What do YOU think of the Socratic method??
There was a very interesting news story on the web this week about a professor from Utah who has been denied tenure (and is now bringing a suit against his former University) due to negative evaluations submitted by his students. In the negative evaluations, students cited discontent with the professor “calling on them when they did not raise their hands” and “forcing them to work in groups”. The audacity! Don’t these profs know that being called on involuntarily could cause one to lose a hand on pokerstars.com?!
Beware: this is what could happen to your brain if you sit in a non-interactive, lecture style LSAT class!
The method of teaching used by this professor, most commonly referred to as the Socratic method, is designed to engage students in discussion in order to put the focus on a dialogue that uses argument and debate as the main process for coming to meaningful, logical understanding. If the words ‘arguments’ and ‘logical’ are setting your LSAT senses aflutter, this is for good reason: the Socratic method is incredibly useful in fostering the skills necessary achieve top scores on the LSAT.
If you’ve taken even a cursory gander at our website, you’ll likely have noticed that we tout our classes as “Interactive” and requiring “Hard Work”. If you read further than that, you’ll have seen us explicitly mention our use of the Socratic teaching method to best sharpen and build skills relevant to LSAT success.
We’ve designed our entire approach around fostering an environment conducive to learning the skills that you will need on test day to rock the exam. It’s one of the things that sets us apart; we put a true focus on mastering the skills necessary to answer every question on the LSAT exam – not the shortcuts/tricks that have worked for some question types from past exams. The best way to do this is to have small classes led by 99th percentile teachers who are well trained and experienced in implementing the Method de Socrates.
While you certainly could focus massive amounts of time spent prepping for the test trying to categorize and memorize every LSAT question type (and the associated “trick” to answering it) that has ever been surfaced on the exam, it’s much more useful to develop the skills that the test is specifically testing.
The never before seen LSAT curve ball is inevitable on test day. Without a proper skill set to fall back on, you’ll be searching for answers, and may very likely work yourself in to a panic that could throw off your timing and affect you on other sections of the test.
Perhaps the missing link in your LSAT prep is a little touch of Socrates. While most of our instructors certainly don’t look like Socrates (some ARE participating in Movember, so it can be hard to tell), and classes aren’t taught in the hills beneath an olive tree in the a Greek city-state, there is an awful lot of Socrates in the way we teach.