Confession: last week in class, I nearly strangled a student. I leaned forward, pretended to put my hands around his neck, and then trembled in a strange way.*

Moments before, we’d had this conversation:

Homer Simpson does not have the LSAT score to teach for Manhattan LSAT

Mary: Why not (E), Sam?

Sam: I felt like it was already stated in the argument.

Mary: But it’s an inference question.

Sam: Yeah, but (E) was pretty much told to us already.

Mary: [Stared at him blankly.]

Sam: It’s like… right there in the argument already. Seemed too obvious.

Mary: [Kept staring.]

Sam: Is that… wrong?

Mary: EVERYBODY, SAM’S ANSWER IS (E), HE JUST DIDN’T REALIZE IT BEFORE.

Luckily, Sam and I are friends. (He’s reading this going, “not anymore.”)

Guys. Please listen. Do not eliminate an answer choice to an inference question because you think it was already stated in the argument. That’s like eliminating a strengthen answer choice because it strengthens too much, or an assumption answer choice because it was unstated. (If you just gasped at the idea of either of those, that’s a good sign.)

Your ideal inference answer choice? An exact replica of a sentence in the argument. Think about it: you’re trying to figure out what must be true. What must be true more than something you’ve been told word for word is true?

Of course, you will probably never see your ideal answer choice… you’ll have to settle for a close match with a synonym or two. But now that you know what you’re going for in a perfect world, no more “we already know that” as a reason for eliminating anything on inference questions, okay?

*True.

Here are the free LSAT events we’re holding this week.

9/19/12 – Online – Zen and the Art of LSAT – 8:00-10:00 PM

9/23/12 – New York, NY – Free Trial Class – 5:30-8:30 PM

9/23/12 – Online – Free Trial Class – 6:00-9:00 PM

Looking for more free events? Check out our Free Events Listings Page.

Have your days been filled with prep work for the October LSAT? If so, it’s time to take a quick break and treat yourself to some of this week’s top articles about law school and the legal profession.

What Most Law Students Forget to Do: Think About the Material (Law School Toolbox)

Spending your time typing, copying, and pasting will keep you busy but will not help you really know or understand the material in law school. Law School Toolbox offers some more efficient ways to prep for class, take class notes, and create study materials.

Fall Frenzy: Law Students Elbow for Summer Shot at Big Law Gig (The Wall Street Journal Law Blog)

Find out why good grades are no longer enough to guarantee 2L’s a job next summer in BigLaw.

What No One Tells You Before You Go To Law School: They Really Are Speaking Greek (Okay, Latin) (Ms. JD)

Alison Monahan, founder of The Girl’s Guide to Law School, explains why law school is a lot like foreign language immersion. When entering law school, expect to be exposed to a whole new language and a whole new culture.

Get Paid and Published for Law School Writings (Law Student Ally)

Maximize your law school experience by taking the opportunity to get your papers published while you’re still earning your J.D.

Telling Your Story: Include Emotional Thinking (jdMission)

As you’re drafting your law school personal statement, be sure to include emotional reflections and not just factual reports about what happened.

In case you missed it, the latest buzz in the law admissions world is that those of you applying might be advantaged this year thanks to the drop in applications among high LSAT scorers. The basic idea is that a dearth of top applicants has made room at top schools for folks who wouldn’t normally squeeze in, which leaves more spots open in the tiers below for folks who wouldn’t normally be admitted at that level, and so on. (You know… like Reagan.)

But is this a reason to apply? I’ve written before and will again: don’t apply to law school unless you want to go. You shouldn’t apply just because your chances of getting into a higher ranked school have increased any more than you should become a doctor because one year you make a particularly strong med school applicant. You should become a doctor because you want to be one, and you should become a lawyer because you want to be one. For some reason, the common sense of this notion is more often forgotten in law than in other professions.

So what’s to be gained from this potential, newfound flexibility in law admissions? Well, if you already planned to apply, why not aim a little higher? Make your reach school a bit of a farther reach. Who knows? You could be surprised. If not, there’s always the circus — I hear their numbers are down this year.

To make up for lack of flight ability, Pen Gwynn (pictured) took up heavyweight boxing

Inference questions in Logical Reasoning ask you to infer what must be true. This means that the answer choice you pick shouldn’t stretch beyond the scope of the text in the stimulus. You want to stay as close to the text as possible, which is why we say things like, “Be literal!” and “Make only baby inferences” (maybe that second one is just me).

Here’s an example of one way wrong answer choices try to trick you. The stimulus will provide statements in black and white—light switches, not dimmers. For example, “all artists are attentive to detail,” “no kangaroos are stupid,” or “most birds fly.” (Notice that even this third example offers a trigger, not a sliding scale. They either fly, or they don’t.)

Sometimes on these kinds of questions, you’ll find answer choices that create issues of degree that don’t exist in the argument. For example, wrong answer choices corresponding to these examples, respectively, might say that artists are more attentive to detail if they eat bacon for breakfast, or that large kangaroos are stupider than small one, or that birds fly better if they are flying with other birds. All three of these are examples of false inferences from the statements above that you can recognize because they create issues of degree that do not exist in the argument.

You can think of this kind of wrong answer as a dimmer (when the argument is a clapper), or a sliding scale, when the argument discusses no such scale.

To try the kind of problem that I’m talking about, check out PT43, S2, Q22 and PT41, S1, W2, and then check out our forum explanations of each.

Another Friday signals the near-end of yet another week of LSAT prep ahead of the October exam. Here are some of the stories that made the rounds among our LSAT crew this week:

The Short on Long-Term Planning: 10 LSAT Tips That Aren’t About the Actual LSAT (jdMission)*

*jdMission have a wide ranging list of LSAT planning tips and application strategies. You should get in the habit of checking back with them!

8 Ways That Judges Have Cited Star Trek From the Bench (io9)

Who knew that judges were such science fiction nerds? Our was #5.

Law School Admissions Tip #6: The Importance of Micro-editing (Law School Podcaster)

Law School Podcaster goes over some helpful editing tips for your admissions essay.

Conquer Back To School Season For Your First Year At Law School (LawRiot)

Four tips for students starting law school. Get the jump on your classmates!

A Work Soundtrack (gradhacker)

A round up of recommended music, playlists, podcasts, and radio stations to listen to while studying, and where to listen to them.

Beauty blogger and former Manhattan LSAT student Jessica (twitter: @JessicaVCloset) has been creating videos about women’s fashion, beauty, and lifestyle tips as a hobby. She’s gathered quite a following for herself in the last year (take a look at her website //www.victoriascloset.ca, and it’s easy to see why). As Jessica is about to begin law school, she was kind enough to share her 0L experience as well as some thoughts on her LSAT prep. Yes, we’re still blushing!

Yesterday, the President of the United States of America logged onto Reddit, the popular online forum community, to participate in one of the site’s online threads called “Ask Me Anything,” where experts on various subject matter make themselves available to the community to answer questions. One question  the POTUS responded to came from a recent law school graduate: Read more

The LSAT is one damn hard test: time is short, the language dense and deceiving, and the answer choices deliberately designed to throw you off.

As if those challenges weren’t difficult enough, imagine taking it in a foreign language. This is the challenge that non-native English speakers (ESL) students taking the LSAT face.

Our friends over at Law School Podcaster recently did one of their excellent podcasts on this very topic in their most recent show Tackling the LSAT As An ESL.

The show features our own Noah Teitelbaum, as well as Steve Schwartz from the popular LSAT Blog. Featured also is first-person testimony from an ESL test-taker (and former Manhattan LSAT student) who rocked the LSAT on exam day to the tune of 169 (97th percentile).

Think of your LSAT Prep as Oil for the Machine That Is Your Brain

Neuroscientists at the University of California-Berkeley have published a study that suggests that heavily training one’s brain to develop sharper reasoning skills (sound familiar?) can can fundamentally reinforce tangible connections between neurons in areas of the that are used when thinking and reasoning.

The study focused particularly on LSAT students, since you all are essentially training yourselves to be better at reasoning. Allyson Mackey, a graduate student in UC Berkeley’s Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute who led this particular study, says “What we were interested in is whether and how the brain changes as a result of LSAT preparation, which we think is, fundamentally, reasoning training. We wanted to show that the ability to reason is malleable in adults.” The findings of this particular study led by Mackey supported this hypothesis.

Silvia Bunge, associate professor in the UC Berkeley Department of Psychology and the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute adds “A lot of people still believe that you are either smart or you are not, and sure, you can practice for a test, but you are not fundamentally changing your brain. Our research provides a more positive message. How you perform on one of these tests is not necessarily predictive of your future success, it merely reflects your prior history of cognitive engagement, and potentially how prepared you are at this time to enter a graduate program or a law school, as opposed to how prepared you could ever be.”

Scientists, prelaw students, and educators the world over should be very excited by this discovery; it is encouraging to know that when trained properly, the brain – like any other muscle in the human anatomy – can be made stronger and more powerful. Study on, my friends, study on!

Source: University of California – Berkeley. “Intense prep for law school admission test alters brain structure.” ScienceDaily, 22 Aug. 2012. Web. 23 Aug. 2012.