LR failure

Comments

• sophie74 Free Trial Member

  May 2017 373 karma

  Are you identifying the question type you're looking at before answering the question? Some types are worded very similarly, like flaw and weakeners, so knowing the q type allows you to be less vulnerable to traps written specifically for the wrong question type.

  Also--if you haven't already, go through the PTs you have taken recently and categorize all the wrong answers you fell for. Chances are, patterns will start to emerge. If you see that you always fall for the same trap on the same type of question, you can be conscious of it and curb it. This is what really helped me become better at LR.
• 2 Likes

  BinghamtonDave Alum Member ⭐ 🍌🍌

  May 2017 8716 karma

  There are a couple of things I noticed about your post. I do not want in any way to come off as rude or arrogant, but please consider the following advice as given from a place of honesty. I and many others have been where you are with LR.

  In short, you are going to have to isolate precisely what is wrong with your approach to LR. You are going to have to see at what link within the chain of getting to the AC you are not properly meeting. These problems run the gamut of misidentifying question stems and therefore going into a strategy that is not useful for the question, to errors in understanding the logical structure of the argument. By my count, there are over 2 dozen mistakes one can make on the way to getting an LR question wrong. Some of these mistakes occur at different points within our reasoning, for instance, incorrectly negating an answer choice when you check it for a necessary assumption question. My recommendation would be to take an LR section from an exam you are using for drills (I use PT 20-49 for my daily drills) and go through that section untimed.

  What I would recommend with a drilled untimed section is to go through the section and identify what the question stem is asking, what the conclusion of each argument is (if the argument has a conclusion) what the supporting premises are, what grammatical keys: “therefore, hence, however, but, for, since, because etc” are present. You also might want to note whether or not you can recall an LR question utilizing a similar structure to the one in front of you. Whether that be a similar flaw, a similar pattern of correlation in the premise to causation in the conclusion etc. You are going to want to start not only building a systematic and intuitive understand of the logical structure of an argument punctuated by an understanding of the grammatical structure, but also potentially similar questions you can draw from. I would then recommend going through the video explanations of each question. Mr. Ping isolates the conclusion and breaks down the stimulus for each question in great detail.

  You will then have a glimpse of what you are missing. It might be the gaps in the logic of the argument, it might be the scope of the conclusion vis a vis the scope of the premises. We have to know what is wrong before we can treat it.

  In summation, I am of the opinion that there are two ways to achieve success on this exam:
  1.Be born extremely smart with a ruthlessly analytical mind that lends itself to the particulars of this exam with some moderate adaptation.
  or
  2.With complete and utter honesty: isolate our mistakes and learn from them in a systematic way inch by inch, improving each day.

  I have adopted the second approach.

  I hope this helps, any further questions don’t hesitate to reach out.

  David
• Sami Yearly + Live Member Sage ⭐ 7Sage Tutor

  May 2017 10806 karma

  @"culv.carlie" said:
  I have grown disheartened in the past few weeks as my PT scores but particularly my LR scores have fallen. I feel like every question has two right answers and always seem to pick the wrong one. I'm currently studying full time (7hrs/day) so I was hoping I would see some improvement but I'm only getting worse. Any tips?

  I agree with the advice above.
  I just want to add that make sure that your mind is fresh when you take your full PT. LSAT is pretty tedious and studying 7hrs a day can be a lot if its not combined with break times . So make sure you are mentally fresh and at your peak when you take these PT's.

  I am concerned about you saying you are getting worse. Getting worse is usually a sign of something else also happening. Are you feeling happy and not stressed? Have you introduced a new strategy in your LSAT that could be causing this?