Is It Paranoia If They Really Are Out To Get You? Forum

[Blueprint LSAT]

Everyone knows the LSAT is hard. More than that, a lot of us are culturally conditioned to reject a message out of hand if there is even the hint that someone is trying to mislead us with complexity. Anyone who has ever said "legalese" with a dismissive sneer, I'm talking to you. But you want to be a lawyer, so you are going to have to learn to annoy people like one and the LSAT is the first hurdle. Basically, Logical Reasoning is an 8th-Grade English Teachers Nightmare Acid Trip.

But how paranoid should you be? You need to read critically. You need to understand what is going on before you dismiss answers. You need to avoid the small detail-oriented traps. What you don't need to do is to second guess yourself into wrong answers. Don't fall in to four traps to avoid the fifth.

If you are brand new to studying for the LSAT, by all means, put on your tinfoil hat, buy 7 dead-bolts and start prepping for the apocalypse. When you first start studying, suspicion is a survival skill. However, slowly but surely, that suspicion gets replaced with actual knowledge and I find that people often don't update their approach. They end up talking themselves out of the right answer because it seems TOO right. Don't do this! You may have fallen in to every trap when you first started out, but don't let that dictate how you act once you have your feet under you.

Think of it this way. You put a lot of effort in to studying. What was the point if you aren't going to trust what you learned. An answer sounding too good to be true was a good sign it was wrong when you knew nothing, but once you know how the LSAT is put together, getting to some of the right answers is actually going to be super easy, especially on the first half of the LR sections. As you learn more and more, don't forget to keep taking diagnostic sections and re-calibrating how much you trust your own instincts based on what you have learned.