Logical Reasoning "information/stimulus retention"..? HELP

juuyuu95

Hello all,

I need some advice on how to improve on "retaining" information; specifically for LR.

What I'm finding is that with all LR questions, I have a hard time reading the stimulus and REALLY nail it into my brain and not be confused when I'm wading through the answer choices. And of course, I'm sure most of you guys already know, when you're not clear of the stimulus, every answer choice becomes a time-suck. I almost feel as if all these lessons on how to approach different question types are irrelevant at this stage, because before you can employ these strategies, you need to actually understand the stimulus... Trying to run before learning how to walk, so to speak.

So, have any of you been in my position and found a way to improve or overcome it? I am seriously in awe when I'm watching JY explain these questions and he seems to just instantly understand the stimulus and attack the answer choice with so much confidence... It's motivating and discouraging at the same time!!!

MrSamIam

Your focus should be on understanding the logic, premise(s) and conclusion(s), and the support between the two. The reason J.Y. can easily read through a stimulus and retain the information isn't because he has impeccable memory (although, I'm sure he probably does). It's because he filters through the useless information, and focuses on the support structure, premises and conclusion of the argument.
Can I assume that you feel fine reading through the stimulus? But, the second you read answer choice "A" you think to yourself, "Wait...what did the stimulus say again?"
If that's the case, you're either:
A) Not fully understanding the stimulus (argument) before moving onto the question and answers - go back and reread it. If you're worried about wasting time, don't. You'll end up wasting even more time if you blindly read the answer choices and hope that something stands out.
Focusing too much on the filler information in the stimulus - Learn to distinguish between useless and relevant information. Hone in on the latter.
C) Just not focusing at all - step away from the computer, take a deep breath, and come back when you're ready.

juuyuu95

@MrSamIam said:
Can I assume that you feel fine reading through the stimulus? But, the second you read answer choice "A" you think to yourself, "Wait...what did the stimulus say again?"

YES. And because I'm unclear of the stimulus, every answer choice seems plausible. I just tried doing a few questions using your A) method, and I can definitely tell that it helps. But the issue now is that it takes a LOT of time to do these questions... I only have to assume here that time will eventually get better, but it really seems like a long ways before I'll ever be able to get to target times...

MrSamIam

@"kon-peki" You nailed it! It takes time. The more questions you do properly, the easier it will be to filter out the useless information, locate the support structure, and find the premise(s) and conclusion.
Just keep at it, you'll eventually notice a decrease in time.

hlsat180

@"kon-peki" said:
I need some advice on how to improve on "retaining" information; specifically for LR.

I recommend two changes to what you do:

1. First, don't try to memorize everything in the stimulus. Rather, focus on the conclusion. Second, the supporting premises. Finally, the gap between the conclusion and the premises (i.e., what's wrong with, or being assumed by, the argument). If you can just remember the conclusion that is 50% of the fight and often enough to eliminate the obvious wrong answers. This alone will save you time/attention.

2. Second, don't compare remaining answers to each other - which are designed to trick you. Rather, compare the answers to what's being asked in the stimulus. Most often, there is a relationship between the correct answer to the conclusion (which ties to recommendation #1 above) or gap in the argument. Four incorrect answers may sound good or reasonable, but fail to address exactly what is being asked.

tldr; Know the conclusion. Measure answers to what's being asked in the stim, not each other.

runiggyrun

The advice above is spot on. I'd add that for a lot of people it helps to read the question first. This will guide what you need to think about when you read the stimulus. You can't aimlessly read the stimulus - your job is to focus on the key points that would help you answer the questions and ignore the rest.
For the majority of questions, you will need to do similar work:
a. Find the conclusion
b. Find the support
c. Find the gap (generally one or several assumptions the author is making)
The gap will be key in answering Flaw (expose the assumption), Weaken (make the opposite of the assumption true), Strengthen (make the assumption true), Necessary assumption (identify the one assumption who's negation would destroy the argument), Sufficient assumption (identify the one assumption that when true would make the argument airtight).

For a few questions you don't need to look for a gap. You need to look specifically for argument structure:
Find the conclusion, identify the part of the argument and identify the argument structure questions might employ valid arguments. You still need to find the conclusion and the support and identify them as such.
Parallel reasoning (probably the most time consuming questions) ask you to find an argument where the relationship between the conclusion and the support is the same. Most of these questions will be "parallel flaw", but some might be valid arguments. It's crucial to be able to ignore the content of the argument and focus on the structure. For these questions diagramming might be of most help.

For a lot of these (not all), you should have a pretty clear idea of what the correct answer should be, before you even start reading the answers, and all you have to do is match the correct answer with the gap you identified in your head (sometimes wording can be unexpected, but the answer is essentially fills the gap you identified).

Finally, there's a category of questions where you don't necessarily deal with an argument.
"reconcile the differences"
"find the disagreement/agreement"
"MSS/MBT/inference" questions.

For a lot of these latter questions you won't have any idea of what the correct answer looks like (especially true for MSS/MBT/inference), so you have to go back and compare each answer choice to the stimulus (as opposed to the previous category of questions where you compare your understanding of the stimulus with the answer choices). Mike Kim has a great explanation of this in the LSAT trainer.

It's OK to be slow in the beginning. Focus on doing the steps right and practice until they become second nature. It's a vastly better approach to just scrambling with no strategy trying to beat the clock from the get go.

danielznelson

I agree with the majority here that finding the conclusion is imperative to locking in knowledge of a stimulus. In the earlier stages in my prep, I skipped over this step and was screwed over countless times because of it.

It's also okay to go back to the stimulus and often necessary if you don't have a full understanding of what it talking about. As already mentioned, and especially for trickier questions or logic-heavy questions like SA, NA, and parallel method of reasoning questions, looking back to the stimulus is a very common requirement to ensure that you're where you should be in parsing out the logic.

If you're still struggling with LR, if only with retaining information, diagramming and notating for questions should help you a lot in the long run. This process slows you down, but doing it will enable you to synthesize information that will naturally become applicable to future questions. This is roughly akin to the memory method in RC, which helped me tremendously. Now having been further down the road in my prep, I no longer diagram and write down information like I used to, or at least not to the same extent.

Try your hardest to pre phrase. Don't spend forever on each question doing so, but consistent practice will improve your ability to predict likely correct answer choices. Prephasing also helps one to absorb the language in the stimulus by default, since you're determining the reasoning, the conclusion, et cetera, in order to quickly come up with possible answers.

@runiggyrun makes a good point that I would like to go off of: some questions don't require you to deal directly with the argument. Knowing this can save you from a lot of time, given that NOT knowing this will leave you parsing through in-depth logic from passages that don't demand it. Main conclusion questions, for example, will occasionally have ridiculous conditional reasoning or an altogether long stimulus. With some of the longer questions, I at least make sure that I have to figure out the reasoning before doing so. I of course do this by reading the actual question, though I am someone who reads in order of the question layout provided - stimulus; question; answer choices.

Last point - for some really tricky parallel method of reasoning questions, I like to notate the stimulus and the answer choices by denoting certain part of the stimulus with "A," its counterpart in an AC as "A," and so on. Doing so helps me to only focus on the structure and to do so efficiently. Be careful, however, as premises and conclusions don't allows fall in the same order.