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Hello all,

I just started with 7sage a few days ago. I am currently following the syllabus according to my test day. I see I have to go through lots of practice and videos to get to the end, almost 60 hrs. per week. however I see that others are commenting that is best to take a diagnostic test to see where I stand and that way focus on the material am having more trouble with. can anyone point me on the right direction? as to where is this test located ( i have search the site and don't see anything label as diagnostic test) all I see is a list of pre-test, if those are it, then which one do I choose?

thanks

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Saturday, Dec 19, 2020

"Good" Arguments

What is the difference between these 2 arguments?

1.

It is heavily raining

Thus, traffic will be bad

2.

It is heavily raining

The ground is wet

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You could say the second argument “flows” better or is more "supported"; however these labels are skin deep and do not get to the heart of what makes a good argument.

A good argument is one where when the premise is true, the conclusion is highly likely or certain to be true.

A useful technique is to think about when the premise is true, can you think of more possible worlds where the conclusion is true, or are there more possible worlds where the conclusion is false?

We reason with our imagination and past experience. For example, in evaluating the first argument, I draw upon all the times I have experienced heavy rain. Sure, some of those times traffic has become backed up, but not every time. Moreover, the rain probably was not the cause of the traffic-- the traffic would have happened anyways.

I can think of more times and imagine more hypothetical worlds where rain is heavy and traffic is normal. Thus the premise being true does not really correlate with the conclusion being true.... so the argument is weak.

A good argument contains a premise that when true, means that the conclusion is more likely than not to also be true.

For the second example, I have trouble thinking of a world where it could rain heavily and the ground does not get wet. Drawing on my experience and imagination, every time it rains heavily, the ground must get wet. When the premise is true, the conclusion is extremely likely to be true.... so we have a good argument.

Another way to think about it is viewing the premise as an input. When that input is true, how often do we get the conclusion or output? Do not be afraid to use your imagination!

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Two More Points:

Strengthening/Weakening questions merely ask you to take the premise (or input) and increase/decrease the likelihood that it will produce the output. For example, to strengthen the first argument, we would just say that water greatly inhibits vehicle speed and handling. If this is true, the input becomes more likely to yield the output or conclusion.

Good reasoning is human nature and evolutionarily advantageous. Those who can see connections and properly anticipate the future better than others are more successful. For example, if you can make the connection that sun causes crop growth, you can manipulate the world to your benefit. However If you reason poorly, thinking that interpretative dance creates crop growth, you will not have many crops and will be disadvantaged!

Also, I will be available again for tutoring between now and February when my courses start back up. My apologies to those who reached out via DM the past couple months, 1L chaos prevented me from being able to keep up with my inbox.

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Hey everyone! So I have been going through some of the free trial material and I think have decided that I will be signing up for ultimate+. My question is why does the schedule have you take all prep tests back to back once you go through the lessons? Is it common or should i take prep tests in between weeks? Should I also take the 2007 LSAT diagnostics test first or go over some material before taking it?

Thank you!

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I am having trouble with consistency in LR sections. Some days I will take a PT and go -3 to -5 on the LR sections, and other times (like today PT 84 section 2) I will get -12... I am wondering if anyone has figured out a method that helped them do constantly well in LR.

#help

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Hello everyone,

Coming to the community for some advice! I am planning on applying to law school November 2021 and have been studying since June 2020, with breaks in between and doing an internship full-time. My internship is transitioning to 20 hours per week until the end of January and I will be done with it then. Next steps after that is to find full-time employment to sustain me until Law School and study for the LSAT. For 2021 I am part of law fellowship that will be preparing me for the application process and they make us take the August 2021 LSAT and encourage us to to law school by November 2021. The fellowship will be providing a powerscore class from June- August; I have currently been using 7sage, Loophole and in the past Blueprint (not for me).

I was considering on taking the January 2021 LSAT but my score is in the mid-140s and want to get it at 165 for admissions. Do y'all recommend taking the test at least once before the August test date and push the January test date to February or April, or build up my score for the August test date.

I would appreciate any advice on how to schedule my studying! Thank you

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Just started seriously studying 3 days ago, and plan on taking the LSAT in April. I purchased a 7sage sub today but it's telling me I would need to study 57 hours a week. I could probably swing 20 hours a week but that's it. Do I have enough time?

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I liked B and D as answer choices. Why is D irrelevant? I've read online explanations that stated it isn't relevant whether or not the dinosaur found was related to the T-rex, but why is that? If the recently discovered dino was related to T.rex, wouldn't that weaken the connection between having T-rex features (oversized head, etc) and needing these features to accommodate their great size?

Admin Note: https://classic.7sage.com/lsat_explanations/lsat-80-section-4-question-22/

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To anyone who’s interested, I’m streaming my study sessions live. Come “join” me in our quest for the mythical 180 :)

I’ll be taking practice test 38 today then blind reviewing.

As of now, I’ll be on until about 9/10 pm EST.

If the link doesn’t work for you, please try clicking “Watch on YouTube” or look me up on YouTube @ Efficiency Bill !

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Hello.

I am studying, in particular, the logic games section. As I am watching the reviews for the games by J.Y, I am noticing that almost all the games can be divided in two ways in their approach.

One of them is where you make the sub game boards and find out all the possibilities before going to the questions while the other approach is making only one gameboard, and then going straight to the questions.

My question is, how do you know whether you should just go to the questions, or just try to get as much sub-game boards without taking up too much time?

Is this just something you naturally pick up as you familiarize yourself with the questions? Or are there more concrete signs that the game is a, as J.Y puts it, a "rules driven game".

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  • Starting with December 2001 (36) and working our way up to each test, with our final one as June 2003 (40)
  • No required starting score
  • To meet on Fridays & Saturdays
  • 1 PT per week
  • Sections 1 & 2 will be blind reviewed on Fridays and sections 3 & 4 will be blind reviewed on Saturdays (will take approximately 2 hours for each)
  • Please comment your interest!

    My goal for this group would be for us to:

  • Take the exams under timed conditions on our own
  • Withhold our blind review of the exam designated for the week until we meet- that way we can work through more of the reasoning as a group. Throughout the blind review I will have at least one person (hopefully a different volunteer for each question- you can stick to whatever you are comfortable with/questions you feel most confident about) walk through their own reasoning. I will encourage the other members of the group to add in their own reasoning if they feel it is necessary or ask any questions. I might pose some questions if needed to help clarify your reasoning and guide you in the right direction. I will step in for the questions no one wants to volunteer for.
  • Even if you cannot attend every single session, you are still welcome!

    A bit about me:

    My BR scores range from 174-180. Under timed conditions, my scores range from mid160s to low 170s. I took my first diagnostic during my sophomore year which was a 148. I didn't start studying regularly and seriously until June of this year (starting at a 153). My understanding of the exam has come a long way and would love the opportunity to lead a blind review group so we can help each other grow and achieve our dream scores! My strongest section is LG and weakest is RC. I hope we can get a good mix of scores and strengths, but please fill out the poll so people who are potentially interested can see if the group distribution will be the right fit for them.

    After gathering all the info, I will send the meeting link and calendar invites to the GroupMe. Post any questions you might have in the comments!

    1

    Planning to take in January, currently PTing in the mid 150s. I usually end up with LG -7ish/LR -9ish/RC -13ish. Blind reviews usually end up in the high 160s/low 170s. Scouring discussion boards/forums tells me that means I have a grasp of the fundamentals and for the most part know how to get to the right answer, it's just a matter of getting to the answer quicker. What are some ways that helped speed up your question answering process? I've seen people say that untimed or modified timed (say 40-45min per section) allows you to focus more on process/accuracy, and though it may seem counterintuitive, being able to lock in your process will speed things up. On the other hand there's the fact the LSAT is a timed test so the best way to practice for it is by timing yourself, plus the blind review is an untimed take anyway. Thanks for any feedback!

    6

    I scored a 180 on the July 2020 LSAT (it was my first time taking it) and I’m writing to share what I did. I was very encouraged by the 180 experiences that I had read online, and I wanted to write something similar before the memory faded away. If you’re reading this, hi! I’m so glad you’re here! I hope this helps.

    Some background: I decided to go to law school during the summer before my junior year, and I wanted to go to a top school. As a double stem and philosophy major I had a GPA below every T-14 median, so I knew that I had to hit the LSAT out of the park.

    I started studying in mid-December during winter break my junior year with a 164 diagnostic. I finished the core curriculum at the end of January and scored a 170 on my first post-curriculum PT. By mid-February, I started taking a full, timed practice test about every other week. I treated every practice test as a dress rehearsal—timed conditions, 15-minute break, printer paper and my favorite pens, a bottle of water. (I was prepared to switch over to pencil at some point, but I lucked out when the flex was announced. I got to use my pens the whole time!) I also practiced the first 30 tests I took with 33 instead of 35 minute sections, which helped me learn to pace myself. If I had a headache, wasn’t feeling my best, or really tired, I wouldn’t test. It was very important to me to try and simulate the headspace that I was going to be in during the test itself—practicing bad form, I thought, wasn't a good use of my time.

    From February to about June I progressively went through the problems sets as I got better at them. I did most easy sets in Feb and saved the medium and hard sets for later in the spring. I gave myself 100% extra time during the difficult sets (I knew that I would have that kind of time for hard problems during the test) to really hone my intuition on rare problems.

    In all, I took 49 practice tests. From late Feb-May, I took one about every other week (for maybe 20 tests). From mid-May (when the semester ended) to July 12th (my test date), I took another 29 (!) tests, about 3-5 each week. I do wish that I had done those first 30 practice tests earlier rather than back-ending my studying as much as I did, but it was workable. For me, taking tests was absolutely the best way to improve. I had a major breakthrough after taking 30 tests mostly because of improvement on LR. By 30 PTs, I began nailing obscure but recognizable question varieties (like certain types of flaws, subtleties in the causation questions, stuff like this). In the first 30 PTs I was usually scoring between 170-174. I staggered the tests so I was doing a mix of old and new, taking PT 41, 51, 61, 71, 81, and then 42, 52, 62, 72, 82, all the way through 49, 59, 69, 79, 89.

    When I kicked my studying into high gear in late May, I was aiming for a 10-PT average of 177 (which was my avg BR score). I was taking summer classes and I studied for 1-6 hours a day depending on what I felt I could do productively. I got a 177 average by mid-June and was consistently scoring scoring 173-179. I scored my first 180 in July, ten days before I was slated to test, and my second 180 a few days after that.

    Even though I was doing so many tests, I never came close to burnout. I think this was because I never forced myself to study—if I needed a day off, I would take one. Besides that, I felt really absorbed in my studying, like I was learning something new or doing something productive the whole time. I really cannot thank 7Sage enough for this. The videos (which I always watched on double speed), the gamified analytics bar, and the really lovely testing and BR interface made it so freaking easy to study, and I felt like I was always making the most of my time.

    I think the thing that really got me through the blind reviewing was the sense that all of the questions are doable, and all of the answers are clear. I absolutely refused to write off difficult questions as oddballs or one-offs, and I spent time in BR internalizing all of the answers so that they seemed completely, patently obvious to me. (Sometimes this meant spending 15 minutes on an LR question. Rarely, it meant spending an hour on an RC question.) If I wasn’t satisfied with the explanations already in the comments, sometimes I would add my own.

    Speaking of blind reviewing, here are some things I did by section:

    LG: I would do all the games again in BR. At first this meant figuring games out for the first time and correcting lots of mistakes or (for the tricky ones) finding a better way to organize things. When I got better at games this meant redoing the games quickly to sanity-check my answers, and redoing the hard ones until they felt easy (maybe 2-3 times).

    LR: Taking 30+ tests really, really helped me improve on this section. At one point it was my best, and I consistently missed zero or one. After 30 practice tests I would thoroughly blind review only the questions I starred or missed since I felt comfortable about all the others. (Again, staying motivated meant using my time really productively! I didn’t BR questions that I was confident in.)

    RC: This was an absolute beast for me, and it took me a long time to improve. Even up until my test date I was missing 1-4 questions on this section. What helped me improve from 3-7 missed to 1-4 missed was to force myself to spend 2.5-4 minutes on the passage (longer than felt natural) really absorbing all of the structure, and then answering the questions somewhat quickly. The main reason this helped was that I could remember where to look for details when questions asked for them rather than guessing or rereading whole paragraphs. (Speeding through was very difficult because I would often feel super unconfident on many of my answers, but it was still the best strategy.) In BR, I spent a lot of time internalizing the differences between the best AC and worse ACs on the confusing curve-breaker questions, and this helped me miss fewer of them.

    About a month before the test I changed my schedule to include a morning routine. I got used to doing an exercise routine, eating lunch, and then sitting down to do a test, taking it at about the same time during the day that my actual test was scheduled for. (The workout was a lifesaver on test day since I was so full of white hot terror that I needed something to distract me!)

    On test day, I get a decent sleep and wake up full of jitters. I do an extra-long exercise routine to help keep myself busy, eat a pasta lunch, and sit down for the flex test. Despite feeling prepared I am visibly shaking and can’t think lucidly because I am so nervous. Thankfully my first section is logic games. I crank through the first three games, and I calm down gradually as I take the test. The last game is wickedly difficult and my nerves didn’t leave me with a lot of extra time. I leave the section highly unconfident on one question and shaky on maybe three. (I still think that I did miss that one question, but everyone’s allowed one miss).

    The next section is LR, and it’s a relatively easy section. I get through it with a bit of time to spare, and very quickly double-check all of my starred questions (the one question I am least confident about is a strangely worded number 7, oddly enough—I must have spent three minutes on it).

    The final section is RC, and I only just finish the section (I almost always take up the full time on RC, and I practiced with the expectation that I wouldn't have time to double-check anything) but I feel pretty good about it.

    And so I got a 180. It took a lot of studying and a lot of luck—things likely would have turned out differently if I had gotten a RC right off the bat or if I had really fudged that last logic game. But my preparation helped me muscle-memory my way through the test even with such terrible nerves—I could really fall back on hardened pattern-recognition. (The LSAT is a very learnable test!) I didn’t set out to get a 180, and I always knew that it was unlikely. My aim was to study enough to consistently hit a challenging but achievable “goal range,” which in my case was 175-180. I could have just as easily gotten any of those scores or lower.

    On another note, my lovely partner was studying for the LSAT at the same time that I was. Early on we made the decision not to share any of our practice test scores besides vague reports, like “I got a new high score!” or “I scored in my goal range!” This turned out to be a really great decision! It freed us from comparing ourselves, and it allowed us to be really supportive. (We celebrated the heck out of our scores together when it was all over, though! They ended up with a 177!)

    91

    For those of you who have already taken the lsat, how did your average preptest score relate to your actual score? In other words, say I want to score a 160 on the actual test, what should be my average score on preptests? (Also, this is referring to the flex)

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    Thursday, Dec 17, 2020

    PT 80 omg

    Anyone else find PT 80 difficult? I know it probably has to do with my test conditions when I took it but oh boy I was averaging 169 these past few tests and dropped to 160 on PT 80 oh boy....tips or words of encouragement?

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    Hi everyone! I am taking the January LSAT flex and had a quick question about score conversions on PT's. When I get my actual score back after taking a PT, I usually go look at the "score conversion" beneath in and find that specific PT with my matching number of incorrect answers. However, there is a wide gap between those two scores. For example, I just took PT 70 and made a 163 actual score, but the conversion score is a 169. Which score is correct?

    Thanks!

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    To current law students / law school grads: how have the analytical lessons from Logic Games transferred over to your work?

    I’m confident LG will help me as a law student (although right now how it will help me still belongs to this abstract mist of “it’s good for me, just keep your head down, and keep doing it!”), but I’m curious how exactly. If anyone who is now doing something law-related has been seeing the effects of their LG training (the spatial elements of LG, manipulating rules, etc) play out in their law-related lives, I’m curious to hear your thoughts!

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    Hey-

    Due to the virtual format of my classes this year, my university is allowing us the optional "S/NS" (Satisfactory/Not Satisfactory) selection for certain grades. Satisfactory gives you credit for the class but does not count towards your GPA.

    As my semester comes to an end and final grades start to get posted, I am wondering if I should cover up all my grades that are below a 4.0 with an "S". This will optimize my GPA. For example, I am in 5, 3-credit classes and have 3 4.0's and 2 3.5's. That is a GPA of 3.8. I could cover the 3.5's with "S" and get a 4.0 for the semester.

    Will this be concerning for a law school to see while reading my transcript? Thanks in advance

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