(Sorry if this is the wrong forum, I wasn’t sure whether it should be here or IMHO.)
I’m taking the LSAT on Saturday*. It is not for law school admission. (I originally signed up when I thought I might go to law school, but I’ve since decided not to go. But I’m still signed up to take the test.) But with a high enough score I qualify to teach LSAT for companies like Kaplan and Princeton Review and so on so there’s at least that riding on it.
The only part of the test that worries me is the logic games part. Every question I answer in this section, I answer correctly. But I’m slow. I usually only get two or three of the games finished. One or two remain unfinished.
So I am looking for advice about how to become more speedy, if possible. Of course there’s just a week to go, so there may not be much I can do about this, of course. But any tips would still be appreciated.
Typically, my approach is to make a little diagram filling in as much information as can be deduced from the rules. (Usually not much, though occasionally on practice tests I find that the rules end up leaving only a few possibilities.) I also note down the rules in a formal-logic inspired shorthand, for quick reference without having to look back up at the problem as worded in English. Then I just basically tackle each question one at a time. I haven’t really found any useful patterns like “for this type of question, use this approach”. Such approaches would probably be helpful, I just haven’t stumbled onto any yet. (“Which COULD BE true” questions coming later in a game can be fairly easy since I’ll often have sketched out enough scenarios for past questions that I can find one that satisfies one of the answer choices. That’s the only “approach” I’ve taken conscious note of so far. “Which COULD NOT BE true” questions tend to slow me down the most, as I seem to have to just check each answer choice one at a time. Occasionally a series of deductions will occur to me making this question type easier, but usually I find myself just trying each choice til I find one that leads to contradiction.)
As I’ve practiced over the past week, it seems like I’m getting a little faster. A couple of times I even managed to answer a few questions on the fourth game. But not reliably. I wonder if there is anything I can do to go reliably faster on the logic games section given just a week between now and test day.
There are only four kinds of logic games. Each of them has a particular way to diagram them. Get a Kaplan book on Craigslist or search the web and learn these.
Yeah, there are a lot of books that explain the games.
Also, you know that the LSAT does not itemize your score within each section, right? There’s just one lump score for the whole thing. Depending on your natural inclination towards the logic games, you might be better off polishing another topic rather than trying to increase your logic games speed 25% in a week.
Well, like I said, the logic games part is the only one I’m worried about.
To clarify, what I was avoiding saying outright is, I typically ace all the other portions.* This is the only one that gives me any trouble.
Thanks for the book suggestions so far. I work at Kaplan (teaching GRE) and have taken a look at what they have for the LSAT. Interestingly enough, it seems they advise fairly well exactly what I already do for the most part. It seems like I just need to learn how to do it faster. There may not really be any techniques for this other than simply practicing a lot, in which case this thread is fairly useless, in which case my apologies…
(ETA: I did see that Kaplan gives some ideas for how to know when and how to skip around between questions within a particular game, and that will probably help if I can get the method down between now and then…)
*I had better, after seven godforsaken years (so far) in grad school…
When I took the LSAT in 2002, the very first question of every new game was intentionally an absolute gimme, so if you’re running out of time and stuck on, say, the second game, take one minute to skip ahead and do those. Assuming, of course, the test hasn’t changed.
Yeah, there should be information in the prep books you have available to you about how to quickly identify the nature of the game and what kind of diagram works best for that kind, so practice with the preliminary kind of administrative work should definitely help you to be more efficient. If you’re anything like me, a lot of your time is spent not figuring out a plan, but checking and rechecking your decision to make absolutely sure it was the right plan. If you have the mechanics down pat and you know you can trust them, you can get right into the actual facts without second-guessing the intuition that got you to that point.
Personally I didn’t feel too pressed for time during that section so I never invested in remembering the strategies that say to answer questions of type X, then type Y, then type Z, but the logic behind those strategies is pretty straightforward - some questions only require a couple of data points to answer, while some need more background work. It might be worth your time to commit those to heart so that if it comes down to it you’ll know right away which questions to get to directly.
For what it’s worth, I found it to be the case that the puzzles on the exam were much more straightforward than those I had practiced with.
What book had you practiced with, Jimmy?
When I took the test, I found that the practice puzzles had let me down severely, i.e., the practice ones had something like a max of 5 variables, and when I got to the test proper, it didn’t hesitate to use questions with 7 or 8 variables quite regularly. Threw my game way off.
The best book I found for the LSAT logic games (and this was 10 years ago now) was the Kaplan Triple-Prep. I got way faster at them after working on the games chapter in that book. It gives really great techniques for recognizing and solving the various types of puzzles you’ll get.
Of course, it having been 10 years since I took the LSAT, I have no idea if they even still make that book.
An anecdote – when I took it ('lo back in the dark days of October 1994), I raced through every section. After our first break, my seatmates berated me – I’d put my pencil down so fast they panicked, thinking the time was almost over. But it wasn’t. I’m just a master at standardized testing. After the break came the games section. And I finished about 75%. As far as we could tell, no one in the room finished that section. It didn’t stop me from notching a very respectable score – enough that I got into a first-tier law school even with a C+ GPA in undergrad.
I’m sure the test has changed in the intervening 15 years (dear god). But my point is that you shouldn’t freak about not finishing the games section. Most people don’t finish that section, so the curve takes it into account. Just keep practicing and your speed will increase. And if you don’t make it to the end, which you probably won’t, don’t sweat it.
Mine was a Princeton Review book of practice questions. I scored much higher on the actual exam than on the self-exams. Maybe I just hadn’t been paying attention.
This is the only one that gives me any trouble.