Fake questions? Forum

[GoGetIt]

So I've heard the Kaplan 180 book is composed entirely of fake LSAT questions. I've taken a Kaplan course, about 5 PT's, and plan on taking every single one there is by gameday (Oct. 2011). Also intend on going through all of the Powerscore bibles and maybe taking another course along with tons of individual prep. However, I'm concerned about burning all my resources too early. My question is, would you recommend using Kaplan 180 for practice during the next few months? If I do this I will have plenty of real questions for when I really want to amp up my prep during my final 4 or 5 months before taking the LSAT. Would the Kaplan 180 book be a good way for me to get some early practice in or a waste of time?
Thank you all.

[Jeffort]

Pick ONE good prep source/method and stick with it, give up on the LSAT prep 'world tour' you have embarked on.

Don't practice with fake LSAT materials, they suck. Lots of stuff in off the shelf Kaplan LSAT books is synthetic/fake LSAT.

[longdaysjourney]

Kaplan's books should have a title page that says "abandon all hope, ye who enter here." Do not waist one more second working with that crap. You have thrown away your money by taking their class.

I hear this type of question frequently. The answer is...don't worry about it. 2 Logical Reasoning Sections * 25 questions per sections * 62 tests (62 by the time you take it) = 3,100 lr questions. 62 preptests * 4 logic games = 248 games. There are also 248 reading comp passages. If you did all those sections, timed that would be 144 hours of timed pretest.

If you can remember the answers to 3,100 logical reasoning questions, 248 logic games, and 248 reading comprehension passages, plus whatever is in the June 07 test, and the SuperPrep A, B, and C, then you are a freaking genius and will probably get a full ride to Yale, graduate order of the coif, and have all of the supreme court justices clerk for you, all while beating bill brasky in arm-wrestling.

This is what you do: Save the 10 most recent practice tests for the 45 days before you test date. Do as many of the other tests as you can before that 45 day prelude. If you run out (which would probably put you in the minority), then retake old tests..or, better yet, just review previous questions that you got wrong.

Besides if you are 175+ material, you won't need to do that many tests to get the score you want...you'll just need to be smart about your studying.

Before you start studying, grab a copy of Informal Logic by Douglas Walker. Give that a read. Then get the Powerscore LG and LR bible and those books of the first twenty preptest divided up by type. Do that, take about 5 or 6 preptests, then order the Atlas books. To me, the powerscore books seemed like an undergraduate course and the atlas material seemed like a masters course. Atlas will tell you to approach some of the games differently than PS. Try out their methods (be sure to give them a fair shake...even if they aren't what you are used to or your "common sense" tells you it's not as good as powerscore) and use the one that works best for you. You will begin to see that a lot of the advice that powerscore gives is junk..and probably causes people to score lower than they could otherwise. After this, continue on with your preptests as usual until you get to the 45 days mark and then follow my above instructions.

..you'll be scoring like me in a mere 4 months

[Jeffort]

Kaplan's books should have a title page that says "abandon all hope, ye who enter here." Do not waist one more second working with that crap. You have thrown away your money by taking their class.

I hear this type of question frequently. The answer is...don't worry about it. 2 Logical Reasoning Sections * 25 questions per sections * 62 tests (62 by the time you take it) = 3,100 lr questions. 62 preptests * 4 logic games = 248 games. There are also 248 reading comp passages. If you did all those sections, timed that would be 144 hours of timed pretest.

If you can remember the answers to 3,100 logical reasoning questions, 248 logic games, and 248 reading comprehension passages, plus whatever is in the June 07 test, and the SuperPrep A, B, and C, then you are a freaking genius and will probably get a full ride to Yale, graduate order of the coif, and have all of the supreme court justices clerk for you, all while beating bill brasky in arm-wrestling.

Yeah, and be able to count cards at a blackjack table using a 7 deck shoe to clean up and win lots O $$$ in Vegas like Rainman

Also, I agree with the wisdom of most of your post, except the part where you said that the Powerscore books teach a bunch of garbage. I disagree. They are the most comprehensive (and affordable) LSAT prep books I've seen available without spending hundreds of $$$'s for the full set of coursebooks and materials some companies use for their full length classes but also sell to people that don't take the full class but instead just want all the books and materials.

What about the PS books do you think is garbage?

[longdaysjourney]

What about the PS books do you think is garbage?

Specifically:

[*]Their diagrams for sequencing games are unnecessarily complicated and, in the hardest sequencing games, often leave you with an erroneous setup. Atlas is much cleaner, much quicker, and much more comprehensive.
[*]The RC bible will do little to nothing to increase your RC score. If you following the "passage-marking" advice to a T, then you will spend the entire section marking up the passages and no time answering the questions.
[*]Powerscore does not give you any overarching mindsets to apply to each section, but rather, a list of rules to follow when you get to a certain game type.
[*]Powerscore's LR bible over-classifies and is redundant
[*]Powerscore gives you no way to systematically handle the myriads of inferences you can make with the harder grouping games.
[*]Powerscores method for approaching "undefined" games is generally vague and ineffective when compared to the Atlas method
[*]Powerscore offers no way to isolate specific weaknesses and eliminate them
[*]Some of the information in the LR matching and Lr flawed matching sections is inaccurate
I could go on...but it would probably be better to look at the atlas material yourself. Then you would see what I was talking about. I was extremely skeptical at first and stuck with powerscore 100%, but after I tried a few of their methods I saw that they were superior. Some of their advice i don't follow, like reading the stem first on LR, but it is mostly solid stuff.

But just to be clear....

I don't advocate replacing PS with Atlas...this would not be wise. Atlas, for me at least, refined what I had learned from powerscore. If I had gone straight to Atlas I don't know how I would be doing now...

I generally subscribe to Lao Tse's advice concerning maximizing your lsat score...in the forty-second section of the Tao Te Ching he says:

Let Powerscore hew the granite out of the mountainside; but let Atlas sculpt and polish it into a masterful statue. This is the Tao.

p.s. I found this: http://www.atlaslsat.com/blog/index.php ... tlas-lsat/

[GoGetIt]

..you'll be scoring like me in a mere 4 months

Thank you for the solid advice. I will definately give that a look see. If you don't mind my asking, where are you scoring?

[LSAT Blog]

[*]Some of the information in the LR matching and Lr flawed matching sections is inaccurate

I agree with this. The LRB says, "[W]henever a Parallel Reasoning question contains flawed reasoning, it is stated in the question stem."

Among other counterexamples, what about PT31 (June 2000), S3, Q18 (p100 in Next 10)?



I also agree that the PS approach to undefined grouping games is not the best. Here's an alternative way.