Do you work for LSAC? I'm kinda puzzled whether you're providing the official opinion or speculating here.Jeffort wrote: LSAC disagrees with you and so do law schools, that is what is important.
Yet again you keep distorting my arguments and attacking your distorted argument. Please see above what exactly I stated, it is very different from what you say here.If they didn't think English reading comprehension skills are important to be a successful law student, there wouldn't be the RC section such as it is included in the LSAT.
There are many other problems with those except just knowing those specific words.Your claim about having to learn/know, for example, medieval poetry, biology or painting vocabulary is wrong, you aren't expected you know those off the wall words unless you are talking about knowing what 'medieval' means. You don't have to know any weird specialized terminology about that or other off the wall subjects a passage could be about. They don't expect you to have prior knowledge of obscure terms specific to specialized topics.
The overall vocabulary and the passage structure is different. People writing about poetry often use different words and phrases to state the same things than people writing about physics. Those slow down reading as they take more time to understand what exactly was said. It may be hard to understand for a native speaker, but after living in the US close to ten years living in the US, and working with legal documents most of that time I've had no idea what "protagonist" means. Mind you, LSAT doesn't allow dictionaries. Now we can argue back and forth whether it is considered a basic word or not (by whom, btw?), but you'll never convince me that knowing the meaning of this word is relevant in any way to assessing one's ability to success in law school. I don't understand why LSAC cannot have four legal RC issues instead of bringing in the irrelevant stuff.
Another problem, which is more relevant to LG/LR is the question wording which gets more and more often worded up in a way which makes you wonder what exactly the rule means. I assume it gets more problematic for native speakers as well, but the issue here is that while it gets, for example, 2x harder for you, it gets 20x harder for me.
May I ask, have you learned another foreign language besides English? Somehow I feel like explaining that it is harder to swim in a windy sea than in a pool to someone who never seen a sea before and thinks you're being a whiner because after all the sea is just a really large pool and you just need to spend more time practicing in a pool.Yeah, you have to understand the other words in the surrounding context to figure it out though, but those will be run of the mill basic level English vocab words. You had this same debate in a few other threads recently where BP Shinners and others pointed out that all the words and subjects you were complaining about not being familiar with didn't matter for solving the questions, but you choose to ignore them.
This is why I discontinued this conversation as it was obvious to me we're looking on the issues differently and would never be able to convince each other. Hence we just "agree to disagree".
Well, for the suff assumption questions you need to at least know synonyms for the "aesthetic value", I just screwed up one of the questions yesterday because of that.For the life of me I've still never been able to figure out what the heck they are talking about with art things like aesthetic value, extrinsic value, intrinsic value, existentialistic poetry, zizafrazzals, etc. You are just failing to realize that the questions don't require prior knowledge of any uncommon stuff and aren't testing you on their vocab meanings or understanding of those specialized concepts, unless they are defined in the passage!
I know what it means, it means the person who wrote that passage had run out of crack and couldn't reach the dealer. So he tried LSD the first time and wrote this whole passage under the influence.If you are complaining about not knowing what a phrase such as "parodic use of color" means, join the club! What does that look like? How does one do that? I don't know! Nobody else knows what it means either, you aren't supposed to!
Maybe it would be different, but as I said before I'm way beyond that on the L1 textbooks, none of those are giant, confusing or overwhelming. And those old cases actually make a lot of sense. There's no "parody use of color" there.Your problem is that you just don't see or fail to recognize that testing your ability to quickly read, process and understand material about unfamiliar non law specific subjects is very much connected to your ability to succeed in law school. Believe me it is! You'll totally understand after your first week as a 1L! Law school doesn't teach things with spoon feeding methods typically used in pre-grad schooling. You are thrown right into a giant confusing, overwhelming mass of new subjects, vocabulary, idea, concepts, types of thinking, styles of writing, etc. right into the deep end head first with a huge stack of books and no instruction manual about what to do with it all.
They just dive right into plowing through cases day one and expect you to be able to make sense of super old cases from as far back as Old English law and talk intelligently about them in class.