Notes from LR Crash Course Workshop #3

partyondudes

Hi everyone,
I recently participated in J.Y.'s LR Crash Course Workshop #3 and wanted to share some of the key takeaways from the discussions we had over the course of four days. It was humbling to realize that there is so much to learn and understand about logical reasoning. At the same time, it was great to see that it is very possible to gain that understanding and internalize it to develop a strong intuition for the test. Thanks so much J.Y. for the opportunity to participate in the Workshop!

Overall Takeaways from the LR Crash Course

Read everything slowly and carefully, even when you’re trying to go fast!

• Spending more time upfront to gain a solid understanding will ultimately allow you to complete the question more quickly and accurately than if you had skimmed through the question and had to reread things several times to catch missed details

To reiterate, DON’T RUSH!

• When you speed up and are focused on speeding up, you lose accuracy
• Read the rules correctly → TOTALLY understand the stimulus, that understanding is so key!
• Timing is a function of confidence, f(confidence) = timing
• The more confident you are, the faster you’ll go. So focus on developing confidence!

Grammar

• Complex grammar is how the LSAT writers really turn up the difficulty of a given question because they can only do so much with logic. Being able to intuitively understand the grammar is critical.

Logical Reasoning questions are very interrelated

• Need to develop foundational understanding of arguments and logic to do well on these questions

“Cookie Cutter Review”

• During Blind Review, look for similar questions or similar answers, i.e., cookie cutter questions and answers, to develop an understanding of the patterns in LSAT questions
• Always look for patterns in the answers and questions...it’s like seeing the code in the Matrix
• Realize that the questions and answers aren’t new enemies. They’re just the same enemies over and over again, wearing different masks.
• You don’t need to get to, but just approximate, the feeling that all LSAT questions are the same.

Cookie Cutter Answer Choice: Sole-Focus or Over-Focus on the Phenomenon

• Common incorrect answer deepens, widens, intensifies, narrows, etc., the phenomenon, but leaves the explanation wide open
• Some such trap answers play with going from broad to narrow or narrow to broad as a way to trick you
• They make the conclusion more important to explain by broadening or intensifying the phenomenon, but don’t provide any explanation as to what caused the phenomenon.
• Examples:
• PT54/2/14
• PT55/1/7 answer E broadens/intensifies the phenomenon but doesn’t provide any explanation for why it happened
• PT55/3/21 - The second sentence, about “highly motivated students” does little to increase the support between the first premise (the first sentence) and the conclusion (the last sentence). Rather, it intensifies the phenomenon presented in the first premise.

Conditional logic

• Also seek to intuitively understand conditional logic such that Must Be True, Sufficient and Pseudo-Sufficient Assumption questions, Parallel Method of Reasoning questions that use conditional logic are freebies.
• Think about developing your intuition such that you can ‘sense a disturbance in the Force’ when a given stimulus or answer choice has an issue and can see the translation of logic in your mind.
• How do you get to the point where you can visualize conditional logic without diagramming on paper?
• Practice, practice, practice!
• Also, to help visualization, focus on important keywords in the stimulus and pay close attention to the broad logical relationships
• Think about the domain that a given conditional relationship operates within as a way to guide your understanding of the conditional relationship.
  
  
  • E.g., see PT54/2/16
  • According to the first sentence of the stimulus, “good hunter” and “bad hunter” refer specifically to cats, so the domain is “cats”. Therefore, when one of the premises says “all good hunters”, it’s only talking about cats that are “good hunters”, not all creatures that are “good hunters”.

Some and most relationships

• It can be very helpful to think about some and most relationships in terms of Venn diagrams

Key tasks for doing well on Reading Comprehension (RC) and Logical Reasoning (LR)

• RC = create a very brief, very succinct summary at the end of every paragraph
• LR = understand the entire stimulus, make sure your timing is good

Name or personify concepts that are abstract to gain a more concrete understanding of them.

• E.g., the movie Inside Out personifies emotions to make them more generally relatable
• Be able to name what you know helps you to internalize it...the name probably doesn’t really matter, more the process of thinking about the concept long enough to find a good, descriptive (to you) name it.

Practice ruthlessly eliminating all five answer choices

• Why?
• It’s inevitable that the right answer will be written in such a way that you’ll pass over it unknowingly. You wouldn’t want to pass over it and then try to justify some other answer as ‘the best of the remaining options, even though it doesn’t feel right’.
  *Eliminate all the answers, then read the stimulus again and look for any details that you might have missed in your initial reading.

These notes certainly aren't all of what we talked about, but I hope you find some portion of them helpful for you in your continued studies!

Alex

Thank you for posting these!

MapleSarahp

You rock, thank you for posting this

TheMikey

Thank you for this!

Grace...

Thank you. It is very helpful.

akistotle

Thank you for this great summary!

LeslieKnopeIsMySpiritAnimal

This is awesome - thank you!

TexAgAaron

Thank you so much! The timing notes are exactly what I was looking for!

bunny11.11

Thank you, for this! I'm still reading through, but wanted to mention that under the "conditional logic" section E.g., see PT54/4/16 good hunter/ cats question..... this is PT5/2/16. Thought I was losing my mind for a minute, after doing Sect 4!

Sidenote, on Phenomenon Notes: This is a really good example. PT55/1/7. I don't dig down and eliminate overly broad, clearly wrong answers fast enough. The conclusion is "The legislation, therefore, has increased overall worker safety within HIGH RISK industries." Oh, if only the LSAT writers would capitalize like that.... What weakens the argument? We can immediately cross out anything that talks about all industry or some industry and not specifically HIGH RISK industry. Maybe this is an obvious point for most people, but looking at the question again I think I just had an epiphany @partyondudes ! That is how you get faster and gain confidence.

TryingMyBest

Thank you!!

dennisgerrard

Thanks for spoiling:) Looking forward to attending session #5!!!

annewr253

Wow Thanks for this!

partyondudes

No problem, @"Alex Divine" @MapleSarahp @TheMikey @Grace... @akistotle @"Lauren L" @akeegs92 @"bunny11.11" @TryingMyBest @dennisgerrard @attalla253

@"bunny11.11" thanks for picking out my typo on the "good hunters" question! Sorry for the confusion...I just corrected it.
Regarding your comment about "all" v. "high risk" industries, unfortunately, I think whether we can strike an answer out because it is too broad or narrow is entirely context dependent.
I tend to think that, in the right context, saying "all" industries would imply "high risk" industries. This goes back to my note about domains. "High risk" industries are part of the domain "all" industries. If I had a weakening statement that applied to "all" industries, then it would also apply to "high risk" industries.
In answer E, however, we don't have a weakening statement, but rather just a related, possibly more significant, data point to explain with a hypothesis. Having another data point to explain does not weaken an argument but rather 'intensifies' the need to explain the repeating phenomenon.
If answer E said something like "workplace safety conditions in all industries have improved steadily since 1955 due to technological innovations", then I'm pretty sure it would be as correct as answer A because what applies to the domain applies to the members of the domain. Technological innovations in all industries, which would include high risk industries, is an alternate explanation to legislation for improved workplace safety.

@dennisgerrard Don't worry, my friend. J.Y. said that every session has been different so far. True, you'll probably take some similar notes, but I don't expect that your session will be totally identical! I look forward to reading your notes!