There is a plethora of LSAT resources out there and they don’t all agree on the best way to tackle a question, diagram a logic game or even read a passage. And with all the wonderful advice you can glean from lawyers, law students and self proclaimed LSAT experts, it can be tough to break through to the “best” strategies for the LSAT.

I’m constantly approached by students who are confused as to the “best” way to approach a particular part of the LSAT.

Should I read the question stems first or second?
Should I really spend that much time marking up the reading comprehension passage? or is it better to just skim it quickly? or should I take a moment at the end of each paragraph to mentally summarize the main point?
Should I use arrows for greater than and less than signs in my ordering games?
For this last one I’d scream out ARROWS! Please, please don’t use greater than and less than signs. They just lead to so many mistakes!

But for all the other questions, the answer is not so cut and dry. How can this be so? Shouldn’t there be one clearly superior LSAT strategy in each case? Unfortunately not.

The one variable that affects all these strategies is you. We all think a little differently and so different strategies will work differently for each of us. Some of us are better off carefully underlining main points and circling characters and author’s view points while we read a passage, whereas others are much better off to skim through and stop briefly to reflect at the end of each paragraph.

So how do you determine which strategies are right for you?

Test them. Do a couple of sections under timed conditions (35 minute LSAT sections) using one strategy and then do a few timed sections using another strategy and pick the one that gives you the best score.
Yes, it’s that simple. Higher score for you = better strategy for you.

It doesn’t matter what your friend used to score 180 or what the text book tells you is the only way to go. Use the strategies that give you the higher score.

That being said, there are a few strategies that are just generally a bad idea. (like the greater than and less than signs < > )
Most of these will become apparent to you as you try them out but if you’re unsure of a strategy feel free to ask me about it in the comments here and I’ll see if I can shed some light on the subject for you.

This video explains how to set up the diagram for the third logic game in the analytical reasoning section of the June 2007 LSAT exam.

The game deals with the voyages of cruise ship Freedom to Guadelupe, Jamaica, Martinique and Trinidad.

Here’s the text of the LSAT Logic game setup.

A cruise line is scheduling seven week-long voyages for the
ship Freedom. Each voyage will occur in exactly one of the
first seven weeks of the season: weeks 1 through 7. Each
voyage will be to exactly one of four destinations:
Guadeloupe, Jamaica, Martinique, or Trinidad. Each
destination will be scheduled for at least one of the weeks. The
following conditions apply to Freedom’s schedule:
Jamaica will not be its destination in week 4.
Trinidad will be its destination in week 7.
Freedom will make exactly two voyages to Martinique,
and at least one voyage to Guadeloupe will occur in some
week between those two voyages.
Guadeloupe will be its destination in the week preceding
any voyage it makes to Jamaica.
No destination will be scheduled for consecutive weeks.

The video analyzes how to set up this game using Alpha Score’s method for setting up any logic game.

LSATs Administered from 1993 to 2011

In 2010 171,500 students took the LSAT, that is the most LSATs administered in the last 20 years. Do you think more people taking the LSAT has any effect on your LSAT score?

This article takes a look at how to set up your LSAT sleep schedule with some diet, and other related factors to help you get your best LSAT sleep!

While some believe that they can train their bodies to require less sleep this belief is false. Specific sleep stages are required in order to facilitate the regeneration of neurons in your cerebral cortex. Other sleep stages seem to help in forming new memories and creating synaptic connection. A lack of proper sleep (sleep deprivation) has been tested with relation to the presence of activity in different sections of the cerebral cortex. Your cerebral cortex includes the temporal lobe which handles the processing of language, and there’s lots of language processing on the LSAT! When given verbal learning tests, the well rested brains the temporal lobe were very active on magnetic resonance imaging scans.. In the sleep deprived, however, there is little or no activity in this area.

Many more studies have been conducted on the effects of sleep on the brain, learning, verbal reasoning, logic and more. All of the news is bad for the sleep deprived. So make sure you are well rested before the LSAT!

Great, but what if you’re like me and often have trouble getting to sleep early especially when there’s a big exam the next day?

Start now! Set your sleep schedule now and stick to it.

Here’s a few steps to follow

1. Figure out what time you need to get up on LSAT day, leave lots of time to arrive early (before 830am) and include drive time, parking etc., you might even want to do a practice run.
2. Start getting up at this time now! And do it every day until the exam.
3. Balance your diet – cut back on sugar and caffeine, especially late in the day. That being said, don’t make any radical changes. If you’re a 4 cup a day coffee drinker now is probably not the time to quit. You should also avoid alcohol and chocolate.
4. Avoid large meals before bed – while they make you feel tired the sleep often won’t come, as your digestion will slow as you try to sleep and possibly keep you awake.
5. Instead eat a small snack – ideal if it contains some carbohydrates and tryptophan, the stuff in turkey. The tryptophan helps produce seratonin, a neurotransmitter, which in turn helps you sleep, and the carbohydrates help get the tryptophan to your brain. It’s not guaranteed to work but it’s worth a shot. Here’s a list of tryptophan containing foods http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tryptophan#Dietary_sources
   
6. Avoid liquids for an hour or two before bedtime.
7. Exercise! – Start getting some exercise in the afternoon or early evening – this can help you sleep better.
8. Take that last day or two off before the LSAT – don’t study, go see a movie, hang with friends (no alcohol!!!), work out etc. but don’t study. Take a break, relax the brain and bring your stress level down.
9. A few days, at least, before the LSAT pack up everything you need for the exam, pencils, ID, your exam ticket, directions to the location etc. – in fact, do it now. This will prevent you from scurrying around at midnight before the test trying to find your ID only to find out at 4am that your little brother “borrowed” it to go to a bar. It happened to me!

Put all this together and you should be on track for a great sleep before the LSAT!

The way in which you take and review your practice LSATs can have a huge impact on your score improvement. Many students simply take prep test after prep test or section after section and don’t stop to really understand and learn from the mistakes they have made. Proper review is essential for your improvement on the LSAT. Here’s one thorough method of reviewing your LSAT practice tests:

1. Select an LSAT prep test or section (LR, LG or RC) and make several photocopies of it. Next…
2. Take the test or section under the proper time limits (35 minutes per section) – our free proctor can help you with the timing: http://www.alpha-score.com/resources/lsat-proctor/
3. If you do not finish all the questions in a section draw a line at the 35 minute mark on your bubble sheet. Only answers before this line count towards your true score. Then continue the remaining questions and record your finishing time. This time should improve as you progress. This simply allows you to get a first attempt at all the questions.
4. Mark the test or section. Do not mark down the correct answers. Only put an x next to the questions you got wrong.
5. Go through each section again and give yourself another attempt at each question you got wrong. You are not on the clock for this step. The key here is to take the time to analyze each sentence or important words and each answer choice to the point that you truly understand the question.
6. With this second set of answers mark your LSAT test or sections again. This time do mark down correct answers.
7. Go back to any you got wrong on this second try. Make note of these questions and of what type they are, these questions can help you identify your areas of weakness. Give yourself another attempt to understand these questions. You now know the correct answers so use them to help break down and understand why they are right and why your answers are wrong. Do not give up on this. You cannot leave a question without understanding it as you will encounter questions just like this again. If you cannot figure it out on your own, this is the perfect type of question to take to your LSAT instructor or tutor. If you are working with Alpha Score – get in touch with your instructor to discuss these questions.
8. Now that you have thoroughly reviewed this LSAT or section put it aside and either try a new section or LSAT or take a break.
9. Later that day or the next, return to a clean photocopy of this same section or LSAT exam and take it all over again under proper timed conditions. If you remember a particular question do not simply answer from memory. Take the time to read through the question, draw diagrams for games and answer the question properly as if it were your first time encountering it.
10. If you do not finish all the questions in time draw a line on your bubble sheet at the 35 minute mark and continue. When you are finished mark the test or section again and go back to step three above to review. Essentially you can repeat this entire process until you are scoring close to perfect.

Why do this?

This approach is much better than simply taking a new test or section every time you sit down. If you take a new test each time you will constantly make the same mistakes and learn little from them. The LSAT has only a limited number of question types and a limited ways in which to structure them. If you take the time to review and understand each question type and structure, the next time you encounter that structure it will be much more likely that you answer quickly and correctly.

Take the time to thoroughly review and understand the questions on your LSAT score will improve.

Typically students continually try new logic games sections with just a cursory review before moving on to the next. This does little to improve your score or skills. With this drill you will repeat and review logic games sections until you fully understand them before moving on to the next. This ensures that when you encounter the next logic game similar to this one, you know exactly what to do.

If you’re looking for more lessons or logic games to implement this drill with, check out our online LSAT prep course.

Watch the video below for a full explanation of the drill technique:

1. If you’re just going straight through from question 1 to 17 or so and then running out of time you need to force yourself to pick up the pace. This may seem like a blinding glimpse of the obvious but forcing yourself to read and answer faster will help. Focus on moving through the questions faster, keep an eye on the clock (not too frequently) and force yourself to move forward faster. At first you will see a drop in your accuracy but you will at least be attempting more questions. You’re often better to attempt more questions even if it means your success rate drops. Getting 70% of 25 questions right is better than 90% of 15 questions. Once you’ve pushed yourself to answer more questions, hopefully moving up to all of them in a section, you can then go back and improve accuracy.

2. Try doing a couple sections with the goal of attempting each question within the time limit no matter what. Give yourself about 1.5 minutes per question and move on to the next at that point no matter what. If you’re still reading answer (B) then you need to pick up your reading speed, if you’re still considering (D) vs. (A) then just go with your gut and move on. You might be surprised at how well you do despite pushing your speed up. The fact is you can attempt all the questions in the time limit you’re just choosing to take more time on some questions than you have allotted to you. Don’t.

3. Skip your nemesis questions. The types you take the most time with or get wrong most often. Likely questions like parallel reasoning, that tend to involve more reading, will slow you down. Skip them on sight and come back if you have time. It’s better to skip a question that would take you 3 minutes and you’re likely to get wrong anyway than to move on and take a shot at 2 more questions.

4. When you take practice tests or timed sections, do as many questions as you can before the 35 minute time limit. Then mark a line on your answer sheet at that point. Continue with the rest of the questions and record your final time for finishing the full section. Your actual score is the 35 minute mark, but you’re at least getting practice on the remaining questions and you can push yourself to improve that finishing time.

Here’s the captions from the Video…

Introduction to LSAT Logic Games

What these first few lessons are designed to do is give you an overview of the LSAT Logic Games. We’re going to give you some strategies and start seeing some immediate improvement on your LSAT Logic Games Score. Now you are going to find much more detail and a lot more detailed strategies in subsequent lessons in our full LSAT Prep Course online, but this is enough to get you started and start seeing some immediate improvement now. So they way we are going to go about this is first we will take a look at LSAT Logic Games as a whole and how they fit into the LSAT and then we’ll look at some very specific strategies that you can use to apply to any LSAT Logic Game regardless of the category or type of LSAT Logic Game. And then we will take those and test them so you’ll get a chance to take some quizzes and see how you are doing with those particular skills and then finally we will go on and apply them to some actual LSAT logic games. So first of all let’s look at how the LSAT logic games fit into the test as a whole. So your LSAT is made up of four scored sections and the logic games are one of those for four scored sections, so that means they make up about twenty five percent of your LSAT score. Now for many students this is the hardest twenty five percent of the test but for many of you it will also be the easiest one that you can see some very quick improvement upon. So what is it that our LSAT logic games are testing? Well according to the makers of the LSAT they are testing your ability to understand complex structural relationships and that is supposed to mimic or simulate the complex relationships that you might see in a legal problem. So let’s take a look at one of our LSAT logic games and we can break it down into its parts.

Sample Logic Game

So looking at our actual LSAT logic game here (see video) you can see that at the top of the page you’ve got a set of instructions and this is going to tell you some information about how to answer these questions on the LSAT now we are going to look at this in more detail later and see what it means but for now let’s not worry about that, we’ll dive right in and take a look at the actual LSAT logic game. You can see that it is basically broken down into three areas. First you’ve got an introductory paragraph and this just gives you the basic structural format of this game. Then you’ve got a set of rules that tells you about the relationships of the entities and how things work in this game and combined with your introductory paragraph these rules are going to give you your diagram and help you set something up so you can go forward to answer the questions. And that is the last component of the game is the actual questions and they’re just asking questions about how these entities in this game relate to each other. Now you may be asking yourself what type of game that is? Or what category it fits into? Well it doesn’t ! Nowhere on the LSAT do they tell you what type of game this is and that’s a bit of a problem because a lot of LSAT courses and textbooks will focus on the specific categories and types of games and while that’s important to be aware of it’s not enough you need to have strategies that will approach all types of LSAT games no matter what type they are. And a place to start without knowing what type of game it is or what category it fits into. And that’s what we are going to give you here, we are going to give you a strategy that you can take in and approach a game no matter what type of LSAT game it is. Now later on we will look at those specific types and adjust our strategy accordingly and what that means is you can take this strategy move into any game and start working on it, putting some things on the paper developing your diagram and as you start to unlock what type of game it is or what category it fits into, then you can adjust your strategy and add some more elements in. So let’s go ahead look at our strategy that works with any LSAT Logic Game.

The Intro Paragraph – 3 Essentials

Whenever you look at the introductory paragraph for your LSAT logic game, which of course they all have, you want to get three things out of it. First you want to get out a list of entities, those are the characters or the actors, the people, the places or things that are going to be moving around in this game. You want to get a list of those entities. The second thing you want to get is the frequency at which those entities occur, so do you have to use them once? Do you have to use them twice? A minimum of twice? A maximum of five times each? Or can use them as many times each as you want. And then finally, the third thing you need to get out of every introductory paragraph for an LSAT logic game is placeholders and that is going to give you the basic structure of your game. It is just going to be a set of lines, blank lines that you are going to put your entities into. So again the three things are the Entities, the frequency at which they occur and the place holders in which to put them.

Entities

Your entities are the actors, or the character’s, or the people, the places, the things that are moving around in your logic game. So this could be a list of clowns that are going to be performing tricks and you’ve got names for them: Albert, Bob, Carrie, Doug and Egbert. And you’re going to represent them with the first letter of their name now sometimes you can use numbers if you just are simply given numbers to represent your entities as in you’ve got a code and you’re generating it from a series of numbers from zero to four. You are just going to put down the numbers zero to four. But if you’re given specific names for your entities you want to use the first letter from their name. So in the case with the clowns we might have are clowns named A B C D and E. If more your entities has two names, so we’ve got Donald Smith as one of your clowns. You only want to use one letter. It just gets confusing when you have two letters because suddenly you’re thinking Oh! is this DS going to be one entity or two entities and once you get into the speed of the game you can mistake it for two entities. So keep it simple, keep it consistent and just use one letter to represent your entities. So you’ve got your list of names for entities and then you are ready to go on and take a look at the frequency at which those entities occur.

Frequency

Now the frequency of occurrence for entities in an LSAT logic game is something that a lot of people miss when setting up their diagram because you don’t really need it but it is this extra piece of information they take you so much further and makes the game that much easier. So you really want to make sure the record this information. And that is: how many times can I use my entities? So in our previous example if I have clowns A B C D and E, how many times can I use them? Can I use each crown exactly once or a minimum of once or maybe I can use my clowns as many times as I want. You want to record that information. You can put it down right next to your entities so you know exactly how many times you can use them and then you’ll be ready to go on and develop your place holders to put those clowns or put those entities into.

Place Holders

The place holders in a game give you the overall structure of that game and they give you the places into which you are going to put those entities. So it is kind of like the board game that you are going to put your pieces on and the entities are the pieces. And you are going to lay out your place holders just as simple lines. Just a simple blank line, like you would in a game of Hang-man where you are going to put a letter or a number into it representing that entity. You are always going to use simple blank lines to represent your place holders. There are really three main ways you can setup your place holders you’re either going to have them in a simple order from left to right representing an order from first to last or Saturday to Thursday or from the left side to the right side of or first to sixth in a race. That’s your basic way of representing your place holders so that’s a basic order and you are going to put it from left to right with some simple lines to represent where you are going to put your entities. The second way you can represent your place holders is a little bit more of an advanced twist on that order. Let’s say you have a second element, let’s say you’ve got clowns performing their tracks but now we need to know exactly what type of trick each clown is performing. So they are performing tricks in order from first to fifth but they are also performing a certain type of trick. They are either dancing or juggling, well you need to make note of that underneath or above each clown. So right next to each clown, either underneath or above it, you want to have an extra line to represent what trick it is they are performing. You can do this anytime you’re given an additional level of information that corresponds directly to each of the entities that you’re putting in your order. This gives you a bit of an advanced quarter and is used in advanced ordering games where you’ve got two levels for your ordering. And this is your second way of laying out your place holders, now you can expand this if you need three levels. Let’s say we’ve got each clown from order from first to fifth and they are performing a certain type of trick that’s your second line and then they are wearing a different color of clothing, that can be your third line. So now we’re just adding a third element. Now typically in LSAT logic games you only get two lines here but you may get as many as three or more so you can be prepared for that by just adding an extra set of lines when or an extra set of place holders to record what’s going on in this order. Now the final way the that you can lay out your place holders for LSAT logic games is if we are putting them into groups. So we are separating our clowns into happy clowns clowns and sad clowns or we are separating them into clowns that can drive well, clowns that can drive poorly and clowns that don’t have their driver’s licence so in that case we are creating three groups. So you just want to do your lines now vertically for your first group, your second group, your third group or however many groups that you have. Now you’re just going to lay out your place holders as we did before but now instead of laying them out in order from left to right were laying them out vertically for our groups however many groups that there may be. Those are really the three main ways that you can lay out your place holders to develop the general structure of your LSAT logic game diagram. Now there are some subtle variations on these that we will get into later in the course but this is going to cover off the majority of your LSAT logic games.

Practice Questions

So now that you’ve seen the three main things that you want to get out of every introductory paragraph for your LSAT logic game, let’s go ahead and apply this knowledge to some practice questions. Go ahead and try the practice questions and remember for each LSAT introductory paragraph you want to pull out your entities, the frequency at which they occur, and put down some place holders to put them in. And don’t worry if you’re not totally comfortable with this yet, we are going to get a lot of practice doing this and once you’ve done the practice questions you can come back to the next video lesson and will show you exactly how we would have solved these problems.

More Lessons…

For the rest of the videos in this series including practice questions and solutions sign up for our trial LSAT course and check out the Analytical Reasoning Section.

The word UNLESS can be a blessing or a curse on the LSAT. This quick lesson will help make it a blessing for you.

Check out the bottom of this article for more LSAT articles, lessons and tips.

Unless is often found in the more difficult Logical Reasoning questions as well as in the Logic Games section of the LSAT.

Here are some of the LSAT questions where you’ll find UNLESS::

• Logical Reasoning
  • Necessary Assumptions
  • Sufficient Assumptions
  • Questions with Formal Logic or Conditional Reasoning Arguments
  • Many of the more difficult Logical Reasoning Questions
• Logic Games (Analytical Reasoning)
  • Many Grouping Games
  • Games with formal logic or conditional reasoning
  • Some of the more difficult logic games

UNLESS is often used on the LSAT to create complex logical structures that frequently confuse or slow down LSAT students.

If you know how to properly approach UNLESS statements you can make some of the more difficult LSAT questions much easier!

Here’s how to make UNLESS statements easy

Let’s start with a simple UNLESS statement:

You cannot fly unless you have wings

This statement is relatively simple so you don’t really need to change it in order to understand the meaning. But on the LSAT they can get much more complex than this, and if this statement were in a logic game you would still want to simplify to help with your game diagram and rules.

The process of simplifying an UNLESS statement is the same for any complex formal logic or conditional reasoning statement – you want to turn it into a basic IF – THEN statement. This makes it much easier to read and understand logically and will help you answer the question faster and more accurately. It also helps you diagram the statement quickly and easily for logic games.

IF – THEN statements are simply a statement with two parts – the first part follows the word IF and is the sufficient condition, the second part follows the word THEN and is the necessary condition. Don’t worry too much about the idea of “sufficient and necessary conditions right now” they’re not necessary in order to understand and utilize this concept.

In order to convert ANY UNLESS statement into a basic IF THEN statement you just need to follow the following steps:

1. Separate the statement into two parts (in this case Part 1: Cannot Fly, Part 2: have wings)
2. Pick one part. Either one, it doesn’t matter. (let’s pick Part 1: Cannot Fly)
3. Negate this part – this means to change if from positive to negative or in this case from negative (Cannot Fly) to positive (Can Fly)
4. Put that part first in your IF THEN statement – after the IF (so we get IF Can Fly)
5. Then take the other part and put it after the THEN – but don’t change or negate it at all (so we have THEN have wings)
6. You now have a complete IF THEN statement from your UNLESS statement (In this case: IF you can fly THEN you have wings)

The key elements here are to just pick any of the two parts, put it first (after the IF) and make sure you negate it. Also make sure you do not change the second part – the part that you put after THEN (don’t negate it)

Once you have this IF THEN statement you can also do the contra-positive of the statement for another IF THEN statement. For more on how to do this check out our complete LSAT courses.

Here’s another example from an actual LSAT question:

No form of psychotherapy that focuses on changing the patient’s unconscious beliefs and desires can be effective unless it also helps change beliefs that are under the patient’s direct conscious control.

Here’s our step by step approach

1. Two parts: Part 1: psychotherapy that focuses on changing the patient’s unconscious beliefs and desires CANNOT be effective Part 2: helps change beliefs that are under the patient’s direct conscious control
2. Pick one part. This time let’s try picking Part 2: helps change beliefs that are under the patient’s direct conscious control
3. Negate this part: It does NOT help change beliefs that are under the patient’s direct conscious control
4. Put that part first in your IF THEN statement – after the IF: IF it does NOT help change beliefs that are under patient control THEN …
5. Then take the other part and put it after the THEN – but don’t change or negate it at all: THEN psychotherapy that focuses on changing the patient’s unconscious beliefs and desires CANNOT be effective
6. You now have a complete IF THEN statement: IF it does NOT help change beliefs that are under patient control THEN psychotherapy that focuses on changing the patient’s unconscious beliefs and desires CANNOT be effective

Note that when we picked out Part 1: we changed it from “No form of psychotherapy… can be effective” to “psychotherapy….cannot be effective” – these two statements have the same meaning, but putting NO as CANNOT makes it a bit easier to understand. It can be very effective to simplify statements like this as you write them. For more on how to do this check out our complete LSAT courses.

So how will this help you on the exam? An IF THEN statement is much more useful as you know exactly what happens in a given situation. For example, now if you are told that a certain form of psychotherapy does NOT help change beliefs under patient control then you can answer easily that this psychotherapy that focuses on changing unconscious beliefs cannot be effective. For more on how to use this on actual LSAT questions and including lots of practice questions and explanations check out our complete LSAT courses.

Also, in the case of Logic Games you can use this to create a very simple rule for your diagrams.

You can also check out this complete question and explanation using unless statements. It’s a difficult question but it demonstrates how effective changing UNLESS to IF THEN can be on the LSAT.

Here’s some more LSAT articles to help you with formal logic and conditional reasoning:

• Necessary and Sufficient Conditions
• More Unless statements
• If and Only If
• Complete LSAT Courses

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