For my diversity statement I am thinking of writing about going through a both physically and emotionally abusive relationship for 4 and a half years. I ended things about 3 weeks and its by far one of the most impactful things that has happened in my life. I initially was going to write about how my father left my mother and I when I was in high school and I could also tie the two together but do you think the abusive relationship story is going to be too much? I don't want the readers to think its a sob story and I certainly will frame it in the way that it made me infinitely stronger (and it did) but I just don't know how tense/serious the topics can be for diversity statements.

So this is my problem. If I give myself ten extra minutes for each LG section I do, I will get 100% right. Every time. But the issue is time. Often times, I find myself struggling over a problem because there is ONE RULE that I haven't seen the full implications of. When I finally see it, I say to myself, "Oh...duh!" and wonder why I didn't see it in the first place. After about three months of studying, I went from a 161 to a 173, but I haven't practiced LG nearly as much as I have RC and LR. If I can shore up my LG, then I'll be set. Can anyone help me out? Is my problem simply due to a lack of practice? Thanks.

How would you go about drilling the Cambridge drill packets post-curriculum?

Do you think it would maybe be more productive if I was to just print out PTs 1-38 and drill all the questions based on section type?

I've been studying for a while now and feel that I have been making a lot of studying mistakes, so I'm looking for any kind of advice on how to reroute.

I am having issues watching the videos on an iPhone. Is anyone else having this issue? It has been this way for some time but I've just been using the app. None of the three options are selected in my settings. Should I change any of these? TIA

Hi all,

So I am in AmeriCorps, and because of the structure of my program I get the opportunity to do a LOT of volunteer work. And when I say a lot, I mean volunteering for single events for around 10 different organizations. How should I put this in my resume? Should I leave out the more insignificant stuff, or just write something like "Volunteer for X, X, X, X, X, X..."

I have two academic LOR's already on file. However, one of them might be mediocre(ok but not "knock your socks off") but I don't know because I waived the rights to see it. So I want to get one from a volunteer advisor I volunteered under. How should the LOR be formatted(ex: paragraph 1:......paragraph 2:.......etc) and what should be discussed in each paragraph?

Also, should I send two academic LOR's only, two academic and the one from volunteer advisor or one academic and one from the volunteer advisor?

before doing games with the great analytical mind at lsat 7sage I rarely got 15 on logic games. I now get 21-23 everytime kudos

This is long, rambly story of going from about a -14 on RC to -4 on RC because I stopped being stubborn.

So a couple of days ago I had a substantial RC meltdown. Basically a whole bunch of events transpired that more or less showed me what I needed to do to help my RC. Here are the events that kind of resulted in me learning how to do RC more efficiently.

Until about four days ago, out of the practice tests I have completed, I had maybe gotten 2/4 passages completed on RC (Averaging about 12-15 minutes per passage – no joke). Even when I tried to do J.Y.’s memory method I would just sit there thinking “I just can’t do it, J.Y.! I’m just not smart enough!” (if you don’t think J.Y. is omniscient, you’re doing the course wrong).

Then, I did one passage and got ¾ passages done on a prep-test with one sneaky line reference question completed in the last passage. I heralded as a huge success thinking, okay. This means I’m getting faster at reading.

Correlation vs. Causation anyone?

After doing some R.C. drills (at my same obnoxiously slow pace), this was quickly disproved.

Then I just started experiencing dread at the myth that people can’t get higher on RC easily (or even at all, as some will tell you). And here I was, doing my drills, sometimes spending up to ten minutes just reading the darn thing.

Then things just spiraled out of control; I freaked out and asked the Internet.

In doing so, I found this article, https://lsathacks.com/email-course/reading-comprehension/. I took the reading speed test the article tells you to and I read it at the same speed I’d been reading LSAT questions. Basically the thing just confirmed I was like dial-up internet when it came to reading speed (although of course, my comprehension was super high because I was reading so darn slow).

The speed test told me I was in the "insufficient" category of readers. I thought, “Insufficient? Screw you online reading test! Your website is insufficient. I read Derrida. My Master’s thesis has 250 references -- I had to read all of those. My whole job revolves around editing and making recommendations on doctoral dissertations and master’s theses. There’s no way I’m an insufficient reader… Is there?”

But there was no way I could think to RRE this apparent paradox.

So I resigned myself to believing I had an irretrievably FMOR and gave in to crippling self-doubt, tabbed back to the article, mortified, thinking “save me from this death.” The article said I was probably “subvocalizing” (a word for pronouncing each word as you’re reading) as I was subvocalizing – super meta. It said smart people didn’t do that.

Mortified at the thought that I had been doing this very thing basically most of my life, the article said I should use Spreeder (basically an app that flashes words across the screen at a certain number of WPM and you can use it to increase your number of WPM and so that you can learn not to subvocalize).

So, I loaded some pretty dense material on Spreeder. For ten minutes I spreeded (hmmm… spred? sprud?) at different speeds. After my ten minutes were up, and before I continued with my spreeding like a time-wasting buffoon, I figured I should look in the LSAT forums and see what other people said about Spreeder.

Lo and behold, J.Y. had already chimed in on it (he’s omniscient, remember?):

If you're running out of time on RC, it's not because you can't read the passage fast enough. It's because you're waffling b/t answers. You do that because you don't read well - be it the passage, the question stem, or the answers. Focus on reading well. Focus on reading for structure. Advice on how to read faster targets casual reading. If you've done any RC at all you'll know all too well that the speed limit is not set by how quickly your eyes can move across the page, how many words your eyes can snap in one shot, or whether you're subvocalizing. Rather, the speed limit is set by lack of subject-matter familiarity and the dense grammatical structure.

I thought, “So magic doesn’t exist. Great. I still can’t read well so basically I’m just screwed.”

Then I tentatively tried to look up LSAT RC reading structures (look them up in the forums – there are some really interesting ones). They gave me some insight, but no cheat sheet in the world was going to help with my problem.

Crestfallen, I returned to my RC drills. I tried to use the highlighter method posted up here earlier by @kylereinhard, hoping that the effervescent yellow stain would incite some inner RC warrior like it had for him. Long story short, I took 8 minutes on the stimulus and 4 minutes on the questions. And I got three wrong. Well, a girl can dream. (Not bashing his method. Try this -- maybe it'll work for you).

Crushed, I tried to look for happy stories in the Webinar section of people who did awesome things after being not so awesome. I found Allison Gill Sanford’s webinar https://classic.7sage.com/webinar/lsat-prep-for-170-plus/ and jumped to the part where she talked about RC. In the webinar, she said, “I would spend way too much time up front on the easy passages…” Which was exactly how I felt. Then (and I’m pretty sure it was her who said this, or maybe it was something I saw in the Trainer, which I looked in after listening to her webinar), which basically said we should try to keep our reading rate more or less constant over our different stimuli and then also replicate this in the practice test (obviously with allowances for harder passages).

So I figured, ok. If I am going to succeed at RC maybe I should just try to read at a speed that will just get me there on time. So, there are maybe 440 words per RC section. If you read in 2 minutes, that means 220 words per minute. If you read in three minutes, that’s 146 words per minute. I knew what it felt like to read at both of those speeds because I had spreeded earlier that day – which showed me that I could read, comfortably, at both of those rates.

So, I decided: I’m going to ‘spreed’ the stimuli (not in the Spreeder app, just on the page but at the same rate as I would read had they been in the spreeder set to 220), using J.Y.’s memory method, for one RC section. I grabbed my analog watch and set it to zero, and-ahem-spreeded the passage until 3:30. Then did a 30 second review of structure. Then answered the question until the full 8 minutes was up. Then went onto the next one. And so on.

Results of the first try:

-4 (And this time, not -4 thanks to guesses!) -- obviously a significant difference for me.

And since I was actually able to focus on the problems (which I’ve since noticed, thanks to BRs and this method, are more so with the questions than with the actual passage itself), I’m improving on RC now just as if it was LR!

Moral:

If you’re like me and you’re doing RC like a sloth because you basically misunderstand everything everyone says because you are some sort of backwards and self-destructive over-achiever (and/or you’re just inherently defiant to omniscient authorities even when they are one hundred percent correct), then maybe just run over quickly to Spreedster, prove to yourself you can read faster than you are right now, come back, and ‘spreed’ it.

I’m not saying skim it. Just read it at a faster rate. For 3:30 or 4 minutes or less. As J.Y. pointed out earlier, don’t worry about subvocalizing or anything like that right now either. You can become a non-subvocalizing speed reader at a different time if that’s really your passion, but I’m not so sure the RC section is the time for it unless you have like ten years to prepare or something.

Anyways. I hope this is helpful to somebody so that they don’t go through the whole ridiculous situation I just went through.

Keep calm and carry on!

*P.s. Don’t mean to insinuate that the article mentioned above can’t be helpful to some folks! Maybe it is the secret way to victory and I'll just never really know.

Go see Rogue One. Seriously, go. It's great.

Or do we have to do so one by one? Thanks!

I had this one down to C and D and ultimately went with C. I saw C an an alternate explanation but would C have been eliminated because the increase was not specifically mentioned a well as the FM? Do both A and B both have to be specifically mentioned and not implied or assumed? Also, I get that C is incorrect because C-> A&B (Other M -> FM & Increase isn't possible due to no assumption in the stimulus that FM caused the increase but is instead the conclusion, so FM->Increase (A->B) was never a possibility. I ultimately eliminated D because I interpreted the AC as saying there was no increase in the algae population because there was no increase in the amount of shells left behind. I took that as meaning constant but didn't go further and see that it meant that we should see more shells if there was an increase, thus weakening the argument. Hopefully this all makes sense for you guys.

https://classic.7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-19-section-2-question-04/

I've been reading about these different games that are apparently on the LSAT now? Are these really that much harder than the old games, or are people struggling with them on the test because they simply aren't expecting them? That is to say, are these new one's just as learnable if you can see them coming?

Do we have to talk about why we are applying to a particular law school in our personal statements? Some of the schools I'm applying to do not ask for a "Why School X?" type essay so do we have to talk about that in the personal statements even if it's not asked of us in the prompts?

Hello, seen from old posts from the past but I'm curious what you guys frequenting the forums now think about studying and music.

I probably listen to music 1-5% of the time while studying, mostly just when I'm pounding away at games. I don't think I could listen to music when I'm doing LR or RC.

Its hard for me to work in silence for too long. When I do listen to music I feel like I can get more work overall in. In undergrad I almost never studied without blasting music and this helped me pretty consistently pull off 6- 8-10-12 hr days most days of the semester in undergrad. My work consisted mostly of reading though so I never found lyrics and loudness to be distracting.

Thoughts?

~80% of the test takers at my test center had their cell phone. Outside the testing room, a lot of people were playing on their phones. After we entered the room, the proctors told us to "turn our phones off during the test".. The desks even had "Turn phone off" stickers on them. Yet we all signed admission tickets certifying that we didn't bring our phone to the test.

Pretty frustrating to see -- per the rules, I did not bring my phone, but it would have been nice to have it during the break

Hey guys,

I believe the answer to this question is no, but are there any methods to obtaining preptests in PDF formats? I have a bunch in standard paperback that I purchased, but I would really like to have a couple of printed out versions for retakes.

I've run into this problem a few times on NA questions, where I can't decide whether to negate by adding a not or negating the quantity. Here's an example of an answer choice from an NA question:

There are some illnesses that experienced physicians can diagnose accurately from physical examination alone.

In this instance, would you negate some to none or place a not after can to negate? Or both?

Hey everyone!

This may be an odd question, but to all of those belonging to the LGBTQ community, do you mark on your applications that you identify as LGBTQ?

I am trying to figure out whether or not this is a good choice? Do school's actually care? Does this contribute positively or negatively to your application?

Since this is a safe space (thanks to all of you that are awesome 7Sagers!), I'd like to add that I identify as bisexual, but I am not super "out" about it. It is not something that defines me as a person, and if you don't know me, or have only known me for a short amount of time, you'd probably never know because I have been dating my boyfriend over the past couple of years.

Only my closest friends and family know about this, so I am debating whether or not I should bother marking what I identify as....

What do you guys think?

https://classic.7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-47-section-1-question-02/

I chose A for this and literally had to check the answer key three times because I thought I was seeing things. I cannot figure out why A is wrong and B is right.

This is a weaken question.

The stimulus says that there have been certain international efforts to protect the natural habitats of endangered species of animals. In spite of these efforts, apparently the extinction rate is still rising. The argument concludes that these efforts are wasted.

After reading the premises, I'm thinking "Oh, great! This is perfect-- What an assumption for this argument to make! I am definitely anticipating that the answer choice is going to have something to do with pointing out that, just because these efforts are aimed at protecting natural habitats, does not necessarily entail that these efforts are also aimed at preventing the extinction rate from rising!" Then I read the conclusion that claims that the efforts were wasted. At this point, I'm 100% anticipating answer choice A.

The international efforts are aimed at protecting the natural habitats of endangered species. This does not necessarily mean these efforts are also trying to prevent the extinction rate from increasing. I mean, in the real world, it is most likely the case that this is also the goal, but in LSAT world, I just don't see how we can make that assumption. What if these efforts were to satisfy the hippie/vegan population so that they think the government is prioritizing the protection of these natural habitats? Or what if their efforts were because there is some new law that requires the protection of these habitats? There could be a number of (yes, crazy yet) logically sufficient reasons for why they are protecting the natural habitats of these species that have nothing to do with the extinction rate. If the two concepts (protecting natural habitats and preventing extinction from increasing) were to be related in terms of our argument, wouldn't the first statement have to say "Despite increasing international efforts to protect the natural habitats of endangered species in order to maintain or decrease the extinction rate, the rate at which these species are becoming extinct continues to rise"?

A- Points out the assumption. Scientists are better able to preserve the habitats of endangered species. That was what their efforts were doing according to the stimulus. This answer choice points out how irrelevant the statement about the extinction rate increasing is to their efforts.

B- Animal refugees are not natural habitats. They are man-made sanctuaries that artificially mimic natural habitats. I rendered this answer choice as irrelevant because it is not even talking about the same subject matter.

I am very confused. I considered this to be an easy question that took me all of 20 seconds and even after reviewing it over and over again, I cannot for the life of me understand it.

(to myself) - "Descriptively inaccurate. Next."

How does one do that? Who do I email or speak to? Help?

General Michaels rejects the use of outdated weaponry. All other generals do not reject the use of outdated weaponry. Therefore, General Michaels is the best war strategist.

Weaken:

A) Rejecting the use of outdated weaponry is not a factor in being a good war strategist.

B) Rejecting the use of outdated weaponry is not sufficient to be a good war strategist.

I've been studying for about a year and my last few PTs (PTs 60s and 70s) have been 163-167. Do you guys think there's any value in the earlier PTs (other than LG, of course)? I really want to take in June, and use the Fall as my fallback just in case.

I just want to know if it's worth spending time doing the earlier PTs (other than LG), because I don't know whether the test has changed drastically since then.

After taking a month off I'm ready to get back to it, I plan to take two per week at minimum, three maximum while doing full BR. I do want to take in June and I'm afraid it may be cutting it close in terms of time.

I found I particularly underperform in law reading regardless of difficulty. Any suggestion on improvement?

I got a letter from LSAC today saying there was a discrepancy with my SSN. My master file (which, I checked, is correct) does not match what I wrote on my answer sheet on test day. So tomorrow I have to fax them my correction.

Will this delay my score?