Hello,
I took too long on this game due to making many, many hypotheticals. Can someone please explain to me how I could have been more efficient with this game? After I diagrammed it and wrote out the rules, I wanted to front-end the game but felt like it was more of a back-end game. Maybe I"m wrong and didn't make the right connections. I ended up with so many hypotheticals to answer the questions and taking much longer than I should have.
Would appreciate any help on this!
LSAT Forum
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- tswiftforever
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Vinny Gambini
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- christine.defenbaugh
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Atticus Finch
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Re: Diagram
Thanks for asking this question, tswiftforever!
This is absolutely a back end game. Our initial setup is fairly sparse. We aren't able to make any specific assignments. We are, however, able to define one row for majors and one row for non-majors. Aside from that we have a few rules we can represent visually, but not insert directly into the diagram. There's simply not much else to do!
Notice that 5 of the 7 questions are conditional questions. This is a common feature of back-end games: the bulk of the work of the game is in playing out those conditionals! The good news is that because there's very little to do in the setup, we should be able to get through it very very quickly. The danger is wasting time on the setup looking for inferences that simply are not there to make.
The key to working through the conditional questions efficiently is to be ready to immediately jot down a new diagram to work on. Don't waste time trying to see the hypothetical in your head first. If you end up having to write it down anyway (which is likely), that's just precious seconds lost.
Additionally, if a hypothetical for a particular question has a clear and obvious split (as questions 4, 5, and 6 do), don't hesitate! Jot them both down! Committing to that and carrying it out is far faster than waffling about whether or not to draw it.
I see students every day waste inordinate amounts of time trying to decide whether they should draw out the hypothetical/split or not, hoping they'll see the answer in their head, convinced that that would be faster than drawing it out. And yet, if they had simply committed to drawing out the conditional immediately, and moved into it with confidence, they would have finished the question in a fraction of the time.
The inferences in the conditionals of questions 2-6 are not particularly difficult ones, as LSAT inferences go. But they are inferences you are unlikely to see without moving efficiently into the diagramming.
Please let me know if this helps, or if you have any additional questions!
This is absolutely a back end game. Our initial setup is fairly sparse. We aren't able to make any specific assignments. We are, however, able to define one row for majors and one row for non-majors. Aside from that we have a few rules we can represent visually, but not insert directly into the diagram. There's simply not much else to do!
Notice that 5 of the 7 questions are conditional questions. This is a common feature of back-end games: the bulk of the work of the game is in playing out those conditionals! The good news is that because there's very little to do in the setup, we should be able to get through it very very quickly. The danger is wasting time on the setup looking for inferences that simply are not there to make.
The key to working through the conditional questions efficiently is to be ready to immediately jot down a new diagram to work on. Don't waste time trying to see the hypothetical in your head first. If you end up having to write it down anyway (which is likely), that's just precious seconds lost.
Additionally, if a hypothetical for a particular question has a clear and obvious split (as questions 4, 5, and 6 do), don't hesitate! Jot them both down! Committing to that and carrying it out is far faster than waffling about whether or not to draw it.
I see students every day waste inordinate amounts of time trying to decide whether they should draw out the hypothetical/split or not, hoping they'll see the answer in their head, convinced that that would be faster than drawing it out. And yet, if they had simply committed to drawing out the conditional immediately, and moved into it with confidence, they would have finished the question in a fraction of the time.
The inferences in the conditionals of questions 2-6 are not particularly difficult ones, as LSAT inferences go. But they are inferences you are unlikely to see without moving efficiently into the diagramming.
Please let me know if this helps, or if you have any additional questions!
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