Identifying the issues quickly in different questions

[NathanH189]

Hi,

My LSAT is next Sunday, and I am still having doubts for in the logical reasoning section.

How well I perform on any given LR section is dependent on the type of day it is, what kind of mood etc.; basically just external factors that influence my cognitive ability. That is a precarious trait that I have, but at the same time I do not think it is exclusive to me, because when people are tired, they tend not to perform as well as they would if they were energetic and awake for example.

The level 5 difficulty questions give me the most headaches (as is definitely true with everyone), and its mainly with questions like 'most strongly supported by' and 'most vulnerable to criticism'. Matching flaws and similar reasoning questions, for example, I have the best time completing because you normally look for the use of language in the stimulus and match it in the answer choices. But I find that you really have to think long and hard about the two difficult types of questions that I outlined above in order to complete them, and that is sometimes something you cannot afford to do in the LSAT as we all know.

I will provide two examples of questions that I have had trouble with. I understand why the answer choices are what they were, but I have trouble applying the same method in looking for the issues in similar questions types to these examples.

These are taken from questions 21 and 25 of Superprep II 2015 part C section 2.

Question 21.


The answer is (E).

Coming to the answer, however, was quite difficult. Of course, the giveaway in the argument was that 'cultural anthropologists, however, should employ both approaches, and also attend to a third'.

I understand why it is the answer, but as I said before, how do I find the key words, key issues in each future type of 'strongly supported' question so that I know what type of answer I need to look for. Should I circle certain words in the stimulus? Should I pay less attention to visualising the actual subject matter and pay more attention to the argument? Is there a better way?

Question 25.

The answer is (D)

With this one, I ruled out every other answer choice and thus chose (D) by process of elimination. After reading the explanation for this answer, it does make most sense that this is the answer. I think a reason that I had difficulty with this one is the laziness or unawareness of delineating the different groups within this question. I should perhaps make a mental note stipulating that the 'local fishing guide' is a different group to 'recent studies'. I think generally that people when confronted with a wall of information, sometimes may overlook the significance of certain things like this - I certainly did, and I assume that at least some other people do too, because these are the sorts of things that the test tries to trick you with. It is like once you identify that recent studies are separate to the local fishing guide, answer choice (D) just stands out amongst the rest.

So on the basis of these two examples, are there any general rules, methods or systematic ways that I could employ which would be extremely useful for future questions that I undertake?

Many thanks to whoever replies.

[ohthatpatrick]

First, the bad / honest news:
Nothing you would read today or practice for the next week is going to have a significant effect on your LSAT test next week.

It's not like a rookie quarterback could hear some good pointers and suddenly behave like a veteran,
(same metaphor for pretty much any profession in which experience is needed to cultivate better intuition)

I'm not saying YOU'RE a rookie, but the idea is that what actually matters on the LSAT is how well we've groomed our subconscious brain. We do that in part by consciously asking the right questions, but much of differentiates the speed and accuracy of an expert vs. that of someone newer to the test is just experience doing LSAT problems.

Also, the test has WAY too much variety for anyone to effectively pin down ONE process that actually works on all questions. We learn tendencies and typical examples, but the test will always force us to think flexibly at times, no matter how experienced we are, and so we will always have problems for which we need to slow down (the real secret is making sure you're getting through typical examples with as little speed and brainpower as possible).

The constructive / good news:

The first question type you listed (btw, you're not allowed to copy LSAT text in here) was Inference. The two things you know about Inference if you've done your HW:
1. Correct answer will combine multiple facts
2. Strong language is a big red flag in answer choices

When I read through the stim, I couldn't see any obvious openings for combining facts (the typical ones are Conditional / Causal / Quantitative / Comparative language). It looks more comparative than anything else, but there's still no obvious synthesis.

When I read through the answers, I'm quickly discounting answers with strong language
(A) only when?
(B) too often rely on a conception that excludes?
(C)
(D) only by
(E)

Having quickly bailed from those three as soon as I heard their extreme formulation, I dig in deeper to C vs. E, although E is a clear frontrunner, because it's incredibly weak and it sounds like a correct answer to Inference / Reading Comp

X does not necessarily imply Y .... to prove this you only need one example in which X was true but Y wasn't.

Do we have an example where
There is disagreement among anthropologists, but their approaches are NOT incompatible?

Sure! The author is recommending we use both approaches, so she thinks they are compatible. Not only is this answer safely worded and easy to support, we can tell that in order to support it, we would pulling together multiple claims (the 2nd, 3rd, and beginning of the 4th sentences), which is how we should feel when we're picking a correct answer on Inference.

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For the other example you cited, Flaw, you should know:
1. Your job is to come up with some Objection to the conclusion. You should be able to agree with the Premises, but disagree with the Conclusion

On this one, I found it hard to come up with an Objection. It sounded like good logic to me at first. Since the guide said "the most populous = best adapted to pollution" I was having a hard time thinking how I would argue that bullhead is most populous but ISN'T best adapted. Then I looked harder at the Conclusion and saw it was in the form of "If they believe X, they believe Y".

Since I can't stop the rule from going from "most populous to best adapted", I can't stop them from believing Y ... IF they believe X.

But that's when I realized ... maybe we can stop them from believing X. Recent studies say that bullhead is most populous, but did the guide ever say that?

No, so THERE'S our wiggle room.

If you're going to the answers without having figured out your line of objection, you might be spending time in the wrong area. Once I had figured out the possible line of objection, I just scanned for what I was looking for and picked (D). I never even read the other answers.



The two big takeaways for these two problems,
1. on Inference, beware strong language and embrace weak language
2. on Flaw, figure out how you're objecting to the conclusion before moving on
are fairly broad takeaways that WOULD steer you correctly on most examples of Inference and Flaw.

But there will be other examples in which this advice isn't useful, and you need to be using some OTHER mental skillset (for example, in either question type, if you were to see conditional logic language, your thinking would change accordingly).

So I think you might be longing for simpler 'tricks' than what really exist. Make sure you own the different strategies / tendencies for different question types (e.g. Flaw, Inference, Suff Assumption, etc.) as well as for different argument types (causal arguments, comparative ones, conditional logic, statistics, rebuttals, etc.)

But ultimately you'll still have to process a lot of intangibles on the fly. It's a tricky test! Good luck.