We are often asked whether or not we use real LSAT games in our class (the answer is YES! The vast majority of the questions featured in class, homework, and from our books are 100% real LSAT questions!), and the question has been asked so many times that the question now reveals more than the answer itself. Someone, at some point, was teaching the LSAT using fake games, and those students were not happy. Whoever that is/was, shame on you – may your pencils be always dull and your erasers leave annoying streaks on your paper.

But, the truth is that our site does sport a rather large number of fake games. What’s up with that? You thought Manhattan LSAT keeps it real; grade A, pure 100% USDA LSAT beef. We do, I swear, but we do like to dip our toes into the world of synthetic LSAT stimulants for extra practice. There are two big reasons for us having fakes. One is that we want to write games that are harder than the usual ones out there so we can push our students’ brains past their usual limits. But the most important reason we have these games is to hone our teacher’s skills. Every one of our teachers must write a logic game as part of his or her training, along with many other curricular and pedagogical challenges (up to but not including having to walk across a bed of coals while reading aloud a reading comp passage).

There are a few interesting challenges to writing an LSAT-like logic game. The first is to write one that is like a game one might see on the LSAT but without actually mimicking a game (it wouldn’t be much of a challenge to simply replace all the nouns and verbs of an existing LSAT game). Along with developing an innovative but realistic game, our teachers-in-training must try to achieve “duh-ness” with their questions. What’s “duh-ness” you ask? Have you ever been working on a question, spending tons of time on testing out answer choices, and then when you get to the right answer and finally see its rightness you say – perhaps aloud – “duh!”?  There it is: pure duh-ness. It comes from the fact that the logic game section is designed to test your ability to make inferences, not your ability to do trial-and-error. Lawyers, as far as I can tell from various movies and run-ins with the law, are not doing a lot of trial-and-error when developing legal strategies. Consider switching counsel if you’re on trial for grand larceny and your lawyer says “Hmmm, what sort of defense should I use with this client? I’m feeling lucky, let’s spin the strategy-wheel-of-fortune and find out!” Since the logic games section is testing your ability to make logical inferences not spin your wheels, the right answer is generally something you could reach through a step of logical moves. Thus, the other challenge for our teachers is to avoid writing a game where a ton of trial-and-error is needed to arrive at the right answers, and instead you can solve them through a slick combination of moves.

It sounds like our teachers are getting a lot out of this, but what’s in it for you? Go right ahead and solve our games if you dare – some of them are pretty tough (I’m particularly proud of Jambalaya – one of my gruesome concoctions). In fact, right now we’re running a series where we show a game in two forms – a simple and complex version – to highlight some of the typical twists that the LSAT throws at us. If you want to stretch yourself, try to win the prize for best explanation on our forums, or, even better, write a kick-ass duh-full extra question to one of our games (if you post it on our forums, we’ll test it out in our lab). But, in the end, treat our games like a tasty yet questionably nutritious food – they’re the ice cream of LSAT prep. Real LSAT games and a hearty strategy guide are the meat of your LSAT prep. They are the most duh games around, and they are the meat and potatoes of our curriculum.

If logic games are your bugaboo, consider taking our Live Online Logic Games Intensive Course.  This six session course focuses solely on the games section of the exam and is, like all Manhattan LSAT courses, taught by a 99th percentile instructor.

"What's that you say, old Chap? The water's polluted? With Dioxin? Oh my. Oh my indeed."

Like snowflakes of intellectual pain, the hardest LSAT question is different for each and every one of us – it’s up to us to look into our hearts and find the question that is burning a hole through an artery. For me, that was PT45, S1, Q12 – the dioxin question. Oh how we fought, oh how we struggled!

Let me walk you through our relationship.

The conclusion of the argument is that, as opposed to what most people are thinking, dioxin released from a mill does NOT cause fish to have abnormal hormone levels. Why? Two premises are given to support this – and here’s where we had our first fight L: dioxin decomposes quite slowly and when the mill shuts down, the fishy hormone levels quickly return to normal.

At this point, me and question 12 were still on speaking terms, but when I looked at her answer choices, oh the pain! The correct answer – the one that most weakens the argument – states that dioxin actually is washed away pretty quickly from the mill area. Sounds painless enough – until you think about it! How does that weaken that argument? I was lost.

My colleague Matt Sherman cleared it up for me with a great forum explanation. You can go read it, but I’d rather tell you in my own words as a program of catharsis. Breathe deeply…OK, here we go:

So, the argument starts by telling us about a supposed causal relationship – folks are suggesting that dioxin might cause the fishy hormone levels to freak out. The author disagrees—he feels that dioxin is unlikely to be the cause—and attempts to discredit the causal claim. How does he do that? Let’s look at a simpler example to clear that up:

It’s been raining all week, and now I have tons of warts. Apparently, rain landing on your skin causes warts.

How would you weaken that claim? There are a few ways:

1.       Show that there’s another cause: evil thoughts cause warts!

2.       Show that someone else got rained on and no warts appeared.

3.       Show that warts appeared when there was no rainfall. (so, something else is causing them)

Pretty straightforward so far! Now, let’s change the argument:

It’s been raining for a week, and Tom now has tons of warts. Tom concluded that rain landing on skin causes warts. But it was raining all last summer, and nobody got even one wart, ever. So, it is unlikely that Tom is correct.

That seems like a good way to discredit that claim, right? It’s basically #2. But now, in a strange twist of LSAT fate, we must weaken that entire argument! How would we do that? Before you read on, what would you say?

You might say this: Yes, it rained, but everyone was indoors the entire summer, enjoying air conditioning, so the rain never touched our skin.

In effect, what we’ve done is said that “raining all last summer” did not actually disprove the original claim. The argument tried to show that the alleged cause, (rain on skin), happened without the effect, (warts), occurring, but in fact there wasn’t a situation in which we had our supposed cause.

Let’s get back to dioxin (by the way, I think dioxin sounds very tasty).

Here’s the original claim: The fish have strange hormone levels and are exposed to dioxin; one possible explanation is that dioxin caused the hormone freak-out.

And here’s the full argument: The fish have strange hormone levels and are exposed to dioxin; one possible explanation is that dioxin caused the hormone freak-out.

But that’s not true because we have a case of dioxin without a hormone freak-out. Let me explain: even though the mill shut down there was still dioxin (since it takes a LONG time to decompose), and we didn’t see a hormone freak-out! You can’t conclude it was the dioxin!

To weaken that, let’s add in the correct answer: dioxin gets washed away quickly by the stream. This allows us to say this: Hey, when the mill shut down, the dioxin actually did leave the premises, so you haven’t proved jack!

What a strange question. If you’re interested, try your hand at this one:

As cities have become more crowded, we’ve seen a lot more cases of schizophrenia in urban centers. People say that overcrowding has caused these higher rates of schizophrenia. However, I disagree! Five years ago, the city of Toledo built enough housing to accommodate every single person in the city, and since then, the city’s population has not expanded, there has been no change in the rate of schizophrenia since then.

Can you weaken that argument using the same sort of maneuver that was used in the dioxin question?

Post your answer! Good luck! And thanks for letting me get that off my chest.

There's got to be a better way to decide whether or not to retake the LSAT

If you took the LSAT on June 6^th and were less than pleased with the outcome, then consider attending our free online review of the exam next Monday night (7/11) at 8pm EST.  Two of our instructors will be breaking down some of the harder questions from the exam and offering advice on whether or not retaking in October is a good choice for you.

Speaking of ‘the great retake debate’, here are a few questions you should ask yourself as you begin to make your retake considerations:

• Did I have a bad day? If June 6, 2011 was a bad testing day for you (e.g. the person next to you had a nervous twitch, severe halitosis, or uncontrollable flatulence that threw you off your game), you probably knew it upon leaving the exam.  We train our students to practice predicting their scores. So ask yourself: did this feel like an awful exam during and after the test?  If yes, chances are you won’t have a bad day again.  Check to see your law school’s LSAT policy, keep studying, and prepare to rock the exam next time.  If no, then it is likely that you have a lot of work to do to get where you need to be.
• Are the law schools I am applying to considering my top score only or an average of all recorded LSATs? For obvious reasons, this is a huge consideration!  If your June score was fairly consistent with your practice test averages, and the school(s) you are applying to are going to average your LSAT scores, why risk posting a lower score? 
• Did I dedicate enough time to LSAT prep? Many students underestimate the amount of work it takes to properly prepare for the LSAT.  Did you give yourself enough time to study? Could you have done a bit more?  If you answered “yes” to this second question, reevaluate your study regiment and consider taking the exam again. Keep in mind that most people don’t improve that much the second time around. The average person who re-takes the LSAT with a score between 150 and 160 improves only 2.4 points on the re-take (and the re-take improvement gets worse as you go up the score ladder).

For more on LSAT scores and the decision to retake, take a look at these past articles:

-          Should I retake the LSAT?

-          LSAT policies for the top 15 law schools (from jdMission’s blog)

Warm Up Those Medulla Oblongatas!

Yet another sign of my geekiness: I love Tuesdays because that’s when the NY Times has a science section. (And for those who are struggling with science passages on the LSAT, it’s not a bad place to start getting some extra practice – though throw in some more technical material as well). Last Tuesday there was an article that caught my eye: Brain Calisthenics for Abstract Ideas is about research on training kids’ intuitive senses about abstract problems. What the white lab coat folks did is develop a computer program that made kids match graphs to equations. The kids didn’t need to solve anything, they just needed to match them on gut instinct (which here means a general understanding of how equations graph out).

I love it! I used to teach math and I did some of this sort of thing – we’d always work on estimating answers before we learned algorithms (the formal steps for solving something). I think building up a student’s intuitive sense of a problem is essential. The question is how to do it for the LSAT?

One way we do it is through the LSAT Arcade. Our curriculum team came up with a bunch of different games, that work very specific mental micro-muscles and builds your intuitive sense of things.

Another tool in your arsenal is lots of practice! The tests conducted in the NY Times article all included lots of practice. So don’t think that you can simply play our cool video game and get a 175 on the LSAT. You need to do tons of LSAT practice tests too. Your goal is to train your brain to begin to, “pick up on differences before [you] can fully articulate them.” But you also want to learn what you’ve picked up on – that’s where learning LSAT strategy comes into play.

One thing I want to make clear about this approach to the LSAT is that it’s only one part of the puzzle. Anyone who has taken a practice test knows that the LSAT requires some very close reading. It’s very easy to be fooled by a stray word so going on instinct alone is far from enough. But, having a strong instinct allows you to know what to look for, what moves to make to get out of “corners,” and generally be a flexible test-take instead of an automaton.

I’m pretty psyched about this article because I know our teachers and our curriculum push students to develop their intuitive skills along with formalized approaches. The article mentions that the ability to transfer skills “is among the highest goals of teachers at all levels,” and we agree. Don’t simply focus on dichotomizing the LSAT, also consider how the different question types are related.

Most Strongly Supported Left Cross

You’ve just gone five rounds with the LSAT.  How do you feel ? Relieved? Depressed?  Nervous?  Befuddled? Angry?

These are all natural emotions for someone fresh off an LSAT.  Hopefully you’ve learned a little bit about Zen and the Art of LSAT as you’ve been prepping for the last few months, but if you’re really freaked out – or just naturally anxious about how things went – we’re in your corner.  Come to our Free Online Review the June LSAT Workshop, led by two of our rock star instructors.  Whether you’re a champion of the LSAT world, or in need of a bit more training, this Review the LSAT workshop is a must attend.

In this session we will review the most challenging logic games from the June Exam, as well as any of the newer curveballs that the LSAC may have decided to throw at you…  We will also address the pesky question of whether or not you should be considering a retake in October.

Of course the decision to retake will be largely contingent upon your June score, which is scheduled to be released Wednesday, June 27^th via email. Past trends tell us however, that you can expect your scores to be emailed to you a bit sooner than that.

While you’re waiting, you may find some of our articles about retakes a useful starting point for making your decision about future LSATs.

Rule Equivalency Questions are Meant to be Broken

The LSAT is a funny beast. On the one hand it stays very consistent – it’s still paper and pencil, still given simply four times per year, and still requires a number two pencil. But, on the other hand, it keeps throwing us small curve balls, small changes in what it asks of us. And these changes happen in every section: Logical Reasoning no longer has multiple questions about one stimulus, Reading Comprehension now has comparative passages, and Logic Games, around the year 2000, entered the Modern Era (read the intro to our Logic Game Strategy Guide to learn what that is). Excitingly, there’s a new Logic Games curve. It’s the introduction of a new question type – Rule Equivalency questions.

If you’ve taken one of the more recent LSATs, you might remember a question that asks something like “Which of the following, if substituted for the rule that . . . would have the same effect . . .” Some of these were quite easy, some were rather tricky, and they were all novel.

If you have already learned the basics of each of the games, take a look at our White Paper on this new question type.

If only it were this easy...

I just finished reading an interesting book, How We Decide, by Jonah Lehrer. One of the more interesting studies that he cites involved choosing between five posters. Three were humorous cat posters (i.e. the internet!), and One poster was a cute photograph of a cat cute cats, one was a Monet, and the fifth was a van Gogh. The folks in group A was simply asked to choose a poster to take home. Plain and simple. Group B was asked to do the same thing AND were asked to explain their decision. What do you think happened?

Group A tended to choose the Monet or van Gogh posters, while Group B went for the kitties. That’s interesting! And then, a few weeks later, Group B folks were generally far less satisfied with their choices than the Group A people. The hypothesis is that forcing people to explain their thinking led them to choose the poster for which they could more easily provide a reason. Apparently, it’s a lot easier to explain why we would want a cat in our dorm room than a Monet.

So what does this mean for the LSAT? One interpretation is that you should simply go with your gut. Sure, that makes sense. Don’t over think the decision – and definitely don’t think you can out-smart the LSAT. Instead, do what the LSAT is asking of you: make the inferences, grasp the argument, etc.

However, I think the more useful takeaway for the experiment above is that we should practice explaining why LSAT answers are right or wrong. The easier it is to verbalize why a tricky wrong answer is wrong, the easier it will be to eliminate it (and vice versa for the right ones, of course). If all you can say about a wrong answer is “it’s just wrong,” you’re more easily fooled — you don’t have a sophisticated grasp of the ideas that the LSAT is testing, and so you are more easily tempted into choosing the cat poster answer.

So, what to when you’re down to two? Obviously, there’s no silver bullet here. Saying “go with the less obvious one” fails, as does “go with the more obvious one.”  What also rarely works is to compare the answers to each other. Instead, compare them to the argument, question, or text. The questions you should be asking yourself are not about the differences in the answers but how each one relates to what you’ve been given. Does the answer address the core of the argument? Is there textual support?

To be blunt, if what you’re saying to yourself is “I always choose the wrong one” you’re still not done learning the basics (and you’re probably ignoring all the times you choose the right one!)

Get to work on explaining yourself and apologies to cat fans.

Wrong! You should spend every waking second getting ready for the test! Even when you are not studying, you should be studying!

Okay, we’re not (totally) serious, but here are two ways to study while you don’t study:

1. Play video games

Have you checked out the Atlas Arcade?

2. Read

When you sit for the exam, you know you are going to get one passage in each of the following four areas: the law, natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Do any of these topics put a little fear into you? If so, consider the following summer reading options:

The Law

Most passages about law that appear on the LSAT are—surprise, surprise—from university presses and law reviews. If you want to be a lawyer but lawyerly language scares you, you may want to start browsing some of these publications (most law reviews have articles available online).

A caveat is that many of these articles will be far more detailed and convoluted than the truncated versions you are likely to see on the exam. So, unless passages about the law are your major hang-up, feel free to ignore this suggestion if sitting down with an online copy of the Harvard Law Review isn’t your idea of a study break.

Natural Sciences

Why do they have science passages on the LSAT! If you are a non-science person, this may have gone through your head once or twice. One thing to keep in mind is the organizational nature of many science passages – they are designed to compare one idea versus another, or to support a hypothesis through careful reasoning.  These are exactly the types of passages the LSAT writers want to test you with.

Scientific language can get very confusing to the ordinary, non-science person. The good news is that science passages on the LSAT tend to be of the type that are written specifically for non-science people. Because of this, if you struggle with science passages on the test, you might benefit greatly from reading some “casual” science magazines in your spare time. Scientific American, Discovery, and The Smithsonian Magazine are all great examples, and they have all supplied former LSAT passages!

Social Sciences & The Humanities

Here there is a plethora of options to choose from, and chances are you already read or subscribe to newspapers and magazines about the social sciences and humanities, such as the New York Times, Newsweek, or Time (Us Magazine doesn’t count). In particular, look out for articles that attempt to justify a main point through the use of reasoning, or articles that juxtapose contrasting ideas. One particular publication we specifically recommend is The Week, which is a magazine that complies contrasting opinions about current events from various publications – it’ll give you great practice at seeing the two sides of a debate and assigning opinions.

Good luck!

Alright, here are the answers to the last blog post: Negating Assumptions on the LSAT

Non Exhaustive List of Common Terms and Negations

If you see…          Negate with…
All                         Not all
Some                     None/no
Most                      Not most/less than half
Not all                   All
None                     At least one/Some
Probably              Probably not/Unlikely
Unlikely               Likely
Never                  At least once/Sometimes
Always                Not always
Sometimes          Never
Without               With
With                    Without

Can you think of others that should be on this list?

An important thing to keep in mind before jumping into this is that negation is not something you should plan to use all the time, even on assumption questions. Use negation to choose between two answer choices if they both seem like close contenders. Your first line of offense for assumption questions should continue to be based on issues of scope and spotting the logical gaps in an argument.

The Basics

You might be wondering what is so difficult about negation, and if you are, I would guess you have not gotten too far into your preparation yet. Often, working with students one-on-one or in a classroom I notice numerous mistakes when students try to negate, and often they don’t even realize they’ve made huge logical changes to the answer choice in the process of negating it. For this reason, I think it’s appropriate to start with a general example that shows in broad, simple terms the mistakes we sometimes make when we negate. Consider,

(1)    The cat jumped over the mat.

That would probably be straightforward to negate, right? We could just negate the verb:

The cat did not jump over the mat.

That’s all well and good, but what about this sentence?

(2)    A cat jumped over the mat.

Does that get negated the same way? Of course it doesn’t. I’ll talk about why in a second, but more interestingly, I wanted to point out that there are two ways to negate statement (2).

A cat did not jump over the mat

or

No cat jumped over the mat.

Though these two are phrased differently, they actually mean the same thing. Effectively both say that the mat has never seen a cat jumping over it (or should I say that the mat has never been jumped by a cat   ?)

Let’s consider one of these negations:

No cat jumped over the mat

Why can’t I use it to negate statement (1)?

Changing “the” to “no” misreads the meaning of the original in a way that does not simply negate the sentence. Since I used “the” in the original case (1), I was really only writing about a specific cat. I should have only cared about whether that cat had jumped over the mat. If all I wanted to say was that the specific cat did not jump over the mat, I did not need to prove the broad statement above, that no cat, ever, has jumped over that mat. Essentially, trying to negate in the second version I over-negated, a potentially fatal mistake in LSAT practice and law alike. I never want to do more heavy lifting (read negating) than I absolutely must.

2
Philosophy

The most important question you should ask yourself when confused about how to negate a particular answer choice is, “What is the minimum I would need to show that disprove the statement above?” This minimum part is very important because often, in difficult cases, students over-negate because they are not paring down to the very minimum.

To see an example of these, consider the following. Imagine your classmate says to you, “I don’t have any friends in this class.” You’d probably respond to this by saying “That’s not true – everyone (or almost everyone here) is your friend.” But that’s a lot more than you’d have to say, and maybe a lot more than you’d want to say, if this classmate was going to ask you to prove your statement. A better idea would be to say more simply, “That’s not true – I’m your friend.” This might sound less promising, but it’s easier to prove, and, importantly, it’s enough to disprove your friend’s statement.

Let’s formalize this a little bit.

(3)    No one in this class is my friend.

What do we need to negate here? Well, if we go back to our anecdotal version above, we see that all we need to show to disprove this (and consequently the negation of case (3)) is that

At least one person in this class is my friend.

That is the negation because it would make statement (3) untrue, though it might not comfort the speaker much to have one friend rather than none, but we are concerned with the logical statements above. Now, to give a few versions I might have anticipated a student giving mistakenly, consider each of these:

Everyone in this class is my friend.
No one in this class is not my friend.
I have a lot of friends.
Everyone is my friend.

All of these “overshoot.” Overshooting is bad. Bad on the LSAT because it shows an inability to determine the precise logical negation of a statement, and bad as a lawyer because you make your case more difficult for yourself than you really have to. From here onwards, make parsimony a central feature of your negation process.  Also,make sure you can articulate how each one overshoots before you continue reading.

3
Complicated Sentences with Multiple Things you Kind of Want to Negate

Now let’s consider the real thing. Consider this answer choice from an assumption question.

(4)    Most people who suffer from ordinary mountain sickness recover without any special treatment.

The tricky part about negating this answer choice is that there are many parts of the sentence we could negate. To make it more obvious, I’ve broken it down by idea:

Most people who | suffer from ordinary mountain sickness | recover |without any special treatment.

Let’s break this down by negating each of these in turn and thinking about whether it produces the minimum that, if true, would disprove the original statement (4).

First, let’s negate the first chunk of the sentence, “Most people who.” This is a claim that at least 50% of a group of people do a specific thing. To negate this part, I’d say “less than half of those people”, or “not most.” This sounds a bit awkward, but it conveys the meaning:

#1 Less than half the people who suffer from ordinary mountain sickness recover without any special treatment.

Would this disprove statement (4) if true? It seems it would because it would show that not more than 50% of the group actually gets better without special treatment. This also seems pretty minimal. For example, so long as I could show that fewer than 49% of people got better this way, I would be set.

Let’s look at negating the second part.

#2 Most people who do not suffer from ordinary mountain sickness recover without any special treatment.

If true, would this disprove the original statement (4)? No, absolutely not. If you’ve been studying for the LSAT for some time, you’ll certainly recognize that this has a scope problem. We don’t actually care about people who don’t have ordinary mountain sickness – we care about people who do have the illness. This is definitely not the proper way to negate the statement.

If we negate the third part of the sentence, we have

#3 Most people who suffer from ordinary mountain sickness do not recover without any special treatment.

Like the first version of a negation, this seems as though it would disprove the statement. Here it would do so by talking about the same group of people (most of those who get this illness), but saying that they do not do what the speaker claims they do. Is this minimal? It seems like it, but let’s push on.
Negating the fourth portion of the sentence yields,

#4 Most people who suffer from ordinary mountain sickness recover with special treatment

This one sounds kind of funny, doesn’t it? We know what it means though, so maybe we can rephrase it a bit better as

Most people who suffer from ordinary mountain sickness recover after receiving special treatment

Oh! Now this actually looks a lot like # 3, which in turn looks a lot like #1. Indeed, if we really think about what they mean, they all mean the same thing, which is saying that more than half of people received some kind of special treatment before they get better, which is the opposite of what the answer choice says.

Moreover, it answers our requirement of parsimony too. We don’t need to show that no one can get better without special treatment – all we need to show is that such is not the case.

4
Non Exhausted List of Terms and Their Negations

Now that we’ve talked about how to negate an answer choice, it’s also worth thinking about some standard negations that are likely to surface many times on your LSAT. Try to complete as many of these as possible.  Feel free to answer in a comment. Answers will be posted in a week or so.

If you see…        Negate with…I
All
Some
Most
Not all
None

Probably
Unlikely
Never
Always
Sometimes

Without
With

To be continued…