Diagram

[ManhattanPrepLSAT1]

[esthertan0310]

Mind uploading the diagram again? ^_^

Thanks!

[ManhattanPrepLSAT1]

Here's the diagram if you'd prefer this to the video explanation!

[esthertan0310]

Thank you, Matt!

There is no video explanation above actually... I can see a huge blank box only

[tommywallach]

I see it fine, so it must be something on your end. Try another browser, or try updating your java stuff.

-t

[esthertan0310]

sometimes it is because of the connection, which is fairly unstable... never mind, the thing is I can access it now.

[steves]

When I did this game as part of the Session 9 HW (Basic Grouping Practice Set 2), it immediately followed Open Grouping Practice Set 1. So when I read in the passage that "each member serves ON AT LEAST one subcommittee" I thought sure that I was really working with an Open Grouping game--and diagrammed it that way. Since I also thought that the rules dealt with the members rather than the subcommittees, that reinforced diagramming the members horizontally and the subcommittees vertically. When I looked at the answer key and saw it diagrammed as Matt shows above, I re-played it that way. Question 18 seemed to be the only Q where the 3 x 3 diagram worked better. Neither diagram helped me too much with most questions--which figured more on playing with the 3-2-1-1-1-1 theme. Initially determining the 3-2-1-1-1-1 structure came to me much faster from the Open Grouping diagram than from the 3 x 3.

So was this really a basic grouping/mismatch rather than an open grouping game--and does it matter in terms of how to approach it?

[ohthatpatrick]

I feel ya. You definitely COULD think of this game the way you did.

Let’s start by clarifying that “Open Grouping”, in our books, means two very different games:
1. Grouping games, where they haven’t told us how many people there are in each group
and
2. “Options” games, like what you were picturing

“Open Grouping” is a pretty silly name for Options games, in my opinion. Options games (my name for them) are those ones you’re thinking of, the ones where we make the PEOPLE the columns and know that they need AT LEAST ONE of a handful of options.

Open Grouping, as a name, SHOULD just mean that it’s a grouping game (i.e. we’ve got a bunch of people and we’re assigning them to some groups) …. the “open” label just means that the game setup didn’t tell exactly how many people there are per group.

If I said we have seven dudes
F G H J K L M
and three groups,
Licensing, Processing, and Accounting

That’s an open grouping game. I haven't told you how many are each group.

If I told you 2 people are in Licensing, 2 are in Processing, and 3 are in Accounting, then that’s a closed grouping game.

In the open grouping game, how could the 7 people be distributed among the 3 groups?
It could be
7 0 0
6 1 0
etc. (tons of possibilities)

LSAT will normally say, in an Open Grouping game, that each group must have “at least one”.

But don’t let THAT moment alone determine whether you see the game as Grouping or Options.

“Options” games are really rare, so you should not be expecting to see one. If you see "at least one" or "one or more" in the setup, you should start considering, "MIGHT this be an Options game?"

But it’s really the RULES where we know it’s an Options game. There would be some rule comparing the quantity of options each person has:
- Paul has more options than Steve
And there would be some rule talking about whether people had any matching / mismatching options
- Tom and Roger have no options in common

This one does loosely qualify, but I'm sure you see that it doesn't play out like the other Options games we've tried, those delicious ones where the board fills with inferences and very little is left undecided.

So, in this case, it’s not hugely different whether you play this one as a Grouping game or an Options game — it’s not a typical version of either.

(This brings up the broader point that we don’t want to get into thinking too rigidly about game TYPES — most games nowadays are not perfect exemplars of any of the basic game types … it’s better to just think about ordering / grouping / assignment as our basic TASKS … recognize how to symbolize/infer common Ordering and Grouping rules … and think of the diagrams you’ve seen thus far as possible tools … but always stay flexible and willing to improvise)

On my page for this game, I would just have this
__ __ __ | __ __ __ | __ __ __

I like my scenarios as horizontal as possible, so that when I need to switch into plug-n-chug mode, it’s quick and easy to compactly write out scenarios near the answer choices.

I would have had the two frames
M __ __ | M __ __ | M __ __
W __ __ | W __ __ | W __ __

and the 3 2 1 1 1 1 numerical distribution.

From there, every question really hinges on initially asking “Does this mean M is in all 3 or that W is?”

[ChentuoZ870]

This is a game that inspires me a lot about some "shortcuts" of the LG grouping question.

From the condition given we can see F/G and H/I cannot be in the same group, and it leaves either M/P is the member that serves in all three subcommittee.

Since no more condition is given, we can infer that, if No more question-specific condition is given, then:

H and I are logically equivolent, shich means:

if choice that contain H sustains, then if H is replaced with I, it would stuill sustain.

So the same for F and G, M and P.
Then you can see that quite a lot of answer choice is logically equivolent.
Since there is only one right choice, so they are all wrong choices.