Diagram

[joshmercer80]

This was supposed to be an easy game from what other people have told me, but for some reason I way over-thought the game. I was trying to figure out what kind of game it was and attack with a strategy. I failed miserabely. I then sat back and just used reasoning to answer the questions and that worked much better for me. How can I keep from choking on a question like this on a real exam? What diagram set up would you suggest? I didnt even come up with an effective diagram. I just ran out different situations for questions 3 & 4 and was able to answer them that way. Question 1 was a freebie. I then went back to question 2 & 5 and was able to answer them from the patterns i saw emerging. Please show me the way. Thank you.

[giladedelman]

So sorry for the delayed response! I must have closed my browser, or something, when I originally posted. (A good LSAT score doesn't necessarily imply computer savvy.)

I've attached a little diagram for this game. I think it falls pretty well into the Open Assignment category, with the added wrinkle that we have to pay attention to who's driving the cars.

I think the best way for you to avoid having a similar meltdown is to continue practicing until you achieve mastery with the standard, bread-and-butter games. The fact that you didn't recognize this as assignment, for instance, indicates that you could profit from spending some more time working on that game type, at the very least. The better you master the standard games, the more easily you'll handle whatever curveballs the LSAT throws at you.

(Also, when you're totally lost, Open Assignment is a pretty useful catch-all setup.)

Does that help?

[joshmercer80]

Thank you for the help. I've done a number of open assignments before and typically do well with them. I guess I was just overshooting the problem and expecting more inferences and that may have caused my panicking into error. I do realize I need a lot more practice and that's what I'm working on right now. Again thank you.

[tommywallach]

Here's another diagram and explanation to add to the resources! I'll be posting explanations to the questions based on this diagram in the Game 1 thread. Hope it helps!

[steves]

I wound up diagramming this game the same way Tommy did. However, I started out diagramming it with the workers on the bottom. This would not likely have been too helpful as each worker can go in only one car. However, I did not realize I was headed down the wrong path until I saw question 1 arranged by car, and figured I needed to rearrange my diagram the same way.

The reason I started putting the workers on the bottom was that I thought I heard or read somewhere--not sure if it was an Interact lesson, LG Study Guide, or perhaps in another PT explanation, that we should see what or who the rules relate to--and put them along the bottom. So since the rules handle the workers, I started to put them along the bottom. What was I misreading or misinterpreting, and what is the correct way to quickly determine what to put on the bottom (or please let me know where it is in the Study Guide or Interact lesson)?

[ohthatpatrick]

I’m not sure what advice you’re remembering, but it seems skewed to me.

For example, in Ordering games, we would normally put the 1 thru 7 on the bottom, right? But the rules are still going to talk about the People.

Seeing stuff like:
Paul is before Roger
Tom comes exactly two appointments after Stan

Would that make you put P, R, S, T on the bottom?

I know you’re searching for a “rule”, but almost everything in LSAT has exceptions, so there’s not a failsafe rule. We still have to adapt to each game.

The general guidelines for me:
1. If ANYTHING involves ordering, then ordering should be at the bottom
2. Otherwise, if there are grouping tasks (these 2 people MUST be together … “friends” / these 2 people CAN’T be together … “enemies”), then the groups should be at the bottom.
3. Otherwise ... there's not Ordering or Grouping to this game? Weird. Okay, let's improvise.

If I’m reading this game, I’m seeing 6 people … am I putting them in Order or in Groups (or something weirder).

Car 1 and Car 2 sound like groups, because more than one person would fit in a car. Ordering games normally have 1:1 ratio of people and containers (6 ppl, 6 slots)

The RULES are where we really get a stronger sense of whether our task is Ordering, Grouping, etc.

“G must be with L” - classic Grouping rule (“Friends”)

So if I think it’s a Grouping game, 6 ppl and 2 groups, my next question is “Open or Closed”? Do they tell me how many people per group?

They say each group has “at least two”, so it’s Open. I need to consider the possible numbers. How can we break up 6 things into 2 containers, with a minimum of 2 per container.

4-2 or 2-4 or 3-3

So the one twist in this Open Grouping game is the Assignment task: we have to assign one person in each group as the Driver.

How do I want to handle that? Should I just circle whichever dude is the driver? Hmm. I could. Or I guess I could designate one of the rows in each group as the driver row. That seems a bit cleaner.

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The big point from that "inner monologue" is that you try to start with the biggest, easiest questions ... find the stuff you recognize (6 people, 2 cars), ask yourself the general questions first (order, grouping, both, or other?), get the general scaffolding of the game, and then deal with the curveball twist or detail last (but still do so thoughtfully).

If you’re looking for more practice with this, try a few things:
1. Do “setup-only” drills, in which you open up a pdf and just give yourself 10 minutes total to set up all four games. This keeps you from going to far/long with any one setup, and it exposes you to a lot of these front-end decision making situations. If you know anything about pro football, you probably know that rookie quarterbacks struggle a ton when they first play in the NFL: the speed of the real game is faster and more pressured than their practice … there are so many variables to simultaneously consider and process. What makes a veteran quarterback so good is simply the practice hours. Through lots of training, your intuition is better able to supply you with a “good guess”. Those intuitions will still be wrong sometimes. Even after having done LSAT for as long as I have, I will still sometimes try a new game, think I should set up frames, and once done with the game decide that the frames were probably a dumb idea. That’s okay. We can’t perfectly diagnose every game on the fly. Just keep practicing.

2. Focus mainly on the rules. See if you’ve got Ordering, Grouping, Assignment tasks. Looking at the rules is the quickest way to determine game type.