process is taught with the utmost care.

Martial arts: Josh Waitzkin, author of The Art of Learning, is a martial artist who holds several US national medals and a 2004 world championship. In the finals of one competition, he noticed a weakness: When an opponent illegally head-butted him in the nose, Waitzkin flew into a rage. His emotion caused him to lose control and forget his strategy. Afterward, he specifically sought out training partners who would fight dirty so he could practice remaining calm and principled in the face of chaos. “They were giving me a valuable opportunity to expand my threshold for turbulence,” Waitzkin wrote. “Dirty players were my best teachers.”

Chess: Magnus Carlsen is a chess grandmaster and one of the highest-rated players in history. One distinguishing feature of great chess players is their ability to recognize “chunks,” which are specific arrangements of pieces on the board. Some experts estimate that grandmasters can identify around 300,000 different chunks. Interestingly, Carlsen learned the game by playing computer chess, which allowed him to play multiple games at once. Not only did this strategy allow him to learn chunks much faster than someone playing in-person games, but also gave him a chance to make more mistakes and correct his weaknesses at an accelerated pace.

Music: Many great musicians recommend repeating the most challenging sections of a song until you master them. Virtuoso violinist Nathan Milstein says, “Practice as much as you feel you can accomplish with concentration. Once when I became concerned because others around me practiced all day long, I asked [my professor] how many hours I should practice, and he said, ‘It really doesn’t matter how long. If you practice with your fingers, no amount is enough. If you practice with your head, two hours is plenty.’” [4]

Basketball: Consider the following example from Aubrey Daniels, “Player A shoots 200 practice shots, Player B shoots 50. The Player B retrieves his own shots, dribbles leisurely and takes several breaks to talk to friends. Player A has a colleague who retrieves the ball after each attempt. The colleague keeps a record of shots made. If the shot is missed the colleague records whether the miss was short, long, left or right and the shooter reviews the results after every 10 minutes of practice. To characterize their hour of practice as equal would hardly be accurate. Assuming this is typical of their practice routine and they are equally skilled at the start, which would you predict would be the better shooter after only 100 hours of practice?”

Image

The Unsung Hero of Deliberate Practice

Perhaps the greatest difference between deliberate practice and simple repetition is this: feedback. Anyone who has mastered the art of deliberate practice—whether they are an athlete like Ben Hogan or a writer like Ben Franklin—has developed methods for receiving continual feedback on their performance.

There are many ways to receive feedback. Let’s discuss two.

The first effective feedback system is measurement. The things we measure are the things we improve. This holds true for the number of pages we read, the number of pushups we do, the number of sales calls we make, and any other task that is important to us. It is only through measurement that we have any proof of whether we are getting better or worse.

The second effective feedback system is coaching. One consistent finding across disciplines is that coaches are often essential for sustaining deliberate practice. In many cases, it is nearly impossible to both perform a task and measure your progress at the same time. Good coaches can track your progress, find small ways to improve, and hold you accountable to delivering your best effort each day.

For additional ideas on how to implement deliberate practice, I recommend this interview with psychology professor Anders Ericsson, who is widely considered to be the world’s top expert on deliberate practice.

The Promise of Deliberate Practice

Humans have a remarkable capacity to improve their performance in nearly any area of life if they train in the correct way. This is easier said than done.

Deliberate practice is not a comfortable activity. It requires sustained effort and concentration. The people who master the art of deliberate practice are committed to being lifelong learners—always exploring and experimenting and refining.

Deliberate practice is not a magic pill, but if you can manage to maintain your focus and commitment, then the promise of deliberate practice is quite alluring: to get the most out of what you’ve got.

ImageImage

FOOTNOTES

Interview with George Peper. GOLF Magazine. September 1987.

Hogan’s precision with the golf club allowed him to play the game in a different way than most. Once, another golf pro came to him for advice and said, “I’m having trouble with my long putts.” Hogan simply replied, “Why don’t you try hitting your irons closer to the pin?”

Ben Hogan was relentless in his quest for improvement. According to one New York Times article, Hogan once received a shipment of golf balls before a tournament and examined each one carefully with a magnifying glass. “Some of these balls have a little too much paint in the dimples,” he said.

The Making of an Expert by K. Anders Ericsson, Michael J. Prietula, and Edward T. Cokely. Harvard Business Review. July-August 2007 Issue.

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Hoping someone has some advice on this for me. When JY goes over strengthen/weaken questions on LR, he identifies the conclusion and looks for an answer choice that either provides more support for or weakens support that the premises provide for the conclusion. I've been trying to practice answering questions in under 1 minute/20 seconds, and to do this I feel that I can use this approach pretty successfully in general. In general, should I try to come up with an assumption of the argument before I approach the questions? Or would having an assumption in my mind potentially distract me from thoroughly examining the answer choices?

Appreciate any suggestions!

Jeff

Hello all! I was hoping I could get assistance with the order in which I should study for the LSAT! I am taking the exam in September but I thought it's better to study earlier since it's my first time taking the exam! I have been studying logic games for 30 minutes a day for a week now. I was wondering if that's a good amount or the right thing to study first. Should I start with logic games then reasoning then comprehension or is there a better order? I am going to try and do an hour a day for the remainder of the time I have before the exam I just want some good tips starting out so I am best prepaired! Thanks so much!

Hello all! I was hoping I could get assistance with the order in which I should study for the LSAT! I am taking the exam in September but I thought it's better to study earlier since it's my first time taking the exam! I have been studying logic games for 30 minutes a day for a week now. I was wondering if that's a good amount or the right thing to study first. Should I start with logic games then reasoning then comprehension or is there a better order? I am going to try and do an hour a day for the remainder of the time I have before the exam I just want some good tips starting out so I am best prepaired! Thanks so much!

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Even though this question is old, it has several lessons built into it. I was able to parse this question out mainly because of the lessons on 7Sage. The first lesson I see with this question is the importance of being attuned to the grammar of the LSAT. The stimulus begins with “since.” This should reference back to the core curriculum grammar lessons: “since” generally introduces something that we will be using to build towards a conclusion. In other words, we are hurled by the first word of this argument into a premise. We also have an additional premise that is introduced by the word “and.” We then have a comma and the conclusion is given to us in conditional language. I sometimes feel on LR that what I am given in a stimulus is like joining a conversation mid-talk and I am expected to piece together the information into the way the authors want us to. This is a perfect example of that phenomena in my estimation.

The second lesson in this question is the heavy use of conditional language. You have to know your conditional indicators in order to map this question correctly. What we end up getting when we map this question is:

P 1:If you support the new tax plan——>no chance of being elected.

P 2:If you truly understand economics——>Not support the new plan.

C:If you have a chance of being elected——>truly understand economics

The third lesson from this question is the idea that questions are often related in the task they set out for us, a deep understanding of this sits at the bottom of the case for reading the stimulus before the question stem: if you can tell what is wrong from the stimulus this thinking goes, the question stem shouldn't have to be read first (I am not a proponent of this view.) When I lined those conditionals up, out of habit I wanted to find the sufficient assumption. Well it turns out that if we look at this question through a sufficient assumption lens, we can actually garner quite a bit. Lets take the contrapositive of that first statement:

P 1: If you have a chance of being elected——>Not support new tax plan

P 2:If you truly understand economics——>Not support the new plan.

C:If you have a chance of being elected——>truly understand economics

So insofar as the premises supporting the conclusion this isn’t a valid argument. But why? Above there is simply no way to get from the premises to the conclusion. The forth lesson dawned on me when I was BR’ing this question: This is where the flaw really is: as currently stated, the premises do not support the conclusion. Familiar terms are used in the premises and conclusion as a way to distract us, but the conclusion might as well be something about football or motorcycle maintenance. There is simply no support for the given conclusion from the given premises. The relationships between the elements do not support the given conclusion.

This is when we take a look at the fifth lesson embedded in this question and that is to take a close look at the question stem. This isn’t actually asking what the flaw is in the way we are all used to. Instead, this question is asking us for something that the argument ignores the possibility of. More specifically, that the argument ignores the possibility that “some people who _____” The fifth lesson here is how to deny a conditional relationship. So if I were to give you the conditional relationship: All cats are mammals, you would deny that by saying “some things that are cats and not mammals.” The existence of a thing that is both a cat and not a mammal is enough to deny the sufficiency of something being a cat triggering the necessary condition of being a mammal. With this knowledge in mind lets take a closer look at what we are given in the stimulus.

chance of elected———>Not support new tax plan

+

Understands economics——>Not support new tax plan

Conclusion:

Chance elected——>Truly understands economics

How could we make this valid? We could say that Not support new tax plan——>Understands economics!

99 times out of 100, if we have gotten this far and we are stuck, it was actually our translation of the logic where we have gone wrong. Meaning if this was a sufficient assumption question, I would bet that I had translated something wrong. But, we didn’t. The only other possibility is something very peculiar: it appears that our author has given us: Understands economics———>Not support new tax plan, but has interpreted this statement in logic to mean: Not support new tax plan———>Understand economics! If we (wrongly) interpret the second condition as Not support new tax plan———>Understand economics, we have a simple A——>B——>C argument.

This is an incredibly difficult step to take. I am open for correction here, but the idea that we are given a conditional statement, that we translate correctly, but have to take a leap in judgement to conclude that the author might have interpreted that conditional statement wrong is hard enough. Finding where the author’s translation went wrong and then negating that translation to point out the flaw makes this, for my money, the hardest flaw question of all time. The author's assumption here is actually a mistranslation of the logic to: Not support new tax plan———>Understand economics The denial of this is (D)

I look forward to a correspondence with members of this community about this question. Has anyone come across something like this elsewhere? Would it behove us to classify this flaw under the umbrella of sufficient/necessary flaws more generally? Thank you!

David

**Admin note: edited title**

Hi community,

I cannot remember all my dorm housing policy violations that I breached in college

because I threw away the papers and the college email is now terminated.

So I contacted the student life office and asked them to release all the records.

They only had one alcohol violation. Honestly I cannot remember if there is anything more.

Im not so concerned about law school app as to the Bar C&F. What if Bar C&F

find out something that I don't remember despite my effort to research and disclose?

Maybe some records are expunged despite receiving written warning, but I cannot remember? (- this is what Im most concerned about.(/p)

I want to disclose everything but I cannot find records. This is really getting frustrating.

I saw something in a comment somewhere about logic game sets of similar questions to do, and I saw on one explanation JY had "if you struggled with this type of question, here's a bunch more". Are there multiple of these lists/ do these lists exist?

The purpose for me pursuing law school is to ultimately work in public interest. I hope to get into policy making/changing.. especially education law and disability law. With that said.. I would love to make it to a T14 school.. Georgetown would be a dream come true.. or Cornell.

My husband is applying to veterinary school the same time I am applying to law school.. This limits my choices of T14 schools. I honestly just want to get into a decent school with scholarships that will allow me to work in public policy.

Considering what my goal with a law degree is, is it reasonable to NOT attend a T14 and still accomplish my goals?

I've been doing too much lurking on the TLS forum.

Are their any more premise or conclusion indicator(s) words that have been found that we can add to the list?

And even words indicating a switch in the argument?

73.4.20 https://classic.7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-73-section-4-question-20/

This is a phenomenon-hypothesis Strengthening question, so we are looking for an answer choice that strengthens the hypothesis or an answer choice that prevents an outside factor from weakening the hypothesis.

The passage is basically saying that the process goes like this: When nerve cells are damaged after a stroke, glutamate can leak from them and can kill other nerve cells. We are left to reasonably presume that this is included in the definition of continuing nerve cell deterioration. Therefore glutamate is present in blood of those whose nerve cells continue to deteriorate after a stroke.

Answer choices (it came down to C and D):

A – incorrect because saying that any neurotransmitter that leaks from damaged nerve cells will damage other nerve cells does not strengthen the relationship we want. It doesn’t give us any more reason to think that glutamate in particular is impacting surrounding nerve cells.

B – incorrect because it’s irrelevant

C – This was very hard to eliminate, but it is incorrect for a couple of reasons. 1) Knowing that it is the only one that leaks from damaged nerve cells doesn’t necessarily impact the relationship. If it does, we have to stretch it with a bit assuming in order to do so (for instance, you have to assume that it actually DOES leak from those nerve cells). 2) It doesn’t rule out the possibility that glutamate could come from five billion other locations in the body. It therefore definitely does not strengthen the statement that glutamate from damaged nerve cells is a cause of brain damage. Just because it is the only neurotransmitter that leaks from oxygen-starved or damaged nerve cells does not mean that it only leaks from those nerve cells. In fact, it leaves the door wide open to think that it could leak from a long list of other places, and we know from the stimulus that we don’t care about those other places. We just want to know if leakage from oxygen-starved or damaged nerve cells causes brain damage, and this answer choice doesn’t give us enough security and clarity for us to be able to do that.

D – This is the correct answer, because it specifies that glutamate can ONLY come from damaged or oxygen-starved nerve cells. This enables us to say (or at least makes it possible for us to say) that glutamate very well could cause brain damage/long-term nerve cell deterioration, since the way it can get into the blood stream in the first place is from oxygen-starved or damaged nerve cells.

E – incorrect because 1) we don’t need to know anything else about nerve cells to conclude that glutamate causes brain damage, and 2) it doesn’t matter that they can leak glutamate and still survive intact. This has no impact on the relationship we are trying to strengthen, since if they were destroyed, it wouldn’t do us any harm or any good.

[Admin edit: replaced with link to question. Please don't post full questions, thanks!]

https://classic.7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-76-section-2-question-24/

We are looking for a necessary assumption.

The conditional for the first sentence is: write in order to give pleasure  /impart truth. However, the conclusion of the argument is that this conditional is not true. They say that if this conditional was true, then you could take any popular book on the shelf and the conditional would be: popular  gave people pleasure  /impart truth. To do this, you would have to assume that if a book gives people pleasure, then it would have to have been written in order to give people pleasure. Just insert the original conditional in right in front of the “/impart truth” part of the equation.

This was counter-intuitive for me because I was immediately looking for a bridge to the conclusion of the stimulus, which is that those who write in order to give pleasure CAN impart truth to their readers. This one is tricky because it is asking you to look for the NA in a part of the stimulus that you’re not used to looking for it.

[Admin edit: Replaced with link to question. Please don't post copyrighted material, thanks!]

Hey all!

I've been hiding away doing applications. I hope everyone did well on the December test and if you didn't, Feb is around the corner and I know you all will kick ass.

So this hasn't actually come up until today but one school I'm applying to asks for an explanation if your second LSAT score is five points or above your last one. I improved by five points and wasn't sure how I should approach the explanation.

Three main reasons for why I increased:

So I'm not sure if I should explain all of this or if it makes me look like a slacker. I don't want the school to think I can't handle stress or change.

Any thoughts?

Thanks and love this site!

Hey 7sage community,

My name is Alex and I am planning on taking the LSAT in June/September 2017. Is anyone looking for a study buddy in the Los Angeles area? I believe it would be great to find a study partner and go over 35 minute timed sections together and help build motivation in conquering the LSAT. I have taken 2 full PT's thus far, my diagnostic score was a 144 in November, my 2nd was 150 last week. I am reading the LSAT Trainer, I have just ordered the Powerscore LGB and Manhattan LR. I reside in Glendale and Whittier.

If anyone is interested in partnering, please leave a comment!