Prediction Fundamentals LR

Logical Reasoning

Test 151, Section 2, Q1 — Plato on musicians

Test 15, Section 2, Q6 — Primate jawbone

Test 15, Section 3, Q24 — Volcanic lava

Highlights

One of the greatest barriers to your success on the LSAT will be the practice of narrowing it down to two possible answers. Thanks to a question at the beginning of class from one of our students, we had a valuable discussion about the damage that comes from narrowing down to two possibilities as a regular practice. Drawing from his experience as a tutor/teacher, Josh described how students who narrow to two choices oftentimes spend all of their efforts trying to make answer choices fit with the passage rather than critically trying to trash them as the garbage they often are. The consequence is that students struggle to see why wrong answer choices are wrong, fail to learn from their mistakes and instead blame the test, and miss more questions in the long term. The solution? Predict the answer and then aggressively eliminate answer choices that don’t rise to the high standard you set for them.