On the LSAT, Do Sweat the Small Stuff
If only my readers were old enough to know the plot of the original 1984 Karate Kid movie, or if only I were young enough to know whether the 2010 Jaden Smith reboot had the same plot…
In the original film, a 16-year-old kid desperate to learn karate is taken under the wing of a sagely old karate master, whose first instructions involve making the kid wax the master’s cars, paint his fences, and paint his roof.
When the youngster boils over and says, “I’m sick of being your slave! When are we going to learn karate?” the master wryly smiles and says, “Show me: wax the car,” and starts throwing punches at the kid. To the kid’s surprise, the well-rehearsed motion of waxing the car is actually similar to the motion of blocking a punch. The well-rehearsed motion of painting the fence helps him to block kicks. The master secretly has been teaching the kid karate by focusing on certain foundational skills.
What does this mean for LSAT? Always start throwing punches at a kid’s face.
No, wait. That can’t be the takeaway. Oh, yeah… embrace becoming smooth and swift at menial tasks, because a big part of learning complex tasks involves increasing our automaticity at some of its underlying components.
If you wanted to master car racing, you would first have to become automatic at manual transmission, as oxymoronic as that sounded. You wouldn’t be able to simultaneously judge the curvature of the upcoming track, the proximity of cars around you, or the imminence of your next pit stop until you had already turned gear-shifting into a “brain dead” skill.
Our brains only have so much working memory, so complex tasks can easily overwhelm us. Musicians repeatedly run scales, so that muscle memory is handling the task of dexterously moving one’s fingers to the right places, enabling working memory to have resources to devote to things like dynamics and expression.
What are the automatic skills you should be cultivating for the LSAT?
LSAT LOGIC GAMES
1. Game Type Identification
We only aspire to automaticity here when it comes to normal types of LSAT games: Basic Ordering, Relative Ordering, 3D Ordering, Basic Grouping, In/Out Grouping, and 3D Grouping.
The fastest way to categorize a game would be to look directly at its rules:
A stack of before/after rules → Relative Ordering
A stack of conditional rules → In/Out Grouping
Friends, enemies, conditionals → Basic Grouping
Chunks, before/afters, numbered positions → Basic Ordering
3D stuff would not be as quick as the above four types, and you would normally sense it more from reading the paragraph setup: Okay, so for these characters, I not only have to assign them to an order/group, I also have to keep track of whether they’re ____.
The other type of LSAT game worth knowing is “Other,” as in, I couldn’t quickly categorize this. That empty name (about as informative as “dark matter” or “dark energy” in physics) at least registers with our brain that “this task seems less familiar, therefore less likely to draw upon my practice experiences. Thus, I might want to consider doing a different game instead and saving this for later, or if I’m doing this game, I should be very flexible and willing to adapt to whatever this new task is.”
To practice: take any official LSAT test you have, go to its Games section, and give yourself 2 minutes total to identify the four LSAT games as one of the above-mentioned 7 types (including “Other”). If you can start to do that in 2 minutes, see if 90 seconds or 60 seconds is enough time for you to categorize all four games.
2. Rule Symbolization/Linkage
Most rules we see are ones we’ve seen before. On any familiar LSAT game type, you rarely encounter a rule that confuses or surprises you. When it does, slow down and really, really think about it. When it’s a normal rule, fly like the wind!
ORDERING: Relative ordering, chunks, reversible chunks, exact spacing, at-least spacing, ‘but not both’ rules, either/ors, conditionals, specific placements or exclusions, same-can’t-touch, and quantity rules
GROUPING: Friends, enemies, conditionals, specific placements or exclusions, and quantity rules
3D: making sure 3D rules are symbolized in ‘domino tile’ form that shows both layers of information
To practice: the LSAT Arcade in the Student Center has a game called Draw It.
You can also just take any official LSAT test, go to the Games section, and look directly at the rules (only peek at the setup if you need to). See how quickly and comfortably you can symbolize all the rules for a game. From doing so, did you figure out what type of game you’re doing? If you encountered a rule that didn’t fit a pre-made schema, should you make a flashcard so that you can quiz yourself on how to translate that rule several more times?
3. Setting Up the Roster and Master Diagram (And Frames, If Applicable)
This gets back to the idea mentioned in #1—if this is one of those six normal types of LSAT games, then you should already have a good sense of what diagrams look like for that type of game. Be brisk as you copy down your roster of characters and as you draw out your blanks (and label them, if necessary/desired).
If you’re sort of picky about your handwriting and take a measured, meditative pace, you might be giving away an extra 15 seconds per game, which is an extra minute for the section.
The decision to frame, the setup of frames, and the fleshing-out vs. abandoning of frames need to become quick, decisive moves. However, this is definitely a higher-level skill than everything else we’ve been discussing.
The decision to frame mostly comes down to asking these two questions:
- Is there a Chunk that only has 2, 3, or 4 options? Would placing it in any of those spots trigger anything?
- Is there some other thing that has only 2 or 3 possibilities? Would any of those trigger something else?
The setup of frames, for me, only involves drawing a couple of horizontal lines. For almost all LSAT game types, my diagram is basically a set of columns and rows, with the master diagram/frames being at the very top or at the very bottom.
Other people like to set up frames by writing separate diagrams, each fully-labeled, in different spots of the page. That is prettier, but that can eat up time. If you like framing, but don’t like the time involved, you might want to experiment with a jankier system like mine that makes it very quick to start a new scenario.
Normally, when we frame 2 or 3 worlds, only one of them is going to actually have juicy chain reactions. If you know that going in, you don’t push futilely to find anything interesting in the more open frame. You just harvest the domino reactions in the cool frame(s), and then you move onto the questions perfectly content that one or two of your frames are nicely fleshed out, while the remaining one is “open for business.”
It’s kinda like with my two daughters: I know that one of them is worth investing time in, and the other one not so much. (Just kidding, Lake!)
4. Orientation Questions
There’s an old Beach Boys song that goes, “I wish they all could be California girls.” That’s how I feel about Orientation questions. These are almost always extremely low-level thinking. We take each rule and scan the answer choices to see whether the rule is being followed. Usually, each rule eliminates one answer. Once we’ve read through all the rules, we should have our correct answer: the last man standing, the only legal scenario up there.
You should fly aggressively into these, confident that you know exactly what your job and process are. If we read a rule like, “Howard appears earlier than Francis,” we can scan for H and F in each answer and verify that H is somewhere to the left of F. You can also translate the rule into what it would like broken, so that you’re only scanning once for the wrong thing.
Read: Howard appears earlier than Francis.
Think: Okay… do any of these answers give me F before H?
I see my students getting these questions consistently correct, but they’re often taking at least a minute. That’s cray. You should be able to do most of these in 30 seconds or less. If you’re taking a full minute to get an Orientation question right, you might be wasting about 30 seconds per game, which is wasting about 2 minutes per section!
Try not to let your brain read the full names of the characters. By reducing them to individual letters, we’re lowering the density of what we’re thinking about and looking for.
When you’re scanning answer choices, you’re not taking a leisurely stroll. You’re playing Taboo, trying to squeeze in as many correct answers as you can before the timer runs out. Hustle!
Don’t overthink the order in which you test the rules, but if you’re aware of a rule that is a bit of a stinker or would involve effort to look for, definitely save it for last. Prioritize the rules that seem super quick/easy to look for.
We tend to overlook the stuff we’re already pretty good at, because we (correctly) don’t perceive it as a weakness. But it can still be a valuable opportunity for improvement. By maxing out your proficiency at low-level parts of the LSAT, you give yourself the “I can breathe again” headroom that allows for calmer, more concentrated thinking on the tricky stuff.
In Part II of this series, we’ll get into the parts of Logical Reasoning and Reading Comp that lend themselves to automaticity. ?
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Patrick Tyrrell is a Manhattan Prep instructor based in Los Angeles, California. He has a B.A. in philosophy, a 178 on the LSAT, and relentless enthusiasm for his work. In addition to teaching test prep since 2006, he’s also an avid songwriter/musician. Check out Patrick’s upcoming LSAT courses here!