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How to integrate the Loophole with 7Sage study materials?
LegallyBrunette21
Yearly Member
Hi everyone!
I will be starting my LSAT journey again after a 1.5-year gap after receiving a 150 on the July 2019 LSAT. I just purchased the Loophole because of its great reviews. For those of you who used the Loophole with 7Sage, what was your strategy? I am planning on going through the CC again and based on past performance, I think I can benefit from the Loophole so I would appreciate if you can share what worked for you.
Thank you in advance!
Comments
Funny you should say that! I am doing the same thing. I am quickly going over CC for the next month, and then my plan is to take a PT, and then BR by using the Loophole strategy. I am also rereading LH on the side at the same time. So, basically, I will be doing the PT online here, and then printing out a copy and doing the Loophole strategy with pen and paper. It will be different than the typical BR, but I want to see how it goes for the first few prep tests.
Good luck!!
I picked up a copy of the Loophole after I finished the CC which I found to be a great way to either reinforce what the CC taught me or to elaborate more on things I wasn't clear on in the CC. Personally if I had not studied on 7Sage first, the Loophole wouldn't have been enough to teach me LR on its own. Loophole is great for giving you another way of looking at things so I would recommend 7sage then Loophole, especially if you have time to sufficiently study.
I second doing the CC first and then reading Loophole.
One way to incorporate the Loophole into working through the CC is to make sure to CLIR all of the practice questions as you're drilling, to integrate the approach into your process to make it intuitive.
I LOVE the Loophole, it was a game-changer for me to finally see/process assumptions (less gullible). I made a ton of notecards from that book and I hung them up behind my desk, so that I can look up at them as I'm drilling. It's handy to have CLIR standing out as a red-ink giant reminder! ... and I'm going to be SO SAD (in a way) when I have to take them down before the test. My wall will look so naked.
I also super-geeked and made a comparative document of the LR question types (I've read Kaplan and the Powerscore books, so I added those in too ... originally, I started it as a comparison between PS and the Loophole, then added in 7S and thought to add K as a 'why not' (I borrowed a copy of the Trainer at the end to see if it might help add to the info - glad I did, the 'flaw' approach was interesting)).
Maybe consider doing something similar between 7Sage and the Loophole, to really interact with the approaches' similarities and differences?? Print it out and hang it on the wall also!! It helps to be constantly reminded. They're both written in a way that condenses the information, so that it wouldn't be an overload.
On a side-note: the Loophole was nuts in making me want to read Hamlet. As a STEM undergrad/graduate degree major, I scoffed at the 'need' for this. But, the LSAT truly is life-changing in many odd ways.
It's funny too, because I read PS and the Loophole before coming to 7Sage and I think doing them first helped me absorb 7Sage better, than if I had done the reverse. But ... I'll never know
... and I'm a much better 'book learner' than 'webinar learner' anyways, where I can highlight, tag, and note.
I'm done with the cc and have moved onto Loophole. After 7Sage, I was testing at -3 to -7 consistently, but I couldn't get that down no matter how much I did practice sections and BRed. So I picked up Loophole. I'm currently doing basic translation drills and CLIR drills on full sections for practice. I've done 4 so I'll do at least 2 more before I move on to specific question types. It's definitely made me more attuned to flaws in arguments, and I can see that it's a good supplement to what I learned on 7Sage. Won't know the full effects til I'm done, but so far no regrets!
@hopefulling I thought doing 7Sage first helped me get a really good foundation for formal logic and LR, so I believed doing 7Sage first was better. But like you, I guess I'll never know!
One thing is that there's a lot more material to drill on 7Sage, and JY's explanations (and the community's comments) are really helpful.
Hi,
We have a lot of similarities in our LSAT journey!
I took my first LSAT in 2018 and got a 163. Then I fell off and started studying again over a year later, using only 7Sage and Loophole. I re-took the LSAT this August and got a 171.
Here are some reflections:
I feel like going through the 7Sage CC again after 1+ years was actually great! Somehow, after the break my brain just seemed to absorb and remember the concepts much easier. I also really took my time to understand the concepts and do all the drills and practice sets earnestly. I didn't skip or skim stuff because it my second go-around.
After CC, I started practicing entire LR, RC, and LG sections from PTs1-35, with BR (started doing them untimed, then timed).
After ~2 weeks of this, I started getting the hang of the types of questions and inferences that keep recurring. However, timing was a big issue for me. This is where Loophole came in.
I saw Loophole recommended in the Discussion Forum and after checking out reviews, thought it would help me parse through passages faster. AND IT ABSOLUTELY DID. The Basic Translation Drill simply took my LSAT game to the next level. It is incredibly tedious to do in the beginning, but the good news is that improvement comes quite fast. That being said, I felt that pretty much everything else about the Loophole book was quite contrived, and more confusing than helpful. I realized a few chapters in that the rest of the book would be a skim vs. a detailed note-taking experience. A lot of cutesy trademarked terms for concepts that are explained much more straightforwardly in the 7Sage curriculum. (This is just my personal opinion though!)
I then carried on taking full PTs and doing BR. I spent a day or two every week doing Basic Translation Drills or reviewing/doing drills from CC, just to brush up. I took max. 2 PTs a week and 2 days off in a week so I wouldn't burn out.
To summarize: I followed the 7Sage course to a T. I used the Basic Translation Drill from Loophole to improve timing and accuracy.
If am not too late to ask genuine doubts, can I know what is Loophole, that is being talked about?
I finished CC and going over the Loophole now!
OK, so not allowed to use a plain (aka: non-monetized) amazon link that directs to the book ...
The Loophole in Logical Reasoning by Ellen Cassidy
For all of you on this thread that have read Loophole -- do you (or did you) start with stimulus or question stem first? Ellen really pushes for stimulus first, but I have my doubts.
@"Burt Reynolds" I tried Ellen's way of stimulus first and my score actually went down. It went up when I went back to reading the question stem first. My tutor says he always reads the question stem first and something he said really resonated with me. For each LR question you're trying to get to the right answer as quickly and easily as possible. Why read and analyze a stimulus more than you have to? Basically know what you're reading for. You have mere minutes not hours to analyze stimuli.
@Emily2122 Totally agree with this -- I think I have a tendency to move into the ACs before anticipating (or CLIRing) the stimulus. That's why I was wondering if anyone's had success with stimulus first.