LSAT Weather Fail

Perhaps you read about the challenging experiences of Luke, our young LSAT warrior.  But Luke has now been out-done by the hapless folks who had their rescheduled February exam re-scheduled.  LSAC just announced that one of the re-take sites has been closed down because of snow!  Looking out the window here in Chelsea, I can see what they were thinking, but we’re New Yorkers.  If we can make it through Times Square, we can make it through this not-so-faux-snowpocalypse.

But truly, that’s some seriously bad luck.  In fact, that’s such bad luck that it might just be a divine message to those folks to go to med school.  No doubt some people are simply pulling out their hair.  Don’t sweat it — you might actually want to delay that LSAT score one more application cycle.  For one, a February score generally puts you in a bad (i.e., late) position in the application cycle (sort of like being in early position in Texas-Hold-Em).  Secondly, as can be expected, there are a ton of people applying to law school this year.  Let them battle it out, and walk in, stepping gingerly around their corpses.

Good luck to those who will manage to take that re-test!  For the rest of us suffering through this heavenly explanation of why we’re supposed to say “climate change” and not “global warming”, stay inside and start working through your Netflix queue.

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Learning to negate answer choices on the LSAT is a key skill if you are really looking to push up your score, for lots of reasons. I tend to think there are two especially important ones. First, assumption questions (and one of the most-related question type, flaw questions) are quite common, and many students find it’s difficult to get all of the most challenging assumption questions correct without using the negation test. Second, negation can be useful for thinking out counterfactuals on inference and strengthen/weaken questions – more on this another time. Today, I’ll be writing about how to negate in general terms. In another blog post, I’ll get into specifics. Read more

The February LSAT gets a bad rep for no good reason.  I assure you, it’s just another LSAT (which may or may not make it worth a bad rep), but for one of my students the test was fine, but the test-center was awful.  After an unexpected re-assignment to a location in a galaxy far, far away, my student — let’s call him Luke — found himself in a large auditorium.  OK, that’s not so far out of the range of expectations.  But, these auditorium seats were not built for the LSAT.  The little flip-up desk seat was about half the size of the LSAT paper!  So, not only did the 80 or so victims in there have to deal with the LSAT, but they were subjected to a constant spatial-relations puzzle/dance-dance revolution game in which you scored points by being able to keep your test on the table so that you could actually  bubble in your answers.

Alright, perhaps he’s a whiner.  When I was a kid we had to take the LSAT in a pool, walking uphill.  But then partway through the first section – RC for him — the radiator started a John Cage piece.  Many a New Yorker is well-accustomed to falling asleep to the erratic — erotic? — banging of the building’s heating system, but apparently this one was so loud that the test-takers revolted and the proctors paused the test at the end of the section to bring in an engineer.  While the engineers calmed the angry beast, the hapless prisoner — at least those following the rules –were not allowed to go to the bathroom since this was not an “official” break.

At least 10% of the test-takers simply walked out of the room and canceled on the spot.  Luke tells me he couldn’t finish that first section, which is unheard of for him, though he totally rocked the rest of the exam.  Alas Luke, go and seek your LSAT destiny in June!  And for everyone else, read up on your testing site (and rate yours) on this test-center-ranking site.

//lsatblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/logical-reasoning-vocabulary-words.html

I just saw a good blog post listing vocabulary words that you should have under your belt for the LSAT.   Take a look and see if you really know all of them.  Thanks for the list, Steve!