Stimulus Comprehension Strategy

jimmy.mcgill

Hi everyone, I wanted to share a strategy that has worked very well for me in improving my performance on LR questions. I've been coming to the realization that around 95% of the time I get a question wrong, it is because I didn't understand the stimulus. At first, I blamed myself for this, saying that I simply was not smart enough to decipher what I was reading, and this, of course, did not help me whatsoever. But, as I started to progress through the lessons, I realized that the LSAT is intentionally confusing. If the test were written by sane, normal, and non-sadistic people who wrote English in the way we all do, the LSAT would be one of the easier standardized tests. So, I decided to look for places where I could find arguments contained in very complex and confusing wording and language. And that is when I stumbled across this thing called the Supreme Court. I found that the arguments they were presenting were strikingly similar to some of the arguments I've encountered on the LSAT in terms of complexity, grammar, etc. So I got to reading cases and this is the strategy I followed.

1. For each sentence, I took a very brief moment to assess whether I understood what it was saying. If I didn't, I read again.
2. At the end of each paragraph, I looked away from the text and restated what it said, in simple terms, in my head.
3. By the time I finished with an opinion or a dissent/concurrence, I formed a low to moderate resolution summary of what the overall argument was and how it was supported.

This trained both my comprehension and my memory skills. So far, I've done about 20 cases and I've noticed sizable improvements in my stimulus comprehension since then.

This is the book I used: https://www.amazon.com/Supreme-Court-Decisions-Penguin-Classics/dp/0143121995
(It is part of a larger series of civic books; I strongly recommend that you check out the other books).

While I haven't gotten to preparing for the reading comprehension section of the test, I am sure this will aid me in that too.

(P.S. Besides just improving your LSAT performance, I feel as though reading SCOTUS cases will be of other use as well. First, it is important to know your rights. Second, the Supreme Court is kinda important to the law and stuff and I think a prospective lawyer should know at least some things about the law.)

(P.P.S. Another strategy that may help is imagining that every argument you come across on the LSAT is being presented by your least favorite Justice; I think that will allow you to more readily see flaws in the reasoning.)