Manhattan LSAT Teachers - Laura Baragona

Manhattan LSAT - Laura Baragona

Like so many others who have taken the LSAT, Laura began her relationship with the exam while completing an undergraduate degree in a field that seemed unnervingly unlikely to produce a viable career. As graduation loomed, she began to catalog the many ways in which she might use her interdisciplinary degree. She quickly discovered that foci in Women's Studies, Africana Studies, Political Science and Theatre do not a paycheck make. It was then that she decided that academia was the way, and began planning for her next step along the winding road to tenure. A law degree, she surmised, might allow her to teach at the collegiate level without spending the next 6 years working towards a PhD...an appealing prospect to a person who has always prized efficiency.

And so began her love affair with the Law School Admission Test: a brilliantly designed, beautiful work of academic evaluation-the pinnacle of standardized testing and, in her estimation, the gold standard to which other, inferior exams should be held. Here was an exam that tested what standard college curricula ignored. Here you were forced to recognize the true and exact meanings of the words on the page before you, the shifts in meaning that occur when a comma is added or eliminated and the subtle syntactic changes that drastically alter the meaning of a piece of text. Here you were faced with arguers hell bent on deceiving you, but you, master of the LSAT, could defy their fallacious trickery, point an angry finger at their errors and ultimately emerge victorious. For a woman who had spent hours mounting arguments to convince skeptical classmates that racism and sexism persist, expertly refuting their illogical responses to the contrary, yet finally failing to convince anyone of anything, the exam was liberating. Finally, someone, somewhere cared about argumentation. Determined to spread the gospel of logic, Laura began helping students prepare for the LSAT shortly after her college graduation and has now taught LSAT classes at more than 20 universities across the country, many among the nation's best. She has also written and published in the field of pedagogy, and is as fascinated by the processes of teaching and learning as she is by the subjects that she teaches.

When not teaching logic, Laura can be found frolicking in the redwoods, exploring the pacific coast and calculating how it is that she might satisfy her wanderlust while meeting the needs of her growing family and settling into the role of wife and mother. Any literature on backpacking the world with an infant is greatly appreciated, and should be forwarded to Laura's CouchSurfing.com profile.

Feedback from Laura's Recent Students

 Laura can make even the most mediocre student feel like they have the gates of understanding open to them when approaching the LSAT. I would commend (her) to teach anything. I dare say (she) might make me understand (or perceive I understood) astrophysics if it came to it."--Live Online Student (Live Online Summer C 2011)

Laura was absolutely AMAZING! I was so cynical coming into this class about my ability to learn in an online setting but she surpassed my greatest expectations. (She) was extremely engaging and truly exude a passion and excitement for the material. (She) knew how to make even the poorest answer seem credible and was able to quickly synthesize the ramblings we students made to be able to answer questions and explain reasoning."--Live Online Student (Live Online Summer C 2011)

 [Laura] explains things very simply. She is super approachable and nice and I'm not afraid to ask her a question."--Live Online Student (Live Online Summer C 2011)

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