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.

Hey October LSAT takers! Here are a few tips for the rest of the week.

DO get a good night’s sleep this week! Start going to bed earlier and waking up earlier if you don’t already so that your body is not shocked by the time on Saturday morning. Better yet, wake up the next couple of mornings and do an LSAT problem or two.

DON’T work too hard on Friday. If the idea of taking the day off to watch the new Arrested Development on Netflix panics you, read over your notes or do a game or two, maybe a few hard logical reasoning questions you’ve done before. But it’s not the day to take a full-length test.

DO continue to do timed, mixed practice through Thursday.

DON’T make the mistake of believing that every practice test score from now until Saturday is exactly what you’re going to score. While they are certainly in the range of what you should expect, just because your practice test drops from a 169 to a 167 tomorrow doesn’t mean you’re suddenly 2 points LSAT-dumber. Learn from your mistakes, review carefully, and move forward.

DO get a passport-size photo of yourself this week if you haven’t already. (This is in addition to your identification. See the email you recently received from LSAC for details.)

DON’T dwell on what you wish you’d done differently over the last few months. To do so is a waste of critical energy at this point, and your mind should be focused on…

DO think positively. Someone is going to teach this test who’s boss, and it’s not Tony Danza. It’s you. YOU. If you don’t believe you’re going to do your best, you’re less likely to. If you do, you’re more likely to. And if you can see that those two statements are not contrapositives, give yourself a high-five right now, please.

DON’T forget your analogue (big hand, small hand) watch. (If you want, set it to 12 o’clock at the beginning of each section so you can easily track your 35 minutes without arithmetic.)

DO take a snack.

DON’T mistake the LSAT for a mythical tool that measures your self-worth. It’s just a test. Plus, you have more friends than it, and they’re cooler.

Now go put those red and blue and yellow balls in order like you’ve never put them in order before!

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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

No, that’s not an order, but it is a great idea. Here’s the problem; there’s a limit to how many tests you can work through without completely tuning out and not getting anything out of it. The good news is you can study the LSAT everyday while minimizing your exposure to the actual test.

Quick disclaimer: this is NOT a recommendation to ditch practice tests or strategies. This is a way to supplement your test studying so you are always in LSAT mode.

That said, consider what the LSAT is actually testing. It is a test that evaluates your ability to think logically. You are presented with chances to think logically all the time (though if you’re like me, you may not always live up to the potential). If you identify and use those opportunities, they become excellent chances to study.

Start with reading comprehension. Whether you’re in school or at work, you have to read, probably pretty often. We read for content – to find out what the article is saying. Start reading for perspective as well. As you go through your books and articles, ask yourself these questions: Read more

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 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.

By now if you’ve been studying for a while, either on your own, in a course or with a tutor, you’ve encountered the ubiquitous “quantity terms” scattered throughout the test: some, most, majority, etc. You may have been surprised to learn that “many” does not mean “most” and that “some” can include “all.” (You may even have slammed down your pencil at this discovery.)

The quirkiness of LSAT quantity terms can be frustrating when you first encounter it, but it isn’t as counterintuitive or labyrinthine as it initially appears to many (but not most). The key question to keep in mind at all times when it comes to a quantity term is: what’s its maximum, and what’s its minimum?

Here’s a useful guide. Once you commit this to memory, you should be in good shape to take down the LSAT on its own quantity terms (har har):

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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Across the board on logical reasoning questions, it’s important to know what kind of argument you’re dealing with:

(1) What is it arguing?

(2) How does it go about it?

(3) Is there a problem with it?

When it comes to (1), it’s often not enough simply to identify the conclusion of the argument and note its substantive components. You should get into the habit of characterizing the conclusion in terms of precisely what its arguing, and to do that, you should always look around the verb–that is, to the action of the sentence.

I took a moment to write down the categories that I personally put conclusions into in my head as I read. This isn’t an exhaustive list of conclusion types or one that I’m suggesting you apply as gospel, but it’s an example of how you might characterize conclusions for yourself as you read:

Judgmental conclusions: These are conclusions that, yep, cast some kind of judgment. They usually contain words like “should” (or “should not“), or justifies/is justified (or doesn’t).

Statements of fact: These are conclusions that state facts. Something is/are true, will happen, do/does occur, shall occur. (Notice that I don’t separate between “is” in the present and “will” in the future since both still say what is true.)

Likelihood: Distinct from the previous category, these conclusions don’t argue that something definitely will or does happen but that it might, and they sometimes give a likelihood. They include words like “might,” “may,” “could,” “probably,” and “likely” or “unlikely.”

Comparative: You guessed it–these are conclusions that X is no worse than Y; X is better than Y; X is more likely to happen than Y. On these, they key thing to remember is to note exactly how the two components are being compared; X “is no less bad” than Y is not the same as saying that X is better than Y. (Can you think of why? It’s because if X is no less bad than Y, X and Y could still be equally bad.)