What's your go-to strategy for Necessary Assumption questions?

Tim Hortons

So, I've just finished the instructional videos for the Necessary Assumption lesson. This is the first time since starting JY's lessons that I feel sorta lost. I've gotten ~5-6 of the instructionally-led questions wrong, which is a little disheartening...

Before I hit the practice sets, I want to get a sense of the strategies that are out there for tackling and (eventually) fool-proofing NA questions. That way I can apply them when I'm practicing to figure out which approaches I jive well with.

All tips are appreciated!

Return On Inference

NA are my worst question type, so I'm not sure if I'm the best to comment for this one. I do think I've made some progress though, and for me it's all been about my ability to separate out the premises and conclusion of the argument. Before I go into the ACs, I make sure I know what the conclusion is, and what premises there are supporting it.

Usually I'll recapitulate it in my mind to make sure I've got a good grasp of it. So many incorrect ACs, even on the harder NA questions, are just irrelevant and do nothing to the relationship between premise/conclusion.

Then once I've eliminated the irrelevant ACs, it comes down to using the MBT/Negation test for the remaining ACs.

I also want to say that NA questions do get easier the more you do -- I also missed almost all of them during the instructional videos. Once you make it through all of the problem sets you'll feel a lot more comfortable with them.

keets993

I think the first few lessons in NA are there to illustrate the difference between SA and NA, specifically the amount of support required. Are you finding possible gaps in the argument when you read through?

Maybe try brushing up on your negation skills because some of the incorrect answer choices in NA don't have to be true because they're too strong. Negation is what helps me when I'm stuck between 2 answer choices.

ElleWoods77

Fellow Canadian here , I love your name . I have a love hate relationship with NA but I became much better after going through the lesson again and really putting in work with blind review untimed. With my blind review in a separate document I write out an explanation of the stimulus , what I think the gap is , and explanations of why I think each question is wrong or right . If I am wrong I take a day or two and look at the question again to try to shatter my reasoning . After doing this , I look at JYs explanation to reinforce my new reasoning if I don’t 100% understand why I got the answer choice wrong . I also keep a record of all the questions that gave me a hard time to come back to later on. I think of NA as a very weak MBT. I am careful with strong worded answer choices . I have learned not to be too quick to eliminate answer choices because the assumption may not be so obvious . Tougher NA is definitely a weakness so I definitely plan to utilize the problem sets and question bank . I am thinking of incorporating skipping NA and coming back to them last since they tend to take me a bit longer to think about.

Tim Hortons

@"Return On Inference" said:
NA are my worst question type, so I'm not sure if I'm the best to comment for this one. I do think I've made some progress though, and for me it's all been about my ability to separate out the premises and conclusion of the argument. Before I go into the ACs, I make sure I know what the conclusion is, and what premises there are supporting it.

Usually I'll recapitulate it in my mind to make sure I've got a good grasp of it. So many incorrect ACs, even on the harder NA questions, are just irrelevant and do nothing to the relationship between premise/conclusion.

Then once I've eliminated the irrelevant ACs, it comes down to using the MBT/Negation test for the remaining ACs.

I also want to say that NA questions do get easier the more you do -- I also missed almost all of them during the instructional videos. Once you make it through all of the problem sets you'll feel a lot more comfortable with them.

Thanks for this -- would you say that your approach to NA is similar to SA questions, except you're looking for a weak (necessary) AC as opposed to a strong (sufficient) AC?

Tim Hortons

@keets993 said:
I think the first few lessons in NA are there to illustrate the difference between SA and NA, specifically the amount of support required. Are you finding possible gaps in the argument when you read through?

Maybe try brushing up on your negation skills because some of the incorrect answer choices in NA don't have to be true because they're too strong. Negation is what helps me when I'm stuck between 2 answer choices.

I find that the gap is usually quite clear to me -- I'm able to pick up on it more often than not. I think, for me, my biggest issue is the amount of time and second-guessing that goes on when I've boiled it down to the correct AC and the trap answer choice. But, like you said, I'll definitely review negation to help with this issue!

@ElleWoods77 said:
Fellow Canadian here , I love your name . I have a love hate relationship with NA but I became much better after going through the lesson again and really putting in work with blind review untimed. With my blind review in a separate document I write out an explanation of the stimulus , what I think the gap is , and explanations of why I think each question is wrong or right . If I am wrong I take a day or two and look at the question again to try to shatter my reasoning . After doing this , I look at JYs explanation to reinforce my new reasoning if I don’t 100% understand why I got the answer choice wrong . I also keep a record of all the questions that gave me a hard time to come back to later on. I think of NA as a very weak MBT. I am careful with strong worded answer choices . I have learned not to be too quick to eliminate answer choices because the assumption may not be so obvious . Tougher NA is definitely a weakness so I definitely plan to utilize the problem sets and question bank . I am thinking of incorporating skipping NA and coming back to them last since they tend to take me a bit longer to think about.

Hey! Awesome to connect with a fellow Canadian 7Sager! It seems as though you're putting in a lot of time to review NA ACs. I think I need to emulate that and BR for longer in order to identify the cracks in each wrong AC. Thanks for sharing your approach.

Cant Get Right

I love NA’s; the more the better. I get these correct and very quickly which is a big advantage to my pacing. Instead of NA questions, I like to think of them as conditional MBT questions. Necessity is actually a pretty difficult concept, but MBT is quite intuitive for most of us. So instead of thinking what is necessary, I ask:

What must be true IF the conclusion is to follow?

It’s the exact same thing, but I think it’s a much more intuitive way to think about it. I also never ever try to prephrase these, or much of anything for that matter. It’s just too easy to predict something else that’s perfectly correct but totally not what they’re going for. Really easy to talk yourself into a trap or get bogged down chasing after something that’s not there, all while missing something perfectly apparent if you just gave it a chance.

Tim Hortons

@"Cant Get Right" said:
I love NA’s; the more the better. I get these correct and very quickly which is a big advantage to my pacing. Instead of NA questions, I like to think of them as conditional MBT questions. Necessity is actually a pretty difficult concept, but MBT is quite intuitive for most of us. So instead of thinking what is necessary, I ask:

What must be true IF the conclusion is to follow?

It’s the exact same thing, but I think it’s a much more intuitive way to think about it. I also never ever try to prephrase these, or much of anything for that matter. It’s just too easy to predict something else that’s perfectly correct but totally not what they’re going for. Really easy to talk yourself into a trap or get bogged down chasing after something that’s not there, all while missing something perfectly apparent if you just gave it a chance.

I think when I was timing myself, I got so caught up in the whole necessity concept, which was a time-sink. But, put your way, it definitely makes sense to use the MBT approach.

ElleWoods77

@"Tim Hortons" said:

@keets993 said:
I think the first few lessons in NA are there to illustrate the difference between SA and NA, specifically the amount of support required. Are you finding possible gaps in the argument when you read through?

Maybe try brushing up on your negation skills because some of the incorrect answer choices in NA don't have to be true because they're too strong. Negation is what helps me when I'm stuck between 2 answer choices.

I find that the gap is usually quite clear to me -- I'm able to pick up on it more often than not. I think, for me, my biggest issue is the amount of time and second-guessing that goes on when I've boiled it down to the correct AC and the trap answer choice. But, like you said, I'll definitely review negation to help with this issue!

@ElleWoods77 said:
Fellow Canadian here , I love your name . I have a love hate relationship with NA but I became much better after going through the lesson again and really putting in work with blind review untimed. With my blind review in a separate document I write out an explanation of the stimulus , what I think the gap is , and explanations of why I think each question is wrong or right . If I am wrong I take a day or two and look at the question again to try to shatter my reasoning . After doing this , I look at JYs explanation to reinforce my new reasoning if I don’t 100% understand why I got the answer choice wrong . I also keep a record of all the questions that gave me a hard time to come back to later on. I think of NA as a very weak MBT. I am careful with strong worded answer choices . I have learned not to be too quick to eliminate answer choices because the assumption may not be so obvious . Tougher NA is definitely a weakness so I definitely plan to utilize the problem sets and question bank . I am thinking of incorporating skipping NA and coming back to them last since they tend to take me a bit longer to think about.

Hey! Awesome to connect with a fellow Canadian 7Sager! It seems as though you're putting in a lot of time to review NA ACs. I think I need to emulate that and BR for longer in order to identify the cracks in each wrong AC. Thanks for sharing your approach.

Meeting fellow Canadians are the best . No problem at all. It has helped me immensely . I used to be a lost soul with NA, but you can not afford to not have a strong foundation while approaching them. I have starting drilling full sections and I have noticed a lot of the NA included are four or five star questions. I really have , I drill the hell out of my weaknesses because that is the only way you will improve. Treating BR like your life depends on it makes all the difference . Best of luck my fellow Canuck.

Jonathan Wang

I want to chime in here and say that it's one of my biggest LSAT pet peeves when people equate sufficient with strong and necessary with weak. Sometimes you need a miracle (so your necessary assumption needs to be a huge statement), and sometimes a small nudge is enough to push you over the edge (meaning a small statement might still be a sufficient assumption). I've seen more students than I can count over the years make some variant of the complaint that they thought an answer was 'too strong' to be a necessary assumption or 'too weak' to be a sufficient assumption, and it grinds my gears because 99% of the time it's indicative of a sloppy, incomplete thought process (the other 1% of the time it's usually just nitpicking and fixating on corner cases, but I can at least understand that).

You determine sufficiency or necessity by a statement's impact on the argument. That's what the respective tests are for - negation testing is the only foolproof way to figure out what's necessary and what's not ("conditional MBT" is just another way to frame the same concept). As you develop a sense of what constitutes necessity and your pattern recognition starts kicking in, that's when little rules of thumb like "if it's a strong statement, compare that to what your sense of the argument is and double check to make sure it's actually necessary" can be helpful. But the vast majority of people skip that part and just jump right to "necessary assumptions are small/weak/subtle/"duh"/whatever", which leads to incomplete and conclusory thought processes like "that's too big to be necessary", and that's a really good way to stunt your conceptual understanding of the theory - especially since in the easier questions you probably won't be punished for taking the shortcut, further reinforcing bad habits.

ElleWoods77

@"Jonathan Wang" said:
I want to chime in here and say that it's one of my biggest LSAT pet peeves when people equate sufficient with strong and necessary with weak. Sometimes you need a miracle (so your necessary assumption needs to be a huge statement), and sometimes a small nudge is enough to push you over the edge (meaning a small statement might still be a sufficient assumption). I've seen more students than I can count over the years make some variant of the complaint that they thought an answer was 'too strong' to be a necessary assumption or 'too weak' to be a sufficient assumption, and it grinds my gears because 99% of the time it's indicative of a sloppy, incomplete thought process (the other 1% of the time it's usually just nitpicking and fixating on corner cases, but I can at least understand that).

You determine sufficiency or necessity by a statement's impact on the argument. That's what the respective tests are for - negation testing is the only foolproof way to figure out what's necessary and what's not ("conditional MBT" is just another way to frame the same concept). As you develop a sense of what constitutes necessity and your pattern recognition starts kicking in, that's when little rules of thumb like "if it's a strong statement, compare that to what your sense of the argument is and double check to make sure it's actually necessary" can be helpful. But the vast majority of people skip that part and just jump right to "necessary assumptions are small/weak/subtle/"duh"/whatever", which leads to incomplete and conclusory thought processes like "that's too big to be necessary", and that's a really good way to stunt your conceptual understanding of the theory - especially since in the easier questions you probably won't be punished for taking the shortcut, further reinforcing bad habits.

Thank you for your insight. I admit I tend to frame this in my mind with NA. I will definitely make an effort to frame my mind this way and focus on the negation test to eliminate answer choices I am not sure about.

Tim Hortons

@"Jonathan Wang" said:
I've seen more students than I can count over the years make some variant of the complaint that they thought an answer was 'too strong' to be a necessary assumption or 'too weak' to be a sufficient assumption, and it grinds my gears because 99% of the time it's indicative of a sloppy, incomplete thought process...

This is definitely one of the things about NA questions that I want to fix but didn't realize till now. I always felt uncomfortable dismissing an AC just because it seemed "too strong". Thank you for this; super helpful moving forward!

Jonathan Wang

@"Tim Hortons" said:
This is definitely one of the things about NA questions that I want to fix but didn't realize till now. I always felt uncomfortable dismissing an AC just because it seemed "too strong". Thank you for this; super helpful moving forward!

Glad you thought so. You can repay me with a double double and a pastry of some kind.

keets993

@"Tim Hortons" @ElleWoods77 fellow canadian here

You can repay me with a double double and a pastry of some kind.

Too bad they got rid of the chocolate danish aka the best pastry tim's ever had.

ElleWoods77

@keets993 said:
@"Tim Hortons" @ElleWoods77 fellow canadian here

You can repay me with a double double and a pastry of some kind.

Too bad they got rid of the chocolate danish aka the best pastry tim's ever had.

Hello fellow Canadian oh man it sucks when Timmy's eliminates your favs. I am addicted to their Reese Pieces brownie, if they get rid of that I will be heartbroken.

Tim Hortons

@keets993 said:
@"Tim Hortons" @ElleWoods77 fellow canadian here

You can repay me with a double double and a pastry of some kind.

Too bad they got rid of the chocolate danish aka the best pastry tim's ever had.

@ElleWoods77 said:

@keets993 said:
@"Tim Hortons" @ElleWoods77 fellow canadian here

You can repay me with a double double and a pastry of some kind.

Too bad they got rid of the chocolate danish aka the best pastry tim's ever had.

Hello fellow Canadian oh man it sucks when Timmy's eliminates your favs. I am addicted to their Reese Pieces brownie, if they get rid of that I will be heartbroken.

I'm gonna try to work my magic. Timmie's always delivers, fam.

ElleWoods77

@"Tim Hortons" said:

@keets993 said:
@"Tim Hortons" @ElleWoods77 fellow canadian here

You can repay me with a double double and a pastry of some kind.

Too bad they got rid of the chocolate danish aka the best pastry tim's ever had.

@ElleWoods77 said:

@keets993 said:
@"Tim Hortons" @ElleWoods77 fellow canadian here

You can repay me with a double double and a pastry of some kind.

Too bad they got rid of the chocolate danish aka the best pastry tim's ever had.

Hello fellow Canadian oh man it sucks when Timmy's eliminates your favs. I am addicted to their Reese Pieces brownie, if they get rid of that I will be heartbroken.

I'm gonna try to work my magic. Timmie's always delivers, fam.

Indeed they always do.