Here are the free LSAT events we’re holding this week. All times local unless otherwise specified.

9/10/13 – Boston, MA- Free Trial Class- 6:30PM-9:30PM

9/15/13 – Online – Zen and the Art of LSAT with Brian Birdwell– 8:00PM- 10:00PM (EDT)

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

Ahh! Four weeks from Saturday! The October LSAT is less than an official month away. For those of you who will be nervously assembling your pencils and tearfully parting ways with your cell phones/girlfriends/boyfriends/over-eager roommates, there’s something else you should be struggling to part ways with. It’s called The Super Pile. 

We’re excited to announce a helpful new resource for those on the road to law school. Ann Levine, president and chief consultant at Law School Expert, has joined our forums and will be answering your law school applications and admissions questions!

In addition to founding Law School Expert, Ann is the author of the bestselling law school guide The Law School Admission Game: Play Like an Expert. She is the former director of admissions at two ABA-approved law schools and the nation’s leading law school admission consultant. Ann has personally guided over 2,000 law school applicants through the law school admission process.

Have a question for Ann? Head over to our forums and ask her now!

Here are the free LSAT events we’re holding this week. All times local unless otherwise specified.

9/8/13 – Online- Free Trial Class- 1:00PM- 4:00PM (EDT)

9/8/13 – New York, NY – Free Trial Class– 5:30 PM- 8:30PM

9/8/13 – Boulder, CO – Free Trial Class- 2:00 PM- 5:00PM

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

With only 5 weeks left before the October LSAT, you may be feeling a little, okay hugely, overwhelmed. You need a plan!

Ann Levine, law school admission consultant at LawSchoolExpert.com and Matt Sherman of ManhattanLSAT, share what you should be doing in the 30 days leading up to the LSAT, in their upcoming Blog Talk Radio show.

Topics to be covered include:

• How you should be spending your time
• How many practice tests you should be taking
• How many points you can increase your LSAT score in the next month

Where: Blog Talk Radio: The LSAT: A 30-Day Plan
When: Tuesday, September 3, 2013
Time: 12:00 pm PST / 3:00 pm EST
Why: Because you want to KILL the LSAT in October so you don’t have to think about taking it in December!

Don’t miss this event – set a reminder now!

We want to hear from you. Submit questions by commenting on this post, tweeting them to @AnnLevine, or chatting live during the show.

Last week, Obama surprised everyone a little by explicitly agreeing with those who have argued for years now that law school should be two years instead of three. The President and Harvard Law grad is in good company, including Samuel Estreicher at NYU Law, who has been a vocal advocate for the expendable third year. Law School Transparency’s suggested new models for legal education reform draw heavily on the same idea of trimming length to save costs.

Indeed, criticism of Obama for making the controversial (or not?) statement seemed to come from one direction: not from people who disagreed with him that law school should be shorter, but from those who thought he didn’t go far enough: instead of “talking” about changing the structure of legal education he should actually “do something.” And why not go further and make law school one year like the Brits? It all left me wondering–is stripping the third year so widely accepted now that it’s not controversial at all? Is there anyone arguing in favor of it?

I went in search of third year supporters. And guess who is one. Martha Nussbaum–University of Chicago Law professor and one of the most renowned legal scholars on the planet. Nussbaum and Charles Wolf, also from Chicago, argue essentially that such reforms risk making bad lawyers:

Electives typically are taken in the second and third years. Given the general courses that an accredited legal education must include, dropping the third year offers no time for interdisciplinary electives. The new wisdom is that this would be no loss … But lawyers who join firms also need to understand how society works if they aspire to be independent thoughtful leaders of their chosen profession, rather than passive followers of custom. In the life of the firm, a deferential model of lawyering (doing it because that is how it has been done) will further erode professional standards.

I’m not persuaded. The argument assumes that somehow the third year of law school is where one learns to become “independent” and “thoughtful” rather than “passive.” To me, these are the kinds of qualities that are instilled over time through interactions with teachers who teach these qualities through and in spite of whatever substantive material is being transmitted; there’s no reason one cannot learn from a torts professor to be an independent thinker but could from a professor in an environmental law clinic.

I’m curious what those of you who will soon be entering law school think.

Manhattan Prep is offering special full tuition scholarships for up to 4 individuals per year (1 per quarter) who will be selected as part of Manhattan Prep’s LSAT Social Venture Scholars program. This program provides the selected scholars with free admission into one of Manhattan Prep’s LSAT live online Complete Courses (an $1190 value).

These competitive scholarships are offered to individuals who (1) currently work full-time in an organization that promotes positive social change, (2) plan to use their law degree to work in a public, not-for-profit, or other venture with a social-change oriented mission, and (3) demonstrate clear financial need. The Social Venture Scholars can enroll in any live online preparation course taught by one of Manhattan Prep’s expert instructors within one year of winning the scholarship.

The deadline our next application period is 9/6.

Details about the SVS program and how you can apply can be found here.

Here are the free LSAT events we’re holding this week. All times local unless otherwise specified.

8/27/13 – Online- Free Trial Class- 8:00PM- 11:00PM (EDT)

8/28/13 – Online – Free Trial Class– 8:00PM- 11:00PM (EDT)

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

Happy Friday! Here is a roundup of some of our favorite news articles and law school tips from the week:

Harvard’s Still Hard to Get Into, Law School Promises (The Wall Street Journal Law Blog)

Students wondering whether to take the plunge into law school may want to consider this: the evaporating pool of applicants could boost their chances of getting into Harvard.

LSAT Sanity: Stop Taking So Many Practice Tests! (Part 2) (jdMission)

What are the Do’s and Don’ts of getting the most out of your practice tests? Here is Part 2 of jdMission’s series.

Are Fully Online Programs a Viable Choice for Law Schools? (Lawyerist)

As everything has raced towards the virtual, including getting a degree online, law has unsurprisingly lagged behind.

LSAT Scores at Top Law Schools Hold Steady Amid Applicant Plunge (The Wall Street Journal Law Blog)

Given that the most competitive undergraduate schools are pumping out fewer prospective lawyers, you might assume that the nation’s top law schools are enrolling less competitive students.

Should The Obama Rankings Be Applied To Law Schools? (Above the Law)

Obama hopes to tie the Obama Rankings to federal financial aid: schools that perform well will have a larger pool of federal money to dole out to students, while schools that perform poorly will have less.

Did we miss your favorite article from the week? Let us know what you have been reading in the comments or tweet @ManhattanLSAT.

We incorporate the latest discoveries in learning science into our LSAT course to maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of your prep. Want to see? Try the first session of any of our upcoming courses for free.

On Inference questions, we take what we’re given and, based on it, find the answer choice that is most supported by it (or that “must be true” or “must be false,” or other iterations of these). This is a very different task than the one we face on Assumption Family questions in which we are looking for problems in the given text. On Inference questions, we are explicitly not looking for problems or gaps or holes. We’re taking the text as given—as 100% true, unquestionable. Then, based on all of that unquestionable text, we figure out what’s most likely also true—whether that’s the sentence in (A) or (C) or (E). Here are five different ways of thinking about this same idea.

1. It’s all premise. On Assumption Family questions, we identify the premise(s) in order to accept it/them as true; we don’t question their validity. In this sense, on Inference questions you can think of the entire given text as “premise.”

2. Even opinions are facts. If you see a blatant opinion like “tomatoes are the best food on the planet,” on an Inference question you must take it as fact. In other words, for the purposes of this question, tomatoes are the best food on the planet.

3. Don’t look for assumptions between stated claims. If you are told that “tomatoes are the best food on the planet,” and the next sentence of the given text reads, “Therefore, Annie should love tomatoes more than anything else,” you might be inclined to focus on the gap: just because it’s the best food doesn’t mean it necessarily should be her favorite…maybe she has unusual preferences! On an Assumption question, this would be an excellent strategy on your part. On an Inference question, you’re misguided; because you’ve been told that Annie should love them more than anything—word for word—and you accept this as true, it’s true. Don’t worry that the transition from the previous sentence was jumpy.

4. Smaller is better (or bigger is not better). Sometimes when I ask students why they didn’t choose the right answer to an Inference question, they tell me that “it seemed too close to what was already said.” This is a good thing; small inferences are what you want, while large ones are what you don’t. Don’t make big leaps away from it in order to feel like you’ve adequately “inferred.”

5. Think list of bullet points, not story. Here’s a little secret. I like to think of the sentences in the given text of an Inference question as bullet points rather than as a story or argument with an arc, even if it reads as a narrative. This allows me to treat every stated idea as equally true and valid rather than forgetting that I’m not supposed to assess them in relation to each other (see point 3, above).

Again, these are all ways of saying essentially the same thing—that the given text on Inference questions is, for better or worse, not to be questioned. So turn off that switch and make your mental list of bullet points.

Mary Richter is a Manhattan Prep instructor based in New York City. Mary has degrees from Yale Law School and Duke. She has over 10 years of experience teaching the LSAT after scoring in the 99th percentile on the test. She is always thrilled to see students reach beyond their target scores. At Yale, she co-directed the school’s Domestic Violence Clinic for two years. After graduating she became an associate at Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP in New York City, where she was also the firm’s pro bono coordinator. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Slate, and more. Check out Mary’s upcoming LSAT classes here.