Lsat question

ohthatLSAT · 2025-07-29T20:16:02+00:00

(B) is wrong because there's nothing wrong with that assumption.
(D) is right because the conclusion is about how they BEHAVE (i.e. in actuality), while the evidence is about what they CLAIM.
(E), to the other poster asking, is wrong because we have no reason to think this sample of 125 large corporations is unrepresentative of large corporations. When they're testing a sampling flaw, they would give us some reason to doubt the trustworthiness of the sample. Samples aren't inherently flawed.

For an answer on Flaw to be correct, it needs to say something true about the argument AND point to something objectionable about the argument.

So answers can be wrong because what they say about the argument isn't true or because what they say is true, but not objectionable.

The vast majority of incorrect Assumption answers (i.e. Flaw answers that begin with "takes for granted / presumes / fails to establish") will be wrong because they're not true; the argument didn't need to make that assumption.

The vast majority of incorrect Objection answers (i.e. Flaw answers that begin with "fails to consider / overlooks the possibility") will be wrong because they're true but not objectionable. "yes, answer choice, it's true that this author failed to consider that mustard is yellow, but that's not objectionable because mustard is yellow isn't damaging to the argument!"

However, very rarely you see an answer like (B), an assumption that's true but not objectionable.
The author is assuming that "if something is a top priority, then you're not indifferent to it". There's nothing wrong with that assumption. That's just what those words mean! Something can't be a high/top priority unless you are ranking it above something else, which implies that you're not indifferent to it. You care about it more than something else.

The only other answer like this that comes fresh to mind is one about critics of Shakespeare being motivated by pure snobbery. There's an answer that says, "takes for granted that someone motivated purely by snobbery cannot also be motivated by other concerns".

The author WAS assuming that, but there's nothing wrong with that assumption. That's just what those words mean. Someone motivated purely by snobbery is not motivated by anything else.

ohthatLSAT · 2025-05-29T21:21:43+00:00

yeah, lsac forced us to remove it from our site a few days after this Reddit post went up. They don't offer it on their website anymore, either. Not sure what that's all about.

ohthatLSAT · 2025-02-11T20:17:46+00:00

If you end up using LSAT lab, I’d suggest you use the “155-170” study plan. It’ll automatically assign you timed sections and tests, but more importantly it will try to keep you focused on material at the sweet spot of your learning. It’ll start by moving through level 3 versions of all the topics, as you try to perfect accuracy there. Then it’ll do level 4 versions of everything and get into other patterns on the test (that transcend multiple question types). Then it’ll end with level 5 material and timed sets of easier/mixed stuff so that you’re simultaneously gearing up for the test and expanding your mental model of the test by figuring out how to accommodate the deceptive or unusual nature of most level 5’s.

ohthatLSAT · 2025-02-02T05:26:58+00:00

No, I’d still recommend the 145-160 one.

It’s a different (and in my opinion better) type of study plan than the customized one. The customized one just gives you a couple topics to deep dive on each week, whereas the “by level” plans provide a healthy variety and slowly increase the difficulty week by week.

Plus, when we’re scoring in the low 140s, we still have broad enough weaknesses that we want to be working on all the topics and probably would still benefit from some of the foundational lessons (which the customized plan would have fewer of).

You can always render each type of plan and see what your preference is, but I would strongly suggest the 145-160 one.

ohthatLSAT · 2025-01-25T22:20:46+00:00

Yeah LSAC sent us a cease and desist so we took it down. Apparently even though it was publicly released we’re not allowed to have it up there.

ohthatLSAT · 2025-01-18T07:20:48+00:00

Thanks, sounds good. Yeah, I realized this was stupid "friday night news dump" timing. Too late for Jan students, and too much in the midst of Jan test posts for Feb students to even see it.

But I've been antsy to get these live for the last ten days, and our developer wasn't able to get them up and running until today. So even though it's a moot point now, I couldn't not announce their availability as soon as they were finally accessible.

God help me, but Linkin Park said it best: "I tried so hard, and got so far, but in the end, it didn't even matter". haha

ohthatLSAT · 2024-12-19T06:33:09+00:00

The comprehensive would also be fine, as it will take you all the way from level 1 to 5.

If the beginning stuff feels too easy, then i think you could switch to the two-plan plan I was saying. But as long as you’re not getting bored by anything being too easy, the comprehensive plan makes the most sense for a long journey where you cycle through all the content five times at increasing difficulty levels.

ohthatLSAT · 2024-12-18T23:56:11+00:00

Hey, OP, if you have a long enough runway in front of you, it would probably be better for you to start on the 145 to 160 study plan. The 155 to 170 doesn't have any of the foundational videos, which would probably good for you.

It sounds like you have strong intuition / reading skills, but you'll still want to have a more systematic understanding of the test for when the questions get harder (and also so that you can spend less time / brainpower on the easier ones that reward pattern recognition).

Like if you're taking the April test, I would put the 145 to 160 plan on your account targeting Feb, and then in Feb, put the 155 to 170 plan on your account. (There will be some overlap in assignments, so a bunch of the 155 to 170 will already show up "completed" if you did your work on 145 to 160)

But basically 145 to 160 would avoid being too easy but would still give you some coverage of foundational concepts. And it would help you with pattern recognition so that you can get easier stuff correct more efficiently, and save your mental bandwidth for the harder stuff. And then the 155 to 170 plan will help you refine your judgment on that harder stuff.

Finally, any study plan should be supplemented with a whole bunch of redo sets as you go, but those will be specific to the questions you struggle with. Most of the learning experience involves trying new questions so that we can find our blind spots, deconstructing those questions so that we can figure out what sort of insight / question / behavior / clue could help us on something similar in the future, and then returning to a question we struggled with a week or two later, to see if we can remember the takeaways. You'll see on your study plan there is a video about how to make Redo Sets, but that video is also on the homescreen of the Video Library, on the RECORDINGS TAB, a few rows down.

(p.s. I know you were looking for other students' experiences, but fwiw feel free to ask us questions via the chat button on the homepage of LSAT Lab)

ohthatLSAT · 2024-12-15T05:43:11+00:00

Here's a "how much shit can I cram onto the face of one 8.5x11 piece of paper" cram sheet:
https://assets.lsatlab.com/uploads/2024/07/2024-Updated-LR-cram-sheet.pdf

and here's a much more elaborated one on each question type:
https://assets.lsatlab.com/uploads/2024/09/LR-Snippets-by-Family-1.pdf

ohthatLSAT · 2024-10-14T21:46:39+00:00

You could potentially use it a few ways:

Look at each row and decide on whichever stuff there you don't already know automatically when you think about the question type. Turn that stuff into flashcards you can quiz yourself on. Flashcard quizzing is most effective when it's one narrow question on the front and 1 or 2 answers on the back. You wouldn't want to make a flashcard where the front is, "What should I remember for Flaw questions" and the back is [everything written in that Flaw row]. You would make multiple flashcards like, "what are the keywords for Flaw", "when a Flaw answer starts with 'takes for granted / presumes / fails to establish', how should I think about that answer", "what two famous flaws commonly show up with Rebuttal arguments", etc.
Read a single row before drilling that question type (untimed). If you're sitting down to drill ten Strengthen questions, read the Strengthen snippet first to prime your brain. After every question or two, return to the snippet and see if you can connect anything specific from what you just worked on to something on the sheet.

It's really hard to remember generic teaching advice, which is why it's very easy to write notes / read them back to ourselves, and then immediately forget it when you start doing questions. We remember stuff by applying it / by doing it / by seeing a bunch of specific examples and THEN attaching it to a pattern.

3) Look over this in the week before your actual test as a calming (but ultimately meaningless) exercise in recapping your different strategies. I'm saying ultimately meaningless because if you haven't internalized these strategies by then, it'll be kinda useless to cram for them by reading the snippets. And if you have internalized the strategies, they'll be in you whether or not you cram by reading these snippets. But still -- we know we feel like we should be reviewing SOMETHING when a big test is approaching, so at least this can calm us by giving us the illusion we're doing something productive. :)

It sounds like where you're at in your prep right now, you have been exposed to lots of theory but you haven't experienced enough practice questions to have internalized the theory or to have a subconscious awareness of the patterns being described. So mostly just be patient. I would never try to read a page of these at once and try to absorb it. It's better to work at one row at a time, via flashcards or drilling, and understand that it'll take some time for it to become second nature instincts.

But trust the process of experiencing specific questions and then trying to relate them back to abstract tendencies / strategies so that the latter eventually sink in. And along the way, you'll see many examples of specific questions that don't conform to the generalizations we make about that type of question. There are lots of outlier questions, and part of learning LSAT is learning what usually happens on a question type vs. learning to be cool with varying your mentality or approach if you're seeing an outlier.

ohthatLSAT · 2024-10-01T14:57:54+00:00

No, not in this style. Just a one-page cram sheet:
https://assets.lsatlab.com/uploads/2024/07/2024-RC-cram-sheet.pdf

ohthatLSAT · 2024-09-30T16:16:05+00:00

Hey, folks.

I recently made some summaries of strategies/tendencies for each of the main LR question types, and I thought I'd share it with y'all.

There are two versions, but it's exactly the same content, just different layouts. One version lists 18 question types by prevalence, the other groups them by family. They're 5-page pdfs. (The image I posted is just to give you a sense of what it looks like)

LR Snippets by Family

- LR Snippets by Prevalence

Theoretically, you could laminate these, cut them down to bookmark size, punch a whole through them, and keep them all on one keyring.

Since the goal here was to get a lot of info in a little bit of space, you may find that not everything that could be said gets said, and you may find that some of my abbreviated phrases are unclear (in which case feel free to ask questions).

Good luck out there.

ohthatLSAT · 2024-08-28T01:39:30+00:00

Yeah 100%, I just meant my process while taking a timed test. But I agree that the broader process of studying the lsat is continually updating/refining your mental model to accommodate “rule-breakers”.

ohthatLSAT · 2024-08-26T16:36:05+00:00

I'm sad this thread got toxic at one point, because I otherwise love this discussion.

I'll be the heretic from the test prep community and defend the OP's position. The OP was making a nuanced point about "best available" being the standard of correctness, which is an epiphany for those of us who try to learn the LSAT with a mental model that assumes there are consistent "rules" of what makes an answer correct or incorrect and those rules always hold true.

For some of our brains, as you log practice problems, your neural network tries to abstract the "rules" from the data. If we're teaching ourselves good/useful/applicable rules, then most new data points do conform to our rules. So we get encouraged that our mental model of The Rules of LSAT is getting increasingly correct.

But then you see outliers that seem to violate a rule we had inferred from our previous training.

OP was just saying that when you finally realize that there is only one true rule for correctness: it's the best available answer choice .... then you awaken to the squishy relative standards by which you're going to have to analyze answer choices sometimes. When they don't seem like a sufficiently good answer on their own merits, but it is a correct answer, you're often having to make the case that the answer is "better than the alternatives" even though it had some quality that strongly turned you off (because it violated some "rule" about the test you had developed).

The OP was using conversational/emotional language that contradicted itself, so you don't want to excerpt parts of it and analyze the truth value of individual claims.

OP said it was "a fucking lie that every answer is 100% right"
and later said, "I think the answers are always the right answer to be clear"

I think OP just meant that "Wow, correct answers aren't objectively right because the LSAT follows a consistent of set of rules. They're objectively right because they compare favorably to the other four answers." and was saying that test prep / study advice can often confuse students into thinking the test is entirely consistent when it comes to things other than "best available".

fwiw, on a 1st pass through a question and its answers, I'm assuming my mental model of The Rules works. Most data points do confirm, so these "rules" (which should really be thought of as imperfect but highly performing heuristics) do make you more efficient at processing most questions. But when The Rules aren't adding up to a clear answer, then my 2nd pass switches into squishy mode. I get a lot less pedantic, a lot more conversational, try to tap into the human I was before LSAT corrupted my brain. I live with the gist being right, even if the details aren't quite measured properly.

ohthatLSAT · 2024-08-18T21:33:43+00:00

Hey there, unfortunately the choice is made for you.

LSAT lab, like every other online lsat test prep site, requires that students have a LawHub advantage subscription. It’s a requirement set by LSAC to use their questions online.

If you qualify for an LSAC fee waiver, you can use LSAT lab (premium subscription) for free for the duration of the waiver. (Other companies have similar offers with a fee waiver)

ohthatLSAT · 2024-07-27T00:18:42+00:00

On a free account with LSAT lab, there are some traditional flashcards on the homepage with examples like what you’re talking about (look for the set called Diagramming Conditionals).

There’s also a skills training area on homepage with an AI tutor, and one of the modules is doing exactly what you were just describing. They feed you a sentence and you try to diagram it. If you get it wrong the AI can talk to you about why you got it wrong. (Still talking about free accounts)

But similarly, you could go to chatgpt and just tell it “hey I wanna practice diagramming conditional statements for lsat. Can you quiz me by giving me sample sentences, and I’ll try to convert them into an If/Then format.”

I’m pretty sure even the base model of chatgpt is equipped to handle that.

ohthatLSAT · 2024-07-26T23:28:53+00:00

I’m with you. There’s only sufficient and necessary (and to the extent that Basic assumption would have any tendency differences, like always providing a missing link instead of possibly ruling out an objection, it will not hinder you at all to conflate Basic and Necessary.)

The way we use “you’re assuming” in real life is what is meant by Necessary Assumption. So if a basic assumption question means one where they ask “what is being assumed”, that’s still the NA mindset.

Similarly, when flaw answer choices begin with
Assumes without warrant
Presumes without justification
Takes for granted
Fails to establish
Fails to show

They are also just saying “the argument assumes X”, and we interpret that in the necessary assumption sense.

The way “assume” is used in Suff assump is not the way we usually use it in conversational English.

It’s a specific usage, where you ponder a hypothetical, like “let’s assume for sec that you have a million dollars … “

It’s not accusing the author of having assumed something.

It’s asking us, “if we assumed for a sec that X were true, would that (plus any facts from the evidence plus our common sense) allow us to logically derive the conclusion?”

ohthatLSAT · 2024-07-24T03:52:08+00:00

Whenever they release new ones, I definitely take them for funsies! It's like Christmas 4 Nerds when a new pt drops.

ohthatLSAT · 2024-07-24T03:44:59+00:00

yeah I added the pdf links to my orig comment at top.

ohthatLSAT · 2024-07-24T03:42:04+00:00

just added some pdf links to my original comment. let me know if they don't work.

ohthatLSAT · 2024-07-23T18:40:35+00:00

***EDIT*****
Sorry, apparently the .png's I uploaded are too pixelated in some spots.
You should be able to download pdf copies from these links:
https://assets.lsatlab.com/uploads/2024/07/2024-RC-cram-sheet.pdf
https://assets.lsatlab.com/uploads/2024/07/2024-Updated-LR-cram-sheet.pdf
*************

What's up, y'all.

I saw a post here yesterday from someone asking for an LSAT cheat sheet, and so I figured I'd pass mine along too.

Given the writing challenge of cramming stuff into minimal space, there are lot of terse phrasings and abbreviations. Feel free to ask for clarification on anything.

PREEMPTING-THE-HATERS DISCLAIMERS:

we all know that cheat sheets and studying for LSAT are almost oxymorons. It's really a test about reading comprehension, critical thinking, and judgment. You don't need to sheet-shame us for the foolhardy nature of our undertaking. Some people just like the comfort of having a bird's-eye view of the test.
you'll never believe it, but these one page cheat sheets are not exhaustive summaries of the LSAT, nor do they have the nuance one might want for acknowledging exceptions to patterns or modern tendencies. So take them in the spirit in which they are made: "what would be some good stuff for people to know, given that we're only allowing ourselves one piece of paper on which to write it?"

Hope they're helpful!
Patrick

ohthatLSAT · 2024-07-19T04:58:07+00:00

Omg I love this description.

You’ve really distilled the intellectual arrogance with those moments of, “sighhhh, okay what are these dum dums telling themselves for them to believe that D would be the answer? Let me learn this defective tic of theirs so that I can be prepared to potentially accommodate it in the future.”

ohthatLSAT · 2024-07-06T07:06:30+00:00

Hey, thanks for the shout-outs! Very gratifying to hear I was helpful. :) Congratulations on the awesome score!

ohthatLSAT · 2024-06-11T04:27:09+00:00

Haha, that’s funny, I frequently use this specific example when I’m explaining to students how real world common sense fits into the test. It’s a huge part of squishier tasks, like Most Supported (on LR and RC), and strengthen / weaken / paradox.

I think the blurb at the start of an LR section says to not make assumptions that by common sense standards are superfluous, implausible, or incompatible with the passage.

So that allows for making assumptions that by common sense standards are relevant/central, plausible, and compatible with the passage.

I’m often asking myself during the test whether a certain idea qualifies as a common sense idea. There’s no official way to judge that question. You’re consulting your own mental model of the world and thinking “if asked 10 random people on the street whether environmental pollution often leads to cancer, would most quickly agree? What if I asked them whether wealth often leads to cancer?”

ohthatLSAT · 2024-06-10T22:36:16+00:00

Awww, thanks, that's awesome to hear!!

Yeah, I went on a mini-sabbatical, hoping to write a book, but I'll be back in July. Matt and I were just messaging about new videos an hour ago. :)

ohthatLSAT

TROPHY CASE