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.

Lately, I’ve been getting asked a lot about notating “unless.” I figured that with the LSAT so close, it might be helpful to write up a quick-and-dirty how-to designed specifically for those of you who need to lock it in last minute. Read more

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.

Say it’s officially late September and you’re still ten points under what you want to be scoring. What do you do? Do you take October? Or do you push it off a few months? Read more

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.

The LSAT is a test of logic before anything else.  It asks you to dissect arguments, make deductions, and pick apart flaws.  Why then does so many of the questions seem to stump even the most logical thinker?  Mostly, it’s because the LSAT goes out of its way to make sure that all the facts you’ve learned before the test don’t help and may even hurt you.

For a moment, imagine yourself in the place of the test makers.  You would have to come up with a way to evaluate the thinking of each test taker, without favoring people who have expertise in a particular subject matter, all with an 100 question multiple choice test.  Sound tough? You bet.

The only way to take away the subject matter bias is to remove the need for any background information.  In theory, you could know not one single fact about the world around you and still score a 180 on the test if you have the English and logic skills.  However, it’s not possible to write a test that deals in practical situations such as those posed in the logical reasoning section without dealing in specific facts.  The test makers thus find themselves with a problem.  Background knowledge is both necessary and absolutely forbidden.

So here’s the solution they came up with.  The facts are directly given.  It’s like being given an open book test, if only you know where the book is hidden.  Consider this completely made up argument:

A dog will always chase a cat it discovers in its territory.  My neighbor’s dog, Spot, saw my cat, Kit, lurking about his doghouse.  Therefore, Spot will try to bite Kit.

For the moment, ignore the argument itself.  Instead, find the “facts” that the LSAT makers have created.  First, they provide the fact that dogs always chase cats discovered in their territory.  Clearly, this isn’t actually true.  My cat is much more of a bully than any dog she meets.  But that doesn’t matter; that knowledge is a fact that I’m bringing in from the outside world, which the LSAT works to make sure isn’t relevant.  Instead, we need to believe that all dogs in this situation will always chase cats.  It doesn’t matter if it’s a four pound wisp of a dog and a seventeen pound alley cat.  That dog WILL chase that cat.
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There are several benefits to creating a study group: accountability, companionship, people to bounce things off of when you’re not sure you understand them. But there is another benefit that isn’t as obvious, and education writer Annie Murphy Paul writes about it in this week’s edition of her newsletter The Brilliant Report. Teaching others material actually helps you learn it better:

“Students enlisted to tutor others work harder to understand the material, recall it more accurately and apply it more effectively. In a phenomenon that scientists have dubbed “the protégé effect,” student teachers score higher on tests than pupils who are learning only for their own sake … A pair of articles published in 2007 in the journals Science and Intelligence concluded that first-born children are more intelligent than their later-born brothers and sisters and suggested that their higher IQs result from the time they spend showing their younger siblings the ropes.”

Read the rest of the article if it interests you–she discusses some fascinating projects underway at several universities to harness this phenomenon. But when it comes to your LSAT preparation, this research presents a great opportunity to take your learning to the next level. Some ideas:

1. Find a partner or group to study with, and teach other the material. Don’t just wait for confusion to arise naturally (I mean, you can, but why when you don’t have to?); design sessions around having to teach each other hard questions.

2. Teach your little brother, or the kids you babysit. Can’t find a study partner? Really challenge yourself by taking on the task of convincing a child in your life that you’re going to play a fun game called “lessons in logic.” This may be too hard.

3. Teach a parent. If (2) doesn’t work out, teach a loved one who is old enough to drive. When I was auditioning to teach for Manhattan LSAT, I practiced on my mom and was impressed with how quickly she learned the material–and how preparing to teach her forced me to learn the question inside and out. (She also was impressed with herself. At the end of our lesson she said, “Maybe I should go to law school!”).

Now when your teacher put you into groups and asks you to teach each another, you won’t be surprised. More importantly, you’ll know why.

There's no magic LSAT pill, just hard work and dedication

Here’s a beautiful fantasy: you walk into your first LSAT class, and you’re given a set of books full of LSAT secrets. Over the next six to twelve weeks, you memorize these little treasures, which are like decadent bite-size morsels, and you leave your last class knowing exactly what you need to regurgitate in order to score a 180. It was merely a matter of getting down all the tricks! You scribbled them in your notebook, took a snapshot with your brain, and that’s all there was to it.

If only.

When you take a Manhattan LSAT course, at some point your instructor will likely deliver the bad news that this fantasy is just that. There isn’t a magic pill to make you do well on this test–but there are certainly things you can do in order to perform better, and when you get to a certain level, it’s no longer about memorization.

If I memorized all the rules of good writing–be specific! have vivid characters! create conflict!–does that mean that if I just sit down and apply all of those rules, I’m going to write a great story? A story that’s in the top 1% of all stories?

No. If I actually apply everything I’ve learned, and if it’s good information, then I’ll probably write a pretty decent story–a better one than I’d written before. But in order to move from decent to outstanding, I’ve got to have something else: flexibility. I’ve got to be able to know where the rules stop and my own sense of the story’s logic takes over, because there is no perfect formula that applies to every tale ever written or to be written.

The same is true of the LSAT. If you work hard to learn rules and apply them, your score will likely go up. It may go up a lot. You may score a 165 or a 168. But people who score 175 are not just applying rules; they know how to think on their feet to interpret unfamiliar questions, and to come up with variations on the principles they understand well.

The beauty of the LSAT is that it’s a logic test, and logic can be learned. But logic is also not something you can fool your way through for four 35-minute sections. To score in the 99th percentile, you should absolutely study methods, general rules, and tips. These will get you far. But  to reach those extra few points, you are going to have to work at making yourself better at logical thinking. And there’s no shortcut for that.

The June 2013 LSAT is just one short month away.

Breath. Breath. Breath.

To kick off the one month countdown and help ease the anxiety, we’re going to make the full version of our LSAT Arcade App FREE for one week. Beginning today, May 10th through Thursday, May 16th, you can download the arcade to your iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad free of charge. Using thousands of questions, the eight different mini games will stretch your ability to make inferences, draw diagrams, analyze arguments, and understand conditional statements. The four unlocked games are adaptive, delivering harder or easier questions depending on your performance and scores are based on number of questions correct.

Whether you’re looking for a fun way to change up your prep routine in time for the June LSAT or you’re just beginning to study, don’t miss out on this special opportunity. Working from the computer? Don’t forget that you can also play our Free Online LSAT Arcade via our website. The app will resume full price May 17th, so use this week as a time to stop studying and start playing!

No need to rush, the LSAT is here to stay

When I was 22, I started studying for the LSAT in August and planned to take it in December. I’d just moved to New York after graduating from college, and I was working a few jobs to cover my bills: being a production assistant at a theater during the day, bar tending at night, and grading papers for a professor during my off time. On the weekends, I’d huddle in the corner of the 1.5 bedroom (1BR with wide hallway) I shared with two other people and try to learn logic games. I did my best to focus under these less than ideal circumstances, and gradually but steadily, found my practice test scores going up.

Then, in November, just a few weeks before the exam, my long-distance boyfriend broke up with me. When I called my mom crushed, our conversation turned to the test. AND HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO CONCENTRATE WHEN I’M SUCH A MESS?! I wailed, to which she replied, as if it took no thought at all: don’t. Postpone it.

At the time, this sounded like the dumbest thing anyone had ever said. Postpone it? I’d been studying for (two) MONTHS! I’d sacrificed nights out for this dumb test. I’d spent my half-hour lunch breaks smushed in a dingy dressing room on 42nd street trying to put M, G, L, and F in order as fast as I could before resuming work, i.e. delivering small paper cups of water to attention-obsessed actors. The truth was, I wanted to be done with the friggin LSAT. I told her this.
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The hardest thing about LSAT prep is that you may just have to undo some of the things you’ve learned in school. Most of us figured out shortcuts that made high school and college much more bearable: Sparknotes, cramming, skimming, writing baloney papers about how the Simpsons represent the pressing issues in the modern US family (that was my high school AP psychology paper – not only was it horrible, I forgot about Lisa). And then the LSAT comes along and wants to know if we can think crisply and cleanly—in other words, if we can think critically. For those of us addicted to thinking “creatively,” it can be a rude awakening.

Let me give you an example: is it true that some of the people reading this blog post are breathing? “That’s ridiculous” the normal brain thinks: everyone reading this is breathing. Well, that’s no doubt true, but isn’t it also true that some

LSAT Interact - designed to make you THINK!

of those folks are breathing? Yes, some of them are. (On the LSAT, “some” means an amount greater than zero, which can technically include all.)

It’s not easy to shift to a more legalistic type of thinking, and that’s why boring LSAT prep can be really frustrating. Folks, we’re not studying for an anatomy exam. You can’t simply jam this stuff into your head, you have to actually think in a different way. One way to accomplish this is to compare what you think against what you’re supposed to think. A good teacher will stop you in your tracks, so your brain goes “whaaa?” and then says “ohhh!”  We could call the “whaaa?” part cognitive dissonance and the “ohhh!” part learning something new (or a geek-eureka).

This is one of the reasons we put in a lot of freezes in LSAT Interact. A freeze? Let me explain: there are tons of moments when the teachers ask a question and then freezes, waiting for you to think what’s coming next. When you click on the button, you hear the teacher continue, as only an LSAT geek can, and then you get to compare and go through your “whaa” and “ohhh.”

As you can see, I’m still super-jazzed about the recent release of LSAT Interact. For a bit longer, the ladies and gents in marketing are letting folks sample it—funny how the first taste is always free!

Last week I headed to Costa Rica to learn how to surf. It was my first time surfing. Not to brag, but on my first day my instructor told me I was very good. I then tried jokingly asking if I was the best student he ever had and he answered quite seriously, “No.”

Mary hangs ten in Costa Rica

“Very good” as in I was standing on the board and riding small waves (want proof? That’s a photo of me from last week). But my second and third days were less successful–early on day two, I lost some of the confidence my instructor’s compliment had instilled. Once I’d fallen two or three times, I became convinced I hadn’t in fact learned how to get up on the board and stay there.

After two afternoons of swallowing gallons of sea water, annoyed at myself for losing my game, I listened to my instructor’s advice: I needed to trust myself. I’d become convinced I was going to fall and so I would.

This lesson applies to the LSAT. I sometimes ask students to imagine themselves scoring 170 (or 175, or 180… whatever the target score). What does it feel like? How did they do it? Believing in oneself isn’t just about hoping that it’ll happen–it’s about trusting that you’re actually capable of getting what you want, and a way to do that is to picture yourself having already done or doing it.

If you’re convinced you’re not going to do well, chances are you won’t. But if you become convinced that you are, you might. Obviously acquiring the skills and knowledge to accomplish certain tasks is also critical–but alone it’s unlikely to be sufficient if you don’t actually see yourself as capable of reaching your goal.

Try this: imagine you just scored your goal on the LSAT–the official one. Write down how it feels. Write down how you did it. Start with, “I’m so thrilled that…” If you want to be super cheesy, hang it on your mirror (next to your “You are beautiful” mantra). What’s to lose?