opinion of Kaplan LSAT premier 2011 addition. Forum

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hazencage

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opinion of Kaplan LSAT premier 2011 addition.

Post by hazencage » Thu Feb 03, 2011 11:46 pm

first of all i would like to point out that chicks are a lot hotter on the cover of praxis, but more importantly I am wondering if the book i am using is really the best. I think the Diagramming aspect is either too simple, or too complicated.

what opinions do you people have?

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LSAT Blog

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Re: opinion of Kaplan LSAT premier 2011 addition.

Post by LSAT Blog » Fri Feb 04, 2011 12:32 am

Well, I'm glad you're not going to force all the prep companies to compete for market share based on who can get the hottest models for their book covers.

I can't speak to the Kaplan 2011 Premier book in particular, but I did some analysis of "Kaplan LSAT 2010 Edition: Strategies, Practice, and Review" and found that they were reusing material from their GRE/GMAT books for LR and RC (and vice-versa).

One thing I didn't like about the presentation of Logic Games in the book was that sometimes they wouldn't limit them to one page. You'd have to flip the page to see the final question of a game - not realistic at all. On Test Day - each game's exactly one page.

The Kaplan retail books don't tend to get very good reviews in general. Would not recommend.

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hazencage

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Re: opinion of Kaplan LSAT premier 2011 addition.

Post by hazencage » Fri Feb 04, 2011 1:27 pm

LSAT Blog wrote:Well, I'm glad you're not going to force all the prep companies to compete for market share based on who can get the hottest models for their book covers.

I can't speak to the Kaplan 2011 Premier book in particular, but I did some analysis of "Kaplan LSAT 2010 Edition: Strategies, Practice, and Review" and found that they were reusing material from their GRE/GMAT books for LR and RC (and vice-versa).

One thing I didn't like about the presentation of Logic Games in the book was that sometimes they wouldn't limit them to one page. You'd have to flip the page to see the final question of a game - not realistic at all. On Test Day - each game's exactly one page.

The Kaplan retail books don't tend to get very good reviews in general. Would not recommend.
what books would you recomend.

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EarlCat

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Re: opinion of Kaplan LSAT premier 2011 addition.

Post by EarlCat » Fri Feb 04, 2011 11:08 pm

Kaplan is making progress. I prepped originally with their LSAT 180, which was HORRIBLE. LSAT Premier (which Kaplan was nice enough to send me a free copy of) at least uses real LSAT questions, which is a big leap forward IMHO. Unfortunately they use questions from very very old tests (which are cheaper to license than new questions). Not that old questions are bad, but they are not as close to what you can expect on test day as newer ones.

Nothing I read in the book (which wasn't a whole lot) was unsound per se. But the book is pretty light on instruction. For instance, the LR lesson (excluding the practice problems and explanations) is only 21 pages long. Games instruction takes up 23 pages (followed by only 6 practice games and explanations). The RC instruction is only 13 pages. Granted, a lot of LSAT prep is about application of the techniques, so practice questions and explanations do come in handy, but it doesn't seem like they give you a whole lot of tools up front to work with.

There are other organizational things that could be improved. For instance, in LR, I wish they had given you a practice section for each question type--a bunch of flaw questions all together then a bunch of parallel questions, etc. Also on games and RC they don't fit the individual games/passages on the pages like the real test will (even in the Official PrepTests in the back), and flipping pages while doing games/RC is really annoying.

Overall this is probably Kaplan's best effort at a retail book. It's certainly better than most of the stuff you'll find at the store, but that's not saying much.

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