Each week, we analyze a movie that illustrates a logical fallacy you’ll find on the LSAT. Who said Netflix can’t help you study? 🎥📖

Described on Wikipedia as a “neo-noir crime-thriller film”, with each of those terms hyperlinked to a relevant page, Gregory Hoblit’s 1996 film Primal Fear introduced the world to Ed Norton and made the world forget about Richard Gere’s turn as Lancelot in First Knight, among other things. Read more

No matter how good you get at Logic Games, finding those difficult inferences will always be a challenge! In our “You Derive Me Crazy” blog series, we’ll take a look at some of the higher-level inferences that repeat on the LSAT, ensuring that you have all the tools necessary to tackle anything the LSAT throws at you on test day

Numbers – if you felt comfortable with them, you’d be taking the GMAT!

I kid. But many of my students do have an aversion to numbers that comes from years of focusing on  non-mathematical topics in their undergrad studies.

Unfortunately, some math will help you on certain logic games. Luckily, if you can add and subtract by one, you’re in good shape!

What am I talking about here? Read more

Each week, we analyze a movie that illustrates a logical fallacy you’ll find on the LSAT. Who said Netflix can’t help you study? 🎥📖

Since we covered Gravity a few weeks ago, we figured we should also cover its sequel, The Martian. Read more

No matter how good you get at Logic Games, finding those difficult inferences will always be a challenge! In our “You Derive Me Crazy” blog series, we’ll take a look at some of the higher-level inferences that repeat on the LSAT, ensuring that you have all the tools necessary to tackle anything the LSAT throws at you on test day

Frames. Amirite?

We’ve discussed framing Ordering games and Grouping games before, bringing up the rules that generally lead to these game-changing inferences (see what we did there?).

However, rules of thumb can only get you so far. The LSAT – especially in recent years – has started to buck trends, and has included things that seem to intentionally go against the traditions that have emerged on the exam throughout the years.

Let’s look at an example! Read more

No matter how good you get at Logic Games, finding those difficult inferences will always be a challenge! In our “You Derive Me Crazy” blog series, we’ll take a look at some of the higher-level inferences that repeat on the LSAT, ensuring that you have all the tools necessary to tackle anything the LSAT throws at you on test day!

Some of the biggest inferences in Logic Games come in the form of frames — 2–3 skeletons that represent every possible way the game can work out. Here at Manhattan Prep, we have two questions that both need to be answered ‘yes’ before we consider frames: Read more

If you go on one of those windsurfing web sites where the seasoned pros give advice to newbies, you see a lot of conversations like this:

Newbie: “I want to learn how to windsurf. I found someone selling a Ten Cate Sprinter windsurfer for $100. Is this a good board for a beginner?”

Pro: “No! That thing is over 30 years old. It will be too hard to learn anything with a board like that.”

So, there I was a few weeks ago, a total beginner who had never windsurfed before, paddling out into the Chesapeake Bay on an old Ten Cate Sprinter windsurfer. Why? Read more

Today, we’re going to look at the game that had everyone talking after the June 2014 LSAT exam: Summit Company. Summit Company had everyone thrown for a little bit of a loop, and it’s not surprising why. It has been awhile since a Transposition game has shown up on the LSAT. Watch this video to hear Christine Defenbaugh explain the four step process to attack and conquer Transposition games.

//youtu.be/n–2YUEGuaQ?list=UUy3GINZffbi2PlzOZxqzQDg

While in general on the logic games section, game types can be divided into two categories–grouping and ordering–there are the occasional “hybrid” games. These are the ones that, like mutts, are the sweet little offspring of both.

A hybrid game might look like this:

Over the next week, Miley Cyrus will have three performances, one in Boston, one in New York, and one in Washington, D.C. Her repertoire of dance moves includes twerking, gyrating, shimmying, and lunging. She will perform at least one of these moves during every performance, and every move will be included at least once. Her performances meet the following conditions:

She performs in New York sometime before Boston.
Her New York performance includes at least three dance moves.
She doesn’t lunge when she twerks.

Do you recognize why this is a hybrid game? Think about it before reading on.
Read more

Recently I was in the car with some friends. I was sitting in the backseat and wasn’t driving. The person who was driving didn’t know where she was going. The person sitting in the passenger seat was supposed to be navigating for her, and he was doing an absolutely horrible job. I could tell he was driving her nuts. This is the kind of stuff he was saying:

Okay, you need to make the third right up here. I mean you could turn right before it, like now, but you don’t have to—oh, wait, you did. Okay, so now that we turned here, hmm. Well, we could keep going straight or we could take the next left, but we’ll need to end up taking a right eventually—why did you take a right?! No, I said we need to eventually! Since we’re now going back the other direction, we could take a right or a left, but somehow we have to turn around…

See how annoying that is? As it was happening, I thought of logic games (because I’ve been doing this way too long). It seemed like a great illustration of a very important logic games principle. When it comes to diagramming, do not write what could be true and what must be true all in the same place. That is, don’t mix up what has to be true with what might be true.

In the same way that it is confusing to receive driving directions that mix what could happen in with what has to happen—“we could turn here but have to turn before four streets up but we could also turn on the next street”—it’s confusing when you look at a diagram where slots 2 and 3 are filled with the letters M and R, but M has to go in slot 2 and R could go in slot 3.

For this reason, it’s best only to write in what must be true, and save what could be true for side diagrams, or “clouds” as we call them at Manhattan LSAT (bubbles with possibilities listed in them)—basically, any diagramming tactic that denotes “this is different from what must be true…this is only what could be true.”

If you’re used to writing it all in one place, it may take some time to break the habit. But start now. It’s worth the struggle.

Could believe Lady Gaga and the LSAT have something in common?!

I recently had a conversation with a student about what he refers to as “sleeper rules” in games. Sleeper rules are the rules that don’t jive with the rest of the rules. They’re the odd man out, the lone ranger. In a Western, they’d be mavericks. On a playground, they’d be last picked. They’re Lady Gaga in the 2000s and Madonna in the ’80s. They’re the green circle next to the four blue … You get it.

We see sleeper rules all over the places in games, but a really good example is the standalone numbered-ordering rule in a relative ordering game: you are given seven rules, say, and six of them are relative (“X is before Y but after V”). The last one is not. It reads, “V can’t be third.” How many of you have gotten to a rule like this–one that you cannot easily incorporate into your diagram–and decided, I’ll just keep it in my head? Aha! Caught!

My guess is that it’s come back to bite you in the bum, as the ol’ “just keeping it in my head” is known to do in logic games.

While it may be your intuition to just keep it in your head, for most of us the best way to handle sleeper rules is actually to do the opposite. Rules that don’t conform to the expectations of the whole game should generally be treated like royalty. Give them a prominent spot on the page, circle them, underline them, shine a giant spotlight on them–that is, make them graphically obvious, and do so close to your diagram. In the example above, this might mean putting a big slash over “3” underneath the V in your diagram, or a big “V NOT THIRD!” note alongside it.

Obvious, nonconforming rules should be notated in the same way: conspicuously. This is the safest way to handle them.