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Hey guys,

I need some guidance on drilling the LR harder questions.
I'm currently preparing for the June 2018 LSAT.
I'm in the process of drilling LR questions by type.

As of now, I'm drilling Flaw questions and I can see which ones are considered to be easy, medium, or hard by using the 7Sage Question Bank (which is extremely useful for anyone interested in knowing the difficulty of the questions they're drilling).

The easy and medium questions aren't giving me a hard time. As a matter of fact, I wish all questions were in this difficulty range.

But when it comes down to the hard questions, I'm getting screwed!
I can't seem to totally understand the language of the arguments or the answer choices.

For those who found success drilling by type, do you recommend I sit on one question at a time until I fully figure out the argument and answer?
Or would you recommend sitting on each question, let's say a set of 5 questions, for no more than 10 or so minutes before looking up the explanations?

I thought maybe I should first give myself around 10 minutes per question before moving on to another one, finishing up a set of 5 questions in a row, reading and understanding the explanations, and later building up from there to not make the same mistakes again.

Any recommendations?

Understanding the language of hard questions is the most difficult part. I'm not sure if the way I approach flaw questions will help you, it's more of a trick for the question type itself than dealing with hard questions. However, since I've picked up this approach I've had a lot less issues with them so I'll at least share it and if it helps you, great.

After understanding the argument, read the answer choices and evaluate as follows:
Overlooks/Fails To Consider or anything that says something similar- does the statement being made weaken the argument?
Presumes/takes for granted- Is this answer choice a necessary assumption for the argument
Descriptors- Fails to distinguish, Infers, etc- See if the AC describes what's happening in the stim.

Once I started approaching it this way, I got a lot better at them regardless of rated difficulty.

Thanks for the advice! Good luck with your studies!

wildcat1906 wrote:Hey guys,

I need some guidance on drilling the LR harder questions.
I'm currently preparing for the June 2018 LSAT.
I'm in the process of drilling LR questions by type.

As of now, I'm drilling Flaw questions and I can see which ones are considered to be easy, medium, or hard by using the 7Sage Question Bank (which is extremely useful for anyone interested in knowing the difficulty of the questions they're drilling).

The easy and medium questions aren't giving me a hard time. As a matter of fact, I wish all questions were in this difficulty range.

But when it comes down to the hard questions, I'm getting screwed!
I can't seem to totally understand the language of the arguments or the answer choices.

For those who found success drilling by type, do you recommend I sit on one question at a time until I fully figure out the argument and answer?
Or would you recommend sitting on each question, let's say a set of 5 questions, for no more than 10 or so minutes before looking up the explanations?

I thought maybe I should first give myself around 10 minutes per question before moving on to another one, finishing up a set of 5 questions in a row, reading and understanding the explanations, and later building up from there to not make the same mistakes again.

Any recommendations?

When you say you don't understand the language of the argument or the answer choices, can you give a brief example of a sentence of answer choice that you didn't understand? Could it be that you just need to take more time to break down the sentences? Or are you saying that you can't understand the argument/answer choices even after spending 10 minutes thinking about it?

I think it just takes me a bit longer to break down the argument and comprehend what the argument is saying. Most of the time, I can find the main point and its support, but there are times where I just can't wrap my head around what the argument is saying. After spending up to 10 mins or so, I usually start understanding it more clearly. I've been practicing more hard questions, and slowly, I'm able to comprehend the abstract language used in both the arguments and answer choices.

Bracket [] The conclusion for every argument (just make sure you actually have the conclusion). It makes life really easy when you find the conclusion and can identify premises and sub-conclusions. Spotting Flaws, NA, SA, etc. becomes way easier.

Platopus wrote:Bracket [] The conclusion for every argument (just make sure you actually have the conclusion). It makes life really easy when you find the conclusion and can identify premises and sub-conclusions. Spotting Flaws, NA, SA, etc. becomes way easier.

I do this often as well. For questions that ask "what is the role of blah blah blah" I put a bracket around the phrase in the question stem and look for it in the passage and put brackets there as well. Saves me a lot of time since I don't have to parse through all the BS of the passage.

I can think of a lot of other things I'd like to drill instead of LR questions

Platopus wrote:Bracket [] The conclusion for every argument (just make sure you actually have the conclusion). It makes life really easy when you find the conclusion and can identify premises and sub-conclusions. Spotting Flaws, NA, SA, etc. becomes way easier.

that's something I do and it does make things a whole lot easier. I'm starting now to drill NA questions and I find highlighting or bracketing the conclusion very useful. But, it's just that the language sometimes stumps me on the harder questions. It takes me a bit too much time until I finally realize what the argument is about, even after getting the conclusion identified. I'd say usually several minutes. But I am drilling sets of hard questions, and I do realize that the test isn't going to have 50 straight hard questions, so I guess that's a bit of relief.