Typing out your thought process. When?

roblim92

Hi guys!

Just a quick question regarding typing out your thought process for LR. I recently developed the habit of typing out my thought process and explanations for each answer choice after grading a PT to try to understand where I'm making mistakes. However, should I be doing this only after blind reviewing and grading the PT? Or should I begin the typing process when I blind review?

Many thanks!

Sarah889

I do this when I blind review. I can't tell you how many times I've got through a question that I considered to be easier, but typing out my answer brings me to this humbling realization that I cannot justify why a seemingly wrong answer choice is wrong. There have been a couple times when this seemingly wrong answer choice is actually the correct one. (Even when this isn't the case, it is always a good idea to be able to clearly justify why each wrong answer choice is wrong.)

My thought process has gone like this:

I'm BRing and I come across question 14. "Oh man...this one is clearly A. This is a strengthening question and A is definitely the only option here that even remotely strengthens this argument. But, since this question took me longer than it should have, let me just be a good LSAT student and BR it properly and type out my reasoning for each answer. A is perfect. B is wrong because it's talking about different subject matter. C is wrong because it has a neutral impact on the argument. D is clearly wrong because...well...because it looks wrong? That's a terrible reason to eliminate D...why the heck is D wrong...IS D wrong? Omg...actually A looks kinda suspect now...what exactly is A saying....Omg, A just strengthens the truth of the premise! Not of the argument! A is totally wrong! So...D....wow. D actually kind of makes sense. Yea that would definitely strengthen the relationship between the truth and the premises."

There's one point for your BR score and a point of weakness you now recognize.

The reason why you should type it out instead of mentally go through the above process is because you are not going to be as strict with yourself as the English language is. Typing it out forces you to complete your thought and not depend on biased assumptions or stupid reasoning like "A is perfect" or "D just looks bad." Reading through the questions again provides too many opportunities to be lazy and, with 50 LR questions for each PT, we are prone to want to get lazy after a while.

Plus, when you are BRing, that is the point when your reasoning is raw in your mind and you don't know the correct answer yet. You are just working with you and yourself. Sometimes knowing the correct answer will bias you into "influencing" how you type our your reasoning. If you recognize a rookie error that you made, pride definitely plays a part in typing out your reasoning for that question if you are doing so in retrospect. If you want to keep track of every stage of reasoning and when you realize your reasoning is wrong, you could always go back through your typed out BR reasoning and scrutinize it with your new knowledge and keep track of what you now realize. I usually do this by highlighting with different colors for each stage of reasoning in Word.

roblim92

@bswise2 said:
Plus, when you are BRing, that is the point when your reasoning is raw in your mind and you don't know the correct answer yet. You are just working with you and yourself. Sometimes knowing the correct answer will bias you into "influencing" how you type our your reasoning. If you recognize a rookie error that you made, pride definitely plays a part in typing out your reasoning for that question if you are doing so in retrospect. If you want to keep track of every stage of reasoning and when you realize your reasoning is wrong, you could always go back through your typed out BR reasoning and scrutinize it with your new knowledge and keep track of what you now realize. I usually do this by highlighting with different colors for each stage of reasoning in Word.

Thank you so much for such a detailed response! I'm definitely going to adopt this method into my review from now on.

Sami

@"JPAI_UBC" said:
However, should I be doing this only after blind reviewing and grading the PT? Or should I begin the typing process when I blind review?

So I write out my explanation during Blind Review for every question I circled while I did the PT timed before I check if I was right or wrong. This is because if I circled something that meant I wasn't 100% confidence in my understanding of that stimulus and I write it down to deconstruct not only that argument for my benefit but also so I can't cheat myself when I finally compare my answer to JY's explanation. If I got it right because of a bad reasoning its easy to see when I have it written down. Writing something down can also be helpful to boost your confidence about a particular aspect of LSAT especially if you were not confident about it during timed section. I wholeheartedly believe a big aspect of speed during a PT comes from confidence. This can really help with that.

After I have checked my answers, I again write down my explanation for any question that I got wrong but I didn't circle. So this is where I really need to spend my time as there is something that I am 100% confidence about but I am actually wrong! Writing out my process and then comparing it to the explanation can be really helpful. I also write out an explanation of what I learned after I have watched the correct way to do something and I make a note of where I went wrong when I did the question timed and felt confident about. This is really important to not make this mistake in future.

rafaelito

@Sami said:
I also write out an explanation of what I learned after I have watched the correct way to do something

I do exactly what @Sami said above down to this last detail. Additionally, in my word document I highlight red the wrong type of reasoning and I highlight yellow the explanation/my own understanding of how to arrive at the right answer correctly. This is so I can review my erroneous thinking in the future (to make sure I don't do it again).

roblim92

Thanks everyone!

TimLSAT180

@Sami @bswise2 Hey guys I just wanted to thank you guys for writing up this post! This is something I haven't been doing and I just started today doing some untimed drilling of 10 questions of weaken, strengthen, and flaw questions and covering up the question stem and ACs and just breaking down the argument first, figuring out the premise and conclusion, figuring out any assumptions, then reading the question stem carefully, and then going through each answer choice (by covering up all the other ones) and I think looking at answer choices one by one instead of looking at them all at the same time is really important. This is because like @bswise2 pointed out, if there's an answer choice that stands out as being correct and even if it does turn out to be the right one, then it biases people's perception (or at least mine) to shed evil light over the 4 wrong answer choices. So, I think going through each one by one forces me to compare the answer choice against my analysis and I can firmly eliminate it or choose it with confidence. So, yeah I hope this process pays off. The only downside is that it takes a loooong time to get through even just 10 questions. Good luck to you all!