"Except" in Q Stem Confusion

The Great White Shark

This is such a silly mistake on my part. During BR over the past several months, I have found that I usually lose track of the "Except" in a Q stem and I end up choosing the wrong answer because I am juggling so much info in my mind, especially if the stimulus has negatives in it.

Most recently I had a problem with a question stem that said: "Each of the following, if true, helps to resolve the apparent paradox above EXCEPT:". I went into the ACs and crossed out the first one I read which also happened to be the correct answer. And then I picked the next one because it resolved the problem. The funny thing is that I went on to read the rest of the ACs and I crossed them out even though they all helped resolve the paradox too. Under the time constraint it just didn't dawn on me that I picked one that functions the same as three others. But in BR I immediately realized what I did wrong.

Does anyone have advice for this dilemma?

Law and Yoda

I have the same issue where sometimes I get tripped up on the word EXCEPT. I found that if I just read the question stem without the word EXCEPT, 9 out of 10 times I'll get the correct answer choice. During BR or practice I'll spend time to look at the AC I choose to see if it still makes sense when I now read the question stem again but include EXCEPT. So for example, the sentence from above would look like "Each of the following, if true, helps to resolve the apparent paradox above." That's how I would go into the AC. Then you would be looking for all the AC that would help resolve it rather than confusing yourself with thinking about the word EXCEPT during your process. May not work for everyone but I think it's helped me a ton!

The Great White Shark

Thank you for the tip! I tried it out today and it helps!

taschasp

Haha it's not just you... I scored a 179 and I swear I tripped up on the "EXCEPT"s so many times during PTs. I still have to be careful with it when I'm tutoring!

Brandi's advice is great!! I think that's what I ended up doing too.

Another thing that helps is to develop a mental censor for when the answer choices don't make sense, to go back and read the question stem again. This is broader than the except issue but, if like me, you have a bit of an ADHD mind and can lose points from not reading (or registering in your mind) one important word like "except", then it helps... I think it would happen several times on any test where I'd read through the questions and have a sort of "what the ****?" radar go off in my head. That should happen if the question stem has an except in it and you go through the answer choices looking for one thing, but it feels like all of the choices (or, ideally, 4 of them) fit the question stem. Basically, train your brain to have a more sensitive "wtf radar" (can I coin this term?) and then go immediately to the question stem and read it again and make sure you've been interpreting it accurately.

But honestly, even on my actual LSAT, I think I caught at least one of these from flagged questions that I went back and reviewed, and realized I'd misread the question stem (or lost track of it by the time I got to the answers, like you demonstrated in your example). I guess my "wtf radar" was strong enough for me to flag the question (and realize my mistake later), but not strong enough for me to realize I'd misread the question stem in the moment. I guess that's a bit like how you realized your mistakes in Blind Review--if you can squeeze in a mini-review at the end of your section before the time runs out. But that's only helpful if you have extra time to go back to those flagged questions, which I definitely did not until relatively near the end of my studying process.