Hi People who have already completed PT 90-92,

do any of you want to start a group chat/do a study session to review some questions together?

Hey guys, I’m going to be taking the November LSAT in a couple weeks and I keep missing fill questions. What is the best strategy to tackle these?

Guys, if I can do it, you can do it too.

I started studying for the LSAT in January of 2021 with Khan Academy. After months and months of practice tests and hours of studying (around 5 a day) I took the test in April and got a 149. I had kept PT'ing in that range during my studying so I had expected it. I kept thinking either I am extremely dumb or something just isn't clicking... So I changed up my routine and paid for 7Sage. I began studying in the early morning 4 hours before work and taking the time after work to relax. I put a cap on how long I should study each day. I finished the core curriculum a few weeks ago and my first PT was a 155. I couldn't believe my eyes. Flash forward to now and I am PT'ing in the 170's. I just wanted to post this because I know how exhausting and disheartening this process can be. YOU CAN DO IT.

Hello 7Sage Community,

If anyone else experienced this problem and found a solution, I'd love to hear it!

If I'm the only one with it, then this is certainly awkward. Please feel free to jump out of this post and help someone with legitimate LSAT questions.

It appears Apple has designed its laptop screens with the express purpose of being magnets for fuzzies floating around the room. I'll clean my screen off before PTing, and then in a few minutes I'm legitimately waging war with my shirt sleeve on the lines of text I'm trying to read. I believe the problem is compounded because I use a dim light setting as well - any smudge or screen fuzz really sticks out. But putting the light on high irritates the hell out of my eyes.

I feel there are strong Napoleon Dynamite (where's my chapstick) vibes coming from this post - but in any case, just putting it out into the ether to see what thoughts are out there.

Happy studying!

Looking to do a PS and resume swap with people applying this current cycle!

Does anyone want to exchange personal statements? I've signed up for the Oct & Nov LSAT, and I am planning to send out my application once scores come out. Message/comment down your email :)

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Hi everyone! I am trying to get as many eyes on my personal statement as possible! Who wants to swap?

Hi!Anyone interested in doing a personal statement swap? Ideally looking for someone who identifies as female.

Thanks!

I'm taking the test in November and all these discussion posts about proctor interruptions have me increasingly worried about experiencing similar issues on the day of my exam. Anyone care to share some positive experiences to help a fellow LSAT-taker out? Or any tips on how to overcome a proctor issue so it doesn't obliterate my chances of doing well on the test?

Episode #52 is here!

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I'm getting ready to submit my applications next week before November comes around. Does anyone want to swap resumes for last minute advice? Would be happy to look over anyones resume if they would do the same for me. Let me know (:

I am considered as an URM for a school I'm interested in ED. My projection is my November LSAT will probably be around 152-153 given my current practice tests are around 155.

If do get 152-153, should I do ED or apply for regular pool? Median for school is 160.

If not admitted to ED, the app will be rolled over to regular pool.

Thank you!

Hi! I am planning to apply to schools in early November. I have a draft personal statement and would love some feedback. I am more than happy to return the favor. Comment below and I'll send you a message :)

I have a 170 with a 3.7 gpa, but am a transfer student and transferred into COVId, so I do not have any close relationships with any my Professor at my new school. What should I do?

I'm applying to law school next fall (for Fall 2023), but have already reached out to my former professors to ask for letters of rec since I've been out of school for a year and don't want them to forget me. If they submit their LORs to LSAC sometime in the next couple of months, would it look worse to admissions officers than if they waited until a little closer to next application cycle? I just wasn't sure if having LORs submitted too early could potentially weaken my application.

Any thoughts/advice would be appreciated. Thanks!

I took the test on 12th. During my first LG section, when there was still around 8 mins left. I was doing the hardest duet one. Suddenly, the proctor shouted at me over the MIC that he wanted to see my ID. I didn't know what happened. I was so scared.

I took the ID and showed it to him.

He asked me: Are you done with your test yet? I said no(almost crying), "it's not, there is still eight minutes left."

He said: Oh, I thought you were done. Go ahead with your test.

He didn't press pause for the whole conversation, which cost me about two minutes, and I didn't solve this LG.

I am a non-native speaker, and the proctor also has strong accent. So I didn't understand her what he was requesting at the beginning.

And because of this incident I dumped the next session RC as well.(luckily someone told me the second section is experiment) I had very hard test make up. LG-RC(rap)-RC(Canadian writer- Paternalism) -LR

I've been thinking about it since Tuesday, it's so infuriating that I completed all the security testing before the exam. Have any of you guys ever been interrupted in the middle of an exam and asked to see the ID?

I quit my job on April and prepare it full time. This is my second lsat. I have been PTing consistently around 170. But I think I have been crewed up on this time.

Why why why? Why some random proctor can interrupted you on such a high stake test and bear almost no cost. Did he do that just for fun?

Hello,

I just finished the first draft of my PS and DS and am hoping to find somebody to swap with as my next step in the editing process. Please only message me if you're willing to review mine as well and not just take my feedback and run.

Thanks in advance!

Hi! I have an early decision deadline coming up pretty soon and am trying to get as much feedback on my personal statement as possible. Would love to help out anyone who would also like feedback on their PS! Message me and we can swap! :)

Can anyone explain to me how the new scoring is going to work and how I should prep for this with PTs? I'm registered for the November 13th test date and have been taking regular LSAT PTs. But I just realized that the new LSAT is a bit different and I have no idea how to adjust my score to reflect what I might actually get on the exam.

On my latest PT, I scored a 162 with a raw score of 78/100. Now that the test will only be three graded sections, how will this change my score? How many can I count on being able to miss in order to get a 170?

I wanted to get some more info on this. Since August, I have heard from all my friends that they scored on the real test roughly 5-10 points less than they are used to scoring on PT’s. My theory is that this is because LSAC is intentionally giving out harder tests in order to keep the scores down since they have so many test takers this year. Are your scores this year reliably lower than your PT’s? Do you think this is because LSAC is giving out harder tests?

This forum is for opinions that are not mainstream regarding studying the LSAT! This forum is not meant to criticize or complain about the LSAT. Instead, it is intended for people to share unique studying tips, original thoughts regarding the LSAT structure and talk about how the LSAT studying process is a different journey for everyone but with surprising similarities! I would love to hear from everyone! I will get us started below with a couple of opinions that may spark some curiosity.

Hey everyone, This post is intended to be an overview of how the sufficient/necessary flaw appears on the LSAT and how we can develop a system of attack for the questions on which the sufficient/necessary flaw appears. I have collected my approach to these questions to 1 single thread.

I want to build on an analogy here that we all might not be entirely familiar with. It is rooted in my understand of the philosophical principle of Occam’s Razor. Suppose your car won’t start and you need to get to work. In an effort to solve this problem, you start deducing what is wrong with the car on the simplest grounds first: you check to make sure the car is not out of gas. We start here prior to checking more elaborate/expensive and time consuming problems: like replacing the transmission, because why potentially waste time with the more elaborate problems if the issue can be solved by appeal to something much simpler?

We do this all the time in our daily lives and I will submit, we should do this on various aspects of the LSAT: start with the simplest explanation of the problem on flaw questions that contain a sufficient/necessary flaw in an effort to save time. If that simplest explanation does not appear, move on to the next description. I might not be the first to apply this system to a problem, but this is the process I use:

1.Identify the “form” in which the argument has taken. This step is a convergence of several skills outlined in 7Sage’s core curriculum. From recognizing conclusion/premise indicators, to properly translating conditional statements, here is where our drills pay off. Extract from the argument both the conditional statement and what the author of that argument does with that conditional statement, here is where the flaw usually occurs.

Drill tip: any time we have a flaw question and our author is using conditional language, alarm bells should be ringing, for our chances of landing in sufficient/necessary territory have increased (although this is not a “silver bullet” it is a decent place to start.)

Drill tip 2: I want to place here a skill I have been thinking about a ton lately for my retake. My tutor calls this skill: following the thread of the argument. Following the thread is granting the argument a certain amount of leeway when we read it. Constantly taking the sentence we just read and trying to see how it relates to the sentence we are reading is following the thread of the argument. Among other things, we are looking for possible negations of certain terms that might not be readily apparent. Take for instance PT 43-2-12, “center of the universe” is essentially negated by the concept of “revolves around a star in the outskirts of the galaxy.” The concept of “center of the universe” implies that it is not in the “outskirts.” Negations can be hidden in the argument in this manner. Note here that there is some debate whether this question is really a sufficient/necessary flaw but I believe it illustrates the point I am trying to communicate fairly well, look out for innovative and clever ways the argument negates terms in the conditional statement, this can happen on several fronts, but a great way to be on top of these possible ways is to “follow the thread” of the argument sentence by sentence.

The sufficient/necessary flaw takes two general forms that encompass the vast majority of sufficient/necessary flaws:

Form 1:

We are given:

A---->B

We are told we have a specific ~A

We conclude we have a specific ~B

Note here: that we are given the ~A in the premise of the author’s argument and are given the ~B in the conclusion of the author’s argument. With this structure, the LSAT writers are telling us that the premise functions like the sufficient condition and that the conclusion functions like the necessary condition. this is an insight that I found helpful when I first noticed it.

Examples:

Pt 45-1-13

Pt 37-4-22

Pt 40-1-14

Pt 23-3-17

Pt 27-4-7

Pt 11-2-9

Form 2:

We are given A---->B

We are told we have a specific B

We conclude we have a specific A

Examples:

Pt 24-2-23

Pt 13-2-26

Pt 22-2-25

Pt 39-4-15

Note here that these are not exhaustive lists. So this is our first step, get a grasp on the form of the argument.

Drill tip: note here that the only question I have been able to find in which we are asked to tell the difference between these two forms is: Pt 51-1-20, in which answer choices (B) and (E) contain the sufficient/necessary flaw, but in different forms. Here we are choosing the form that mirrors our stimulus. Know these forms! Knowing the form in front of us is the first step to describing that form with an answer choice.

2.Once we have the entire “form” in front of us, we move on to the question of how a description of the flaw might appear. In the easiest way available: we scan the answer choices for the words sufficient/necessary. This is the analog to checking if our car is out of gas, if we have found a description of our problem that uses the words sufficient/necessary correctly: choose it and move on, congrats, you’ve answered this question in 40 seconds.

Drill tip: the LSAT writers are aware of this surface level approach to questions, occasionally, they will plant a misdescription of the sufficient/necessary flaw. For an example of this, please see: PT 75-1-12 answer choice (B),in which is using our words that we need, but is describing valid logic! Yes, the test writers are this petty. This is not the only question ever to contain a trap like this, so it begs the question of knowing how to describe a sufficient/necessary flaw beyond the buzz words sufficient/necessary. At this juncture, with some back of the envelope calculations, I believe with the first two steps, we are looking at getting 30-35% of flaw questions that contain a sufficient/necessary conflation correct. What I mean by this is that many flaw questions that contain the sufficient/necessary conflation that we have understood due to our application of step 1 will describe it using those words. This is merely noticing the reappearing elements to the question and describing it.

3.So we have reached step three. We have a handle on the form of the argument and we know that the author has committed the sufficient/necessary flaw. We also don’t see the words sufficient/necessary used in the answer choices as a way of describing the flaw in front of us. So at this point, we are going to need and are going to have to deploy an understanding of what makes the sufficient/necessary flaw bad reasoning. In service of this point I recommend three things: Mr. Ping’s individual explanations of questions contained in the various packages available for purchase on 7Sage, Douglas Walton’s book: “Informal Logic, A Pragmatic Approach” and an analysis of the answer choices the LSAT provides us with as credited responses to these questions. Lets take a look at a problem that contains the sufficient/necessary flaw in which we have to describe the flaw by reference to precisely how the reasoning is flawed rather than the use of buzzwords.

PT 37-4-22

Here we are given:

Irish stone--->very old

Premise: we have a particular ~Irish stone

Therefore we conclude that have a particular ~very old stone

Note here that we have to know that Scotland is not Ireland in order to draw this implied negation of our A term. I think we can rely on the fact that the terms are not literally the same here, rather than geographical knowledge. This is an example of ”following the thread” of the argument.

So this is the sufficient/necessary flaw, form 1. We are given A-->B, we say we don’t have an A, therefore we conclude we don’t have a B.

Here we are going to see two hurdles that the test writers throw our way: referential phrasing and what I call the fourth wall. Now, if you have read this far, bear with me for a moment! I promise this will be of value to you.

Quite often with sufficient/necessary flaws, our author is going to take the actual conditional statement that we translated correctly, reverse it and then run some sort of operation on that reversed (flawed) interpretation of the conditional statement.

So we are told if Irish stone then very old. This is the correct interaptation.

Our author takes that conditional statement and reads it as:

If very old then Irish stone

Our author then takes that wrong conditional statement and runs the contrapostive on it.

~Irish stone

Therefore

~Very old

This is what answer choice (E) is describing:

“Takes the fact that all members of a group [Irish stones] have a certain property [very old] to mean that the only thing with that property [very old] are members of that group [Irish stones].”

This answer choice says:

takes Irish stones---->very old

to mean

Very old---->Irish stones

This is where the flaw occurs, when the author has mistranslated the initial conditional statement. At that point the author runs the contrapostive on this wrong conditional statement. Now this is weird, we are essentially engaging with what the author has erroneously translated and ran away with.

So this “fourth wall” of analysis is where we will move to if the words sufficient/necessary are not present in the answer choices. Lets take a look at another example:

Pt 23-3-17

Here we are given:

If punishment deters then punishment justified

We say that we have evidence that punishment does not deter

Therefore we conclude that punishment is never justified

Again, take a look at answer choice (C)

The author has mistaken

“Being sufficient to justify punishment [deters] to be necessary to justify punishment.”

The author has taken:

If punishment deters then punishment justified

To mean

If punishment justified then punishment deters

The author then runs the contrapositive on that mistaken translation of the conditional statement.

Step 3 is about finding how the author might have messed up the conditional statement we were given and that we correctly translated. In the above example the author has taken

Deter---->justified

To mean

Justified------>deter

At this juncture, it doesn't matter what operation the author of the argument takes, it will still be wrong, because the statement is translated wrong.

Here is the heart of what makes a sufficient/necessary flaw bad reasoning: sufficient conditions do not operate the same way as necessary conditions. Lets look at another example to engrain this intuitively:

If something is a dog then it is a mammal

Dog---->Mammal

My neighbor has a cat (not dog)

Therefore my neighbor doesn’t have a mammal

Depriving a necessary condition of its sufficient element does not allow us to draw any conclusions about the necessary element [mammal]. This is covered in the core curriculum. Depriving “mammal” above of something that is sufficient to produce it doesn’t mean we don’t have a mammal in front of us. Something else could be sufficient to produce mammal: cat, gerbil etc.

Now, saying my neighbor does not have a mammal, allows us to draw the conclusion that my neighbor does not have a dog, for (as we all know) depriving a sufficient element (dog) of its necessary condition (mammal) allows us to say we don’t have the sufficient condition, because we don’t have the thing necessary for having that sufficient condition.

Operationally, sufficient and necessary conditions hold different powers for our conditional statement. On sufficient and necessary flaws, the author of the argument (usually through a mistranslation of the initial conditional statement) has granted the sufficient element the powers of the necessary element.

So, if we are given:

A----->B

and the argument says we have a particular ~A

therefore we conclude we have a particular ~B

The argument might be erroneously taking A---->B to mean B---->A

Similarly, if we are given:

A---->B

And the argument says we have a B

Therefore the argument says we have an A

The argument might be erroneously taking A----->B to mean B----->A

There are a finite number of ways in which the LSAT describes how this flaw has taken place and I have found it helpful to look at the flaw the way we do in step 3 as my main method of cutting through the haze of referential phrasing on many of these answer choices, because quite often the heavily referential phrasing answer choices to sufficient necessary flaws will be saying just this: that our author has taken A---->B to mean B---->A. If we know that the author has misinterpreted the conditional statement to mean something that it doesn’t, we can get a grasp on a majority of the ways in which it is described not using the words sufficient/necessary. It has been my experience, that with some back of the envelope calculations, an application of steps 1-3 will net us the form and description of 85-90% of sufficient/necessary flaw questions.

I hope this approach helps:

I will monitor this thread for additional questions and will be adding a part two in the coming weeks.

David

*full disclosure, I'm not sure if there is anyone else out there that approaches these questions like this. Any similarity is purely coincidental. I am also open for any correction you might see fit, we can make our approach stronger together as a community.

Edit 1: more specific elaboration in paragraph starting "There are a finite..."