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lawschool111

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question about prep tests from early 1990s

Post by lawschool111 » Thu Aug 29, 2013 12:05 am

I recently got access to the Logical Reasoning Sections of prep tests from 1991,1992 and 1993.

For some reason, the LR sections from the early 1990s were quite difficult for me, and appeared to be significantly harder than the mid 90s and 2000s. The language and questions seem to be much more convoluted.

Should I be worried about my performance on 90s LR sections..or has Logical Reasoning significantly changed over the years?

TripleX

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Re: question about prep tests from early 1990s

Post by TripleX » Thu Aug 29, 2013 12:08 am

may as well stop studying. No hope if you can't get through the early 90's without trouble.

lawschool111

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Re: question about prep tests from early 1990s

Post by lawschool111 » Thu Aug 29, 2013 12:18 am

TripleX wrote:may as well stop studying. No hope if you can't get through the early 90's without trouble.
you're wrong there buddy. i've been performing significantly better on LR sections from the mid 90's and 2000s

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Jeffort

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Re: question about prep tests from early 1990s

Post by Jeffort » Thu Aug 29, 2013 3:02 am

lawschool111 wrote:I recently got access to the Logical Reasoning Sections of prep tests from 1991,1992 and 1993.

For some reason, the LR sections from the early 1990s were quite difficult for me, and appeared to be significantly harder than the mid 90s and 2000s. The language and questions seem to be much more convoluted.

Should I be worried about my performance on 90s LR sections..or has Logical Reasoning significantly changed over the years?
Some LR questions from the early 90s are somewhat different stylistically with occasional off the wall reasoning patterns instead of almost all the questions being rehashes of run of the mill commonly repeated reasoning patterns. There are other stylistic differences in some questions and/or between sections when you compare sections as a whole. On the early to mid 90s tests there are also some really hard LR questions that are super hard sometimes for unique, never before or after seen reasons. Luckily logic is still logic and the problems are all solid, and thus good practice, they just aren't as a whole representative of what a typical modern LR section will look like.

There are some notable stylistic differences with the writing in terms of commonly repeated vocabulary and ways of expressing types of things. I know what you mean by some convoluted and/or vague wording, there are some old LR questions written in arcane ways that make the information more difficult to process. You don't see that as much in recent LR.

Don't worry about a slight difference in your performance compared to more recent sections. I think the LR sections of recent tests are easier than older sections due to the extreme predictability of everything down to a level of consistency much more standardized than was the case with test forms from the 90s.

The main reason for the difference is that it was a different organization/group of people writing the test questions for tests from 1991 through 1994-5 than for tests from 1996 and later, plus the test specifications for the content balance of full sections and full tests has evolved since then too. In the early '90s LSAC basically fired the test question development team and hired a new group of people to do the job so that tests from I think 1996 and later were entirely content from the new team. The team that wrote the older LR was an odd bunch, you should see the LR questions they wrote for tests from the 80s up to 1991! There were many bizarro LR questions in the 80s tests that make their weird ones from the early 90s tests look totally normal and easy.

However you characterize the various differences in old LR sections vs new ones, you still shouldn't experience a significant difference in performance between them. A few points difference that means just a few questions here and there is typical prep fluctuation no matter which tests you are comparing until you reach perfection. If you are experiencing a major performance difference, then the problem is something other than the logical difficulty of the sections since they are not that different in that regard.

lawschool111

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Re: question about prep tests from early 1990s

Post by lawschool111 » Thu Aug 29, 2013 5:13 am

Jeffort wrote:
lawschool111 wrote:I recently got access to the Logical Reasoning Sections of prep tests from 1991,1992 and 1993.

For some reason, the LR sections from the early 1990s were quite difficult for me, and appeared to be significantly harder than the mid 90s and 2000s. The language and questions seem to be much more convoluted.

Should I be worried about my performance on 90s LR sections..or has Logical Reasoning significantly changed over the years?
Some LR questions from the early 90s are somewhat different stylistically with occasional off the wall reasoning patterns instead of almost all the questions being rehashes of run of the mill commonly repeated reasoning patterns. There are other stylistic differences in some questions and/or between sections when you compare sections as a whole. On the early to mid 90s tests there are also some really hard LR questions that are super hard sometimes for unique, never before or after seen reasons. Luckily logic is still logic and the problems are all solid, and thus good practice, they just aren't as a whole representative of what a typical modern LR section will look like.

There are some notable stylistic differences with the writing in terms of commonly repeated vocabulary and ways of expressing types of things. I know what you mean by some convoluted and/or vague wording, there are some old LR questions written in arcane ways that make the information more difficult to process. You don't see that as much in recent LR.

Don't worry about a slight difference in your performance compared to more recent sections. I think the LR sections of recent tests are easier than older sections due to the extreme predictability of everything down to a level of consistency much more standardized than was the case with test forms from the 90s.

The main reason for the difference is that it was a different organization/group of people writing the test questions for tests from 1991 through 1994-5 than for tests from 1996 and later, plus the test specifications for the content balance of full sections and full tests has evolved since then too. In the early '90s LSAC basically fired the test question development team and hired a new group of people to do the job so that tests from I think 1996 and later were entirely content from the new team. The team that wrote the older LR was an odd bunch, you should see the LR questions they wrote for tests from the 80s up to 1991! There were many bizarro LR questions in the 80s tests that make their weird ones from the early 90s tests look totally normal and easy.

However you characterize the various differences in old LR sections vs new ones, you still shouldn't experience a significant difference in performance between them. A few points difference that means just a few questions here and there is typical prep fluctuation no matter which tests you are comparing until you reach perfection. If you are experiencing a major performance difference, then the problem is something other than the logical difficulty of the sections since they are not that different in that regard.



Thank you very much for your insight!! Calmed my nerves a great deal.

I absolutely agree with you. The more recent LR sections seem to be much more predictable. In the more recent LSAT tests the consensus seems to be, and also from my own experience, that questions 1-10 are usually the easiest (with an occasional difficult problem thrown in there) and questions 15-21 tend to be the most difficult. As a result, I like to work my way through the first 10 pretty fast and am sure to slow myself a little bit down in the mid-sections so that I will pick up on any nuances.

When I was doing the LR sections from the early 90s I was completely flustered. The language was very convoluted and the answer choices appeared to be very vague. With a lot of the problems I really had to take my time and re-read the stimulus in order to make sure that I understood the argument, whereas on recent LSAT questions I read through them just one time and get to straight to answers.

Another thing is with the more recent LSATs is that I feel like you can almost always narrow down the answer choices to one or two answers. However in the early 90s LR the answers didn't seem to stick out like a sore thumb.

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