If you’re having a bit of an LSAT freak-out, take a break from your umpteenth preptest, stop negating assumptions and talking about contrapositives. Drink some tea (not Long Island), and read some tips:

Final tips from people other than your mother

Tips for chilling out and getting YOUR best score

What to do the night before the LSAT

Good question! Obviously this depends on your situation, but in general, if by this Friday, May 14 – your last day to postpone your registration for the June LSAT – you are not scoring at least 3-4 points from a score that you’d be OK having, you probably won’t like your actual score. There are definite exceptions to this rule, but that’s a decent rule of thumb. But don’t pull your hair out over this question, because if you decide NOT to postpone, and then realize – eek! – you’re not feeling the LSAT winds blowing in your favor, you will face a set of options, many of which are perfectly acceptable.  Steve Schwartz wrote a great analysis of these different options,

The Pampered Pets Grooming Salon has a very busy day ahead.  There are three groomers – Lisa, Mario, and Nancy – scheduled to work, and the salon has 1-hour appointment slots available for each groomer at 8, 9 and 10 am.  Seven animals have appointments – four poodles, two terriers, and one westie.  No more than one animal is assigned to any particular appointment slot. Animals are assigned to grooming appointments according to the following restrictions:

• Lisa grooms more animals than any other groomer.
• At least one poodle is groomed before any terrier is groomed.
• Each groomer grooms at least two different types of animals.
• Nancy grooms a poodle at 10 am.
• No terrier can be groomed during the same hour that a poodle is groomed.
• Mario does not groom a poodle first.

1. Which one of the following must be true?

(A) Mario is assigned exactly one animal.
(B) Nancy is assigned exactly one animal.
(C) Lisa is assigned exactly two animals.
(D) Mario is assigned exactly two animals.
(E) Nancy is assigned exactly three animals.

Read more

Definitely not. Now that all of the follies of April Fool’s has quieted down, it’s time to get focused on the June LSAT.

If you’ve only bought an LSAT book thus far and sorta-kinda-maybe took one official practice LSAT exam (with a teeeeeny, quick Facebook session thrown in — Admit it. You know you did.), it really isn’t too late.

You’ve got almost 2 months left. It won’t be easy to learn all there is to know about the LSAT, but if you are mentally committed, you can still do well. The June administration is one of the most popular dates because most students figure that if they don’t do well, they can re-take the LSAT in September.

We’ve got an intense NYC 3-Weekend LSAT Bootcamp beginning May 8th and a Live Online LSAT Course beginning on April 24th. These courses are comprehensive and will structure your studies from now until the June exam. Both courses are taught by our awesome 99th percentile teachers and feature our flexible, 170+ focused curriculum and strategy guides with 28 Practice LSATs. If courses aren’t your style, our Self-Study options fit most students needs.

For upcoming course schedules in your area, select your location on the map: Find me an LSAT Course!

Good luck!

Looking for a challenge?

Old Blue Eyes

Seven singers—Hiroshi, Jordan, Kirkwood, Lewin, Marin, Olin, and Pan—will audition for the lead singer role in a Frank Sinatra cover band. The auditions will take place one at a time, and no other singers will audition for the role. The order of the auditions must conform to the following rules:

• Exactly two auditions will take place between Jordan’s audition and Olin’s audition.
• Exactly one audition will take place between Marin’s audition and Pan’s audition.
• Hiroshi’s audition will take place immediately before or immediately after Lewin’s audition.
• Jordan’s audition will take place before Hiroshi’s audition.

1. Which one of the following could be the order of auditions, listed from first to last?

(A) Jordan, Lewin, Hiroshi, Olin, Marin, Kirkwood, Pan
(B) Jordan, Hiroshi, Lewin, Olin, Marin, Pan, Kirkwood
(C) Olin, Hiroshi, Lewin, Jordan, Pan, Kirkwood, Marin
(D) Pan, Olin, Marin, Jordan, Kirkwood, Hiroshi, Lewin
(E) Marin, Jordan, Pan, Lewin, Olin, Hiroshi, Kirkwood

2. If Olin auditions first, which one of the following must be true?

(A) Marin auditions third.
(B) Pan auditions third.
(C) Kirkwood auditions second.
(D) Jordan auditions third.
(E) Hiroshi auditions seventh.

3. If Lewin auditions immediately before Olin, each of the following could be true EXCEPT:

(A) Kirkwood auditions second.
(B) Marin auditions seventh.
(C) Pan auditions third.
(D) Jordan auditions first.
(E) Hiroshi auditions third.

4. If Kirkwood auditions sometime between Jordan and Olin, which one of the following must be true?

(A) Kirkwood auditions second.
(B) Either Marin or Pan auditions fifth.
(C) Either Marin or Pan auditions first.
(D) Either Hiroshi or Lewin auditions last.
(E) Jordan auditions either first or fourth.

5. There are exactly two possible orders of auditions if which one of the following is true?

(A) Hiroshi auditions immediately after Jordan.
(B) Kirkwood auditions immediately after Olin.
(C) Lewin auditions immediately after Olin.
(D) Marin auditions immediately after Jordan.
(E) Pan auditions immediately before Olin.

6. If Marin auditions first, which one of the following must be true?

(A) Kirkwood auditions before Pan.
(B) Olin auditions after Pan.
(C) Hiroshi auditions after Kirkwood.
(D) Lewin auditions before Olin.
(E) Jordan auditions after Kirkwood.

7. If the condition that Hiroshi’s audition will take place immediately before or immediately after Lewin’s audition is replaced with the condition that exactly one audition takes place between Hiroshi and Lewin, and if all other conditions remain in effect, each of the following could be true EXCEPT:

(A) Olin auditions fourth.
(B) Jordan auditions third.
(C) Kirkwood auditions first.
(D) Lewin auditions sixth.
(E) Hiroshi auditions fourth.

Think you can solve this Logic Game Challenge?

Win $200 off any LSAT Course or any Atlas LSAT Strategy Guide (your choice!)

Post your answer and/or explanation on our LSAT Forum. 

LSAT Weather Fail

Perhaps you read about the challenging experiences of Luke, our young LSAT warrior.  But Luke has now been out-done by the hapless folks who had their rescheduled February exam re-scheduled.  LSAC just announced that one of the re-take sites has been closed down because of snow!  Looking out the window here in Chelsea, I can see what they were thinking, but we’re New Yorkers.  If we can make it through Times Square, we can make it through this not-so-faux-snowpocalypse.

But truly, that’s some seriously bad luck.  In fact, that’s such bad luck that it might just be a divine message to those folks to go to med school.  No doubt some people are simply pulling out their hair.  Don’t sweat it — you might actually want to delay that LSAT score one more application cycle.  For one, a February score generally puts you in a bad (i.e., late) position in the application cycle (sort of like being in early position in Texas-Hold-Em).  Secondly, as can be expected, there are a ton of people applying to law school this year.  Let them battle it out, and walk in, stepping gingerly around their corpses.

Good luck to those who will manage to take that re-test!  For the rest of us suffering through this heavenly explanation of why we’re supposed to say “climate change” and not “global warming”, stay inside and start working through your Netflix queue.

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Learning to negate answer choices on the LSAT is a key skill if you are really looking to push up your score, for lots of reasons. I tend to think there are two especially important ones. First, assumption questions (and one of the most-related question type, flaw questions) are quite common, and many students find it’s difficult to get all of the most challenging assumption questions correct without using the negation test. Second, negation can be useful for thinking out counterfactuals on inference and strengthen/weaken questions – more on this another time. Today, I’ll be writing about how to negate in general terms. In another blog post, I’ll get into specifics. Read more

//lsatblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/logical-reasoning-vocabulary-words.html

I just saw a good blog post listing vocabulary words that you should have under your belt for the LSAT.   Take a look and see if you really know all of them.  Thanks for the list, Steve!

Good question! First off, we’ll be discussing this in our upcoming workshop in which we’ll review the December LSAT.

If you’re just looking to take an LSAT, it doesn’t matter which one you take — just take it after you’ve prepared!  But if you already have taken the LSAT and are wondering whether to re-take, there’s a lot more to say.  The question of whether you should re-take in June, Sep/Oct, or Dec  has one set of answers.  If you are wondering whether to re-take in one of those non-February months, take a look at some previous posts – should I re-take the LSAT & how to improve your LSAT score.   But for February you get a special set of answers just for you!

In general, the answer is NO.  Here’s why (and thanks to Ann Levine for some help on this one):

1. It’s hard to improve an LSAT score significantly in one month. Caveats: if you truly had a bad day on test day, and having such a day is completely out of the ordinary for you, sure, a re-test could conceivably show serious improvement.  But, so you know, most people don’t improve that much.  For example, the average person who re-takes the LSAT with a score between 150 and 160 improves only 2.4 points on the re-take (and the re-take improvement gets worse as you go up the score ladder).  For most people, those 2.4 points are not enough to significantly alter your application — and for most folks, those 2 and almost a half points definitely do not warrant a re-take because . . . Read more