Older vs. Newer PT Strategy and Differences

SuperMario929

Hi all,

I hope that everyone who took the June LSAT got the score they desired, and that those taking the July LSAT are beginning to feel confident about their abilities!

I am facing a bit of a real-life RRE situation with my LSAT preparation. On the earlier PTs, I am scoring in the 170s (just got a 174 on PT 38, 178 BR), but on the newer PTs I am scoring in the low-mid 160s (BRs in the high 160s). I am alternating back and forth, and for whatever strange reason, the newer PTs are just more difficult for me. It's not as though I am falling for traps or anything like that on the newer tests because I know I don't know the answer to a host of questions when I am taking them.

Has anyone else encountered this phenomena personally? Or does anyone have any wisdom to impart on how to bridge this difference? Or is there no difference, and this is somehow entirely mental or some sort of statistical anomaly? Thanks for any advice, and good luck to those who are studying!

Michael.Cinco

The more recent lsats I find get tricker with respect to the LR sections. They step away from the traditional errors in reasoning and require a crisper understanding of the concepts as well as a really close reading of the stimulus. That's the biggest difference I've found.

I remember getting destroyed by one of the lr sections in the 80's getting 7 wrong when to that point ive been averaging -1 - -3 on an lr section.

Good news is you can adapt to it.

MIT_2017

@SuperMario929 the increased difficulty, or at the very least the overall change in the feel of the test, has been experienced by many, myself included. I agree with what @"Michael.Cinco" said about the LR questions. For example, in the earlier PTs, if you could narrow an answer choice down to two answer choices, choosing the one with less extreme/absolute language would be very often correct -- say something like 80% of the time. In the later PTs (mid 70s and 80s), this strategy would only get you the correct answer something like 50% of the time -- in other words, it was no longer a very helpful strategy, thus requiring you to spend more time developing a complete understanding of the stimulus and answer choices. *

I actually personally experienced a bigger dropoff in RC than LR in the mid 70s PTs. This is oversimplifying it, but I felt that it used to be the case that if your average passage had 8 questions, about 6 of them would have one clearly correct answer, with 2 of them requiring a good amount of inference, and you'd likely feel somewhat uncomfortable when you end up circling an answer without being able to truly rule out the other four. Later on, this breakdown became closer to 5 and 3 or 4 and 4. *

Lastly, I strongly believe the Logic Games have gotten easier. Many people think they've gotten more difficult because there is often a Miscellaneous type game, which had been pretty rare for a long time. But I suppose I'd say that there is a difference between being good at intuitively drawing inferences by applying logic to the games and simply being good at forcing a game into some cookie-cutter template that you've used before. If you are able to relax and not freak out when faced with an unfamiliar game type, I think you may also find that these games end up being quite easy.

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.* = Of course these exact numbers and percentages are made up, but you get the idea.