Help with LR

aadivine

Hi guys

I have been really overwhelmed with studying for the lsat. I have been studying as much as I can on a day basis. I have been still managing to get -11 on logical reasoning. I haven’t been able to focus on rc because most of my time is being devoted towards lr. It’s been very stressful because I don’t understand why I am doing so poorly after so much studying for the past year. Any recommendations ?

Should I keep practicing ?
Does Lr section eventually become easier !? After practice ?
I’m just confused when will I see results ?

Achen165

I understand your frustration and have been in your shoes. From my experience, I was convinced that I was studying by doing questions/sections over and over again without realizing that improvement was actually impossible because I had a weak foundation. It wasn’t until I addressed that issue was I able to focus on improvement overall.

The simplest, most mechanical part of understanding LR deals with question stem identification, and having a loose plan of attack for each question type. In other words, you need to understand the task at hand.

Then, your understanding of the stimulus. This is your ability to paraphrase, identify premises/ major premises and conclusions with full accuracy. This is also your ability to understand what is an argument and what is a fact set and spotting the flaws/assumptions implicit within arguments. This is also your ability to make general or specific predictions about answer choices.

The third task is making sense of what is appealing about wrong answers and what confirms correctness in the right answers. This is about analyzing your behaviors and making note of how to allow logic to replace being misguided by your intuition. This deals with identifying patterns and common traps, paying closer attention to detail in language, etc.

It is critical that you assess and addresses all of these tasks in order to not repeat mistakes so that you can improve. You need to establish insight as to your own behaviors and tendencies.

I would suggest that you consider consulting a variety of foundational sources to build a stronger framework for approaching questions or revisit some LR sources that you have used in the past.

Improvement can come! You just have to be aware of how you think and be informed of how the LSAT is structured in order to bridge foundational knowledge with the nuances you discover in practice in order to correct your thinking and not just nod your head at the right answer. You have to truly understand it all better. That whole spiel of thinking like the test maker and getting inside their heads is truly the only way for improvement to stick. You have to be highly alert and aware of the unique nature of the LSAT. Understand better, then practice to construct understanding.

Little Grasshopper

I would start with just LR 10 questions instead of doing full LR section. When you see sufficient condition words and necessary condition words, diagram the arguments. The types of arguments are those arguments such role, method of reasoning,point of issue, descrepancy,main point do not use negation. Commas are your friends and help separate context. You want to watch out for main premise indicators and conclusion. You want to ignore context because it is design entrap you and lead you down the wrong path.

The question that you want to start with:

1) Main Point
2) Point at Issue

Before you build the house, you start with one brick