Training Your Instincts for the LSAT
Warm Up Those Medulla Oblongatas!
Yet another sign of my geekiness: I love Tuesdays because that’s when the NY Times has a science section. (And for those who are struggling with science passages on the LSAT, it’s not a bad place to start getting some extra practice – though throw in some more technical material as well). Last Tuesday there was an article that caught my eye: Brain Calisthenics for Abstract Ideas is about research on training kids’ intuitive senses about abstract problems. What the white lab coat folks did is develop a computer program that made kids match graphs to equations. The kids didn’t need to solve anything, they just needed to match them on gut instinct (which here means a general understanding of how equations graph out).
I love it! I used to teach math and I did some of this sort of thing – we’d always work on estimating answers before we learned algorithms (the formal steps for solving something). I think building up a student’s intuitive sense of a problem is essential. The question is how to do it for the LSAT?
One way we do it is through the LSAT Arcade. Our curriculum team came up with a bunch of different games, that work very specific mental micro-muscles and builds your intuitive sense of things.
Another tool in your arsenal is lots of practice! The tests conducted in the NY Times article all included lots of practice. So don’t think that you can simply play our cool video game and get a 175 on the LSAT. You need to do tons of LSAT practice tests too. Your goal is to train your brain to begin to, “pick up on differences before [you] can fully articulate them.” But you also want to learn what you’ve picked up on – that’s where learning LSAT strategy comes into play.
One thing I want to make clear about this approach to the LSAT is that it’s only one part of the puzzle. Anyone who has taken a practice test knows that the LSAT requires some very close reading. It’s very easy to be fooled by a stray word so going on instinct alone is far from enough. But, having a strong instinct allows you to know what to look for, what moves to make to get out of “corners,” and generally be a flexible test-take instead of an automaton.
I’m pretty psyched about this article because I know our teachers and our curriculum push students to develop their intuitive skills along with formalized approaches. The article mentions that the ability to transfer skills “is among the highest goals of teachers at all levels,” and we agree. Don’t simply focus on dichotomizing the LSAT, also consider how the different question types are related.