Last week, I talked about good goals to set in preparing for the LSAT. Once you’ve set ’em, the question becomes how in the humanities-passage to stick with (and meet) them in a way that gets you the biggest bang for your buck.

First, meeting your goal(s) should be challenging, at least a little bit. If it’s not, you didn’t set the right one. If you’re trying to quicken your pace on games, and you set a goal for 11 minutes instead of 13, and that’s easy, it wasn’t ambitious enough. Set it for 9. Or go crazy… 8! If you are having trouble concentrating for long periods of time and decide to study 30 minutes without texting or getting a snack, once that becomes easy, don’t increase it to 40. Go for an hour, or 90 minutes. Push yourself when it comes to resetting your goals over time, and they will serve you well. Read more

Goals are important when it comes to LSAT preparation. First we’ve got to make them, then we’ve got to stick with them.

This week and next, I’ll be talking about these two processes.

10 (3) Goals You Should Set, No Matter Who You Are

1. Put your phone away. You can’t resist checking to see who texted. You just have to send that one email. You only need to map the tapas restaurant now so you will know what train to take there after you finish doing this practice test. Or would be doing, if you didn’t keep checking your phone.

Trying to study the LSAT with your Droid or Blackberry buzzing (or silently existing) next to you like trying to do yoga alongside a tiny man whispering, “Don’t clear your mind!” (I’m not sure why he has to be tiny, but he does.) Leave the phone in the other room–or just across the room–and you will practice better, which means you’ll score better. Are you really going to let your cell phone be the reason you end up at a lower ranked school? Harsh, but true. Read more

What do you do when you go on vacation? Do you whip out a book of logic puzzles? Yes, I do. Say what you will, but this is what it’s like in the life of an LSAT geek.

On my latest vacation, I started in on Alice in Puzzle-Land, by Raymond M. Smullyan. I recommend it if you have some extra time on your hand for strengthening your logic brain power. The puzzles are arranged in sets that build on similar logical themes. Some are pretty easy, and some are killers. Here’s a summary of the first puzzle of the book:

There are two brothers. One is named John. I forgot the other one’s name. One always lies, one always tells the truth. I forgot which one does which.

Your job is to figure out which one of the brothers is named John. But, everyone is in a rush, so you may ask only one brother a three word question. That’s it! You need to be able to figure out which brother is John from that question.

Ideally, you should figure this out while sitting in a hot spring on vacation. Go ahead and post your answer or e-mail it to me (my first name @manhattanprep.com/lsat/)

Remember ABC order? You know you hum “elemenopeee” when you’re looking for a “P” word in a list.

ABC order can be useful in an LSAT-specific context. It can help you distinguish between two question types that look very similar but are actually different in logic games.

Consider these two hypothetical question stems:

(1) Which of the following is a list of students any of which could be assigned to Mr. Patrick’s class?

(2) Which of the following could be a list of students assigned to Mr. Patrick’s class?

Often, you’ll see “complete and accurate” smashed in there before “list”:

(1) Which of the following is a complete and accurate list of students any of which could be assigned to Mr. Patrick’s class?

(2) Which of the following could be a complete and accurate list of students assigned to Mr. Patrick’s class?

The questions are obviously similar. For the novice test taker, they can look identical. But they’re asking for different things.

Question (1) is asking for a list of all possibilities, in any scenario. What students can be assigned to Mr. Patrick, ever, at all, in any situation? It’s not asking for a list of students that must be able to be in Mr. Patrick’s class together in one scenario. Read more

The terms “necessary” and “sufficient” get thrown around a lot in the LSAT world these days. We at Manhattan LSAT use them to distinguish between two different kinds of assumption questions. They come up on the test in answer choices (for example, “The argument mistakes a necessary condition for a sufficient condition”). And usually by the fourth session of a course, students start making jokes like, “I had half a sandwich earlier, which was necessary, but not sufficient.” We all pretend not to love the joke.

But what do they mean? One of my favorite analogies for explaining the basic difference between necessary and sufficient is the alarm clock. We’ll call it the Necessary Alarm Clock.

Say I have a very hard time waking up. I’m a sad, awful person who hates morning, sunlight, and everything to do with happiness. I so dread being awake, in fact, that in order for me to get up in the morning, eight things need to happen:

1. My alarm clock goes off.
2. The smell of bacon drifts into my room.
3. I have dreamt of lilies and puppies.
4. Speaking of puppies, my dog is licking my face.
5. A marching band passes.
6. It’s not a Monday.
7. I am not hungover.
8. It is 72 degrees in my bedroom.

Again, in order to wake up, every single one of these things must occur.

So what is sufficient for me to wake up? 1-4? 5-8? 1, only? None of these. The occurrence of 1-8 is sufficient for me to wake up, and 1-8 only. Could we say, then, that 1-8 is also necessary for me to wake up? Sure! Each of these has to happen; that means they are all necessary.

How about my alarm clock going off? Is that sufficient for me to drag my caboose outta bed? No. 2-8 still has to occur. But is it necessary? To answer that question, we ask what would happen if it DIDN’T go off. If it didn’t go off, I’m still snoozing. So, yes, it’s necessary.

Finally, suppose 1-8 occurred, plus there were fourteen cheerleaders practicing in my kitchen. Would I wake up? Of course I would. The sum total of 1-8 plus the cheerleaders is sufficient to get me out of bed. But is the sum total of 1-8 plus the cheerleaders necessary to get me out of bed? No. The cheerleaders can be disposed of.

Yes, I wrote this post just to be able to close with that sentence.

Rick Santorum sure has made some controversial remarks lately. But are they logically sound? Regardless of your political leaning, it pays to know how to evaluate the pieces and soundness of an argument. For this week’s post, I’ve plucked a few Santorum gems to help you review logical reasoning strategy. Can you identify the question types, below? Better yet, can you answer them? Answers after the jump! Read more

To Infinity, and Beyond!

Two of the more common questions asked by future LSAT takers are: 1) “When should I begin studying for the LSAT?”  and 2) “How long does it typically take to prepare for this exam?”

The answer to these basic (yet extremely important!) questions provides a ‘jumping off point’ for folks and helps them plan their lives (or lack there of) during the months spent prepping for the LSAT.

If you are planning to take the June 2012 LSAT, I’ll save you the drama of the rest of this post: it’s time to start studying now! Get started with a diagnostic test. This will give you a great sense of where you are, although you should not get discouraged if you score well below the national average (151) your first time. If you don’t know much about the exam, you should read our intro guide or attend one of our free workshops (available in NYC and Live Online). For the rest of you thinking a bit more long term, read on…

Read more

NOTE: This is the first of many posts by one of our most beloved teachers, Mary Adkins. A graduate of Yale Law School, Mary is one of Manhattan LSAT’s 99th percentile rock stars based out of New York City.

The February LSAT is over and done! You know what that means. One: Mardi Gras. Two: folks–February test refugees and otherwise–are gearing up to prepare for the June exam. As we enter the beginning of this study season, I want to share a tool that might be useful to those of you facing a particular breed of LSAT challenge.

Down The LSAT Timing Rabbit Hole

Recently, I worked with a student who came in every week reciting the same outcome of her practice. Whenever she did sections untimed, she rocked them. She scored in the 160s, her goal range, and did so consistently. But as soon as she set the clock, her score plummeted fifteen points–consistently. The kicker? She wasn’t even taking that much more time when she wasn’t on the clock.

This student–we’ll call her Charmayne–needed to trim about eight minutes off her logic games section and ten minutes off each logical reasoning section. So pacing was something to work on, sure. But it was clear that the extra time wasn’t the only source of her higher scores (and that lack of it wasn’t the only source of her lower scores). When she felt herself on the clock, she’d snap into panic mode, abandon or forget strategies, and fly through the test wildly. Picture a woman in a blindfold, swinging her arms to try to hit cartoon As, Bs, Cs, Ds, and Es swarming around her. (For the record, this creepy nightmarish image is mine, not hers.)

It occurred to us that one reason she was having a hard time improving her pacing was the paralyzing anxiety she felt as soon as the virtual LSAT proctor entered the scene.

Together, we came up with the Time Shave. Read more

With less than 48 hours remaining before the February LSAT, we have some helpful advice on what can (and cannot) be done at this late stage in the game, as well as some mantras for test day.

Get your mind right. It can be rather tempting to start down some  last minute LSAT rabbit holes. This close to test day, it is helpful to adopt somewhat of a  “what’s done is done” attitude. For example, there are likely some game types that you simply are not going to get any better at between now and Saturday – and that is OK!  So long as you’ve been consistently hitting or exceeding your target score on your latest timed practice tests without a mastery of those game types, you should see similar results on the real thing. Accept that you’re not going to get that 180, and start to focus on all of the success that you ARE going to have on test day as opposed to worrying yourself in to a frenzy over those sections of the test that have continually thrown you off after months of hard work.

Get off the sauce. This may seem painfully obvious, but steer clear of the alcohol or any other mood/behavior altering substances for the next few days. Start (or continue) exercising (exercise is linked to neural growth ya know).

Admit it: the LSAT is damn hard! Unless you’re scoring well-below the national average of 151, chances are that if you think a question on the exam is difficult, just about everyone else in the nation does too! Yes, there will be some super geniuses  out there who won’t, but if we stick to thinking about rest of the mere mortal population, admitting that this thing is difficult can go a long way in easing your tensions. If it’s a tough question, lots of people will get it wrong; the question is whether you’ll get it wrong and waste a lot of time on it. Don’t get stuck on the mud on a question you were never going to get right, and cost yourself precious time that you could have been using to nail the questions that come easier to you.

Warm yourself up on test day. Since your brain is a muscle (and since it is unlikely to be accustomed to working hard on a Saturday morning), be sure to give it a proper warm up before you sit down to tackle the first section of the LSAT. I would advise arriving at your testing location at least 40 minutes early. Before you enter your testing center, do an easy-ish game that you’ve successfully completed several times before. This method of warming up is exponentially better than using section 1 on the real thing!

Good luck on Saturday – and be sure to remember what you can and cannot bring in with you to your testing center.

Fresh from the M LSAT Lab of Geekyness, an infographic with loads of info on the February LSAT, including what you can and cannot bring with you. Enjoy, and good luck on Saturday!!

Are You Ready for the February LSAT?