Trouble with SA and PSA Questions, help!

CircleTurk

Hi all,

I've been studying for a little over 7 months but I've always had trouble with Sufficient Assumption and Pseudo Sufficient Assumption questions. I get them right a lot of the time but it takes forever, and writing out the lawgic often makes it worse for me.

I don't think JYs method works for me very well. I understand the principles of lawgic but I have a lot of trouble when the logic chains they present use slightly different subjects/are not worded in the same way. It's also really easy for my brain to get it all jumbled.

Anyone else have this issue? What worked for you?

Are there other methods for approaching these outside of writing out logic chains that can work?

help

thecmancan

Ideally, your intuition is good enough on the non-curve-breaker questions that you don't need to diagram. The easier SA questions will have a glaring gap in reasoning.

For SA you look for the exact wording of the ideas you want to link together. You can also look for contrapositives. I find SA questions a bit easier because the burden of the AC to move the argument to 100% validity.

PSA questions are quite different. The ideas that link together are not necessarily exact matches. It's quite a big looser in terms of validity.

Often with these, you are looking for reasoning errors and the common correct AC types for each:

Causal reasoning: look to help argument become more than coincidence. defend against alternate causes, etc.

Comparisons: look for AC's the make the comparison in the argument more applicable and likely to hold water.

Most of all, these questions are often just obvious leaps over gaps.

Such as: Barry stole our company secrets, PAY HIM!

Well, obviously it's missing a premise that link these ideas together. Perhaps Barry was contracted to conduct Penetration Testing and our company always pay our dues.

You get the idea.

CircleTurk

@thecmancan I'll try being more intuitive. I've seen some other courses have other methods too, such as looking only for words that are in the premise but not the conclusion or vise versa in the answer rather that answers that use words in both, but its still confusing. Not sure why. I might just have to accept that i'm not great at these.

Sami

@CircleTurk said:
Hi all,

I've been studying for a little over 7 months but I've always had trouble with Sufficient Assumption and Pseudo Sufficient Assumption questions. I get them right a lot of the time but it takes forever, and writing out the lawgic often makes it worse for me.

I definitely recommend not writing out the logic. LSAT is testing your understanding of logic and linguistics. Writing out things in logic, while sometimes necessary for very complicated logic heavy questions, takes away from understanding the stimulus. If you ever have to write out logic for a question, wait till round two. Otherwise you run the risk of taking a long time and missing out the linguistic element of the stimulus and not understanding other aspects of the stimulus.

I don't think JYs method works for me very well. I understand the principles of lawgic but I have a lot of trouble when the logic chains they present use slightly different subjects/are not worded in the same way. It's also really easy for my brain to get it all jumbled.

I have found that when people try to do logic they are doing it at the end after reading the stimulus and therefore it can be a bit overwhelming. Instead try to actively read line by line. This means that it is important to have a good idea about what you can conclude from having read the premises before you have even read the conclusion.

For sufficient assumption questions, if you are reading the conclusion and you have no idea what is possible to conclude, it's going to be even harder to find a right answer choice to fix it.

Let's look at an example:

All black cats are considered unlucky. Therefore, black cats are rarely adopted as pets.

We can quickly see the jump here that our premise was not sufficient to make that conclusion. Since we are supposed to guarantee the conclusion it must be true that animals that are considered unlucky rarely get adopted.

But an assumption is much harder to see in a slightly more complicated stimulus. For example:
Superstition, often unsupported by logic, can be very pervasive in a society and people often act on them out of fear even if they don't believe it's real. This is problematic for black cats, who are considered unlucky. It is therefore not a surprise that many cats of this color are rarely adopted as pets.

The assumption in both stimulus is similar. If you are drawing the second stimulus out, you are about to spend a lot time and may even get confused. Instead, just read each sentence to understand. As you read each sentence after the first one, see how that adds to your understanding based on previous sentences. As long as you are pushing back, you should have a good understanding and therefore when you read the conclusion you should be able to say, all I can say about black cats from the premises is that they are considered unlucky based on superstition but that's not enough to say anything about their adoption rate. Let's see if an answer choice can help me resolve this problem.

CircleTurk

@Sami okay! I’ll try that approach. Thank you for the tips and examples, especially letting me know that writing stuff out in Lawgic is rarely the correct thing to do. I’ve found that when I don’t do that and just go for it, I am often correct and less confused, so I will try more of that.