June 2011 Study Group Forum

[99.9luft]

Ahh Navajo basket weaving...

After doing the RC in PTs 19-28 I swore I was going to send hate mail to every Jazz and Blues music historian I could find an address to. Maybe the head RC passage writer at LSAC was a Jazz/Blues aficionado at that time.

.....And maybe he was in a traumatic accident involving elevator music and a blind black man and has since shifted focus as the newer RC passages don't seem quite as mentally torturous...

you can't be serious, brosef, those passages were so fun. Try noguchi (pt59) or the mites (pt53) and then report with your thoughts.

[xjykybl]

Have people done the pre 10PT?
I didn't do the 1-10PT, and am now using the LR sections for LR drill. Somehow the pre10PT LRs are different from the most recent ones. Anyone has the same feeling?

I just started with a few LR from PT2. If you've done them, did you understand #2 of LR1? I read the MLSAT explanation and still don't get it.

And this is a random question for everyone: when you send PMs do they sit in your outbox without sending for a ridiculous amount of time? I tried to send a PM at like 10:30 am and it still hasn't sent...happens all the time

The Camp Winnehatchee question?
Bill rejected Ann's statement, and provided the evidence that "some Tri-cities students are campers at Camp Lakemont, not campers at Camp Winnehatchee". This could be an evidence used to refute the claim that "All stduents at Tri-Cities High School are campers at Camp Winnehatchee". But Ann didn't make that calim. Ann only said all campers at Camp Winnehatchee go to Tri-cities, and it's very likely that Tri-cities includes students who camp somewhere else.
So E is Bill's mis-interpretation.

[soj]

RC review went pretty well. I remembered surprisingly little of the passages, and at no point did I recognize an answer as correct without actually thinking it through. So maybe this is improvement. (Or maybe I'm actually remembering things without being conscious of it.)

PT | Score in March | Score today

Code: Select all

1 | -6 | -0
3 | -5 | -2
18| -5 | -2
19| -6 | -1

I picked my ten favorite and ten least favorite RC passages. The former list was definitely harder to come up with.

Top ten favorite passages
1. Bettelheim's Freudian reading of fairy tales: probably the easiest passage ever. The other Bettelheim passage nearly made my LEAST favorite list.
2. Dutch tulip market
3. women doctors in the Middle Ages
4. embryo polarity
5. Chinese Talk-Story (haters gonna hate. I enjoy tough passages that I do well in because they make me feel good about myself)
6. strategic Thurgood Marshall
7. Hippocratic oath
8. birds' status signaling
9. okapis
10. Miles Davis (I love jazz passages, I used to play jazz)
Honorable mention: Native American tribal recognition, women's memoirs of the French Revolution, Harriet Jacobs's slave narrative, reasons against using the GNP, benefits of drinking wine

Top ten least favorite passages
1. Puerto Rican code-switching! Worst passage EVER.
2. historical sociology. Fuck this shit.
3. Denise Meyerson vs. Critical Legal Studies. Totally turned me off Columbia Law School.
4. Lamarckian evolution
5. medieval canon lawyers
6. vasopressin
7. Bentham's nonexclusion principle
8. multicultural education
9. four theories of species diversity
10. faculty patenting (in the same section as code-switching!)
Dishonorable mention: gray marketing, Lichtenstein and pop art, controlled burning of forests, compulsory national service, nerve growth factor

[99.9luft]

hmmm...i should compile a similar list, soj.

Although, i think i'd distinguish between easy rc and intellectually interesting rc passages. These sometimes overlap for most of us but sometimes what others think is hard is easy for me simply because of the fact that it's interesting (jazz, Byron, cake walk, T. Marshall). Off the top of my head, my least favorite are those dealing with psychological game theory/behavourial studies, etc. (even writing these words makes me wanna barf).

At any rate, RC is still a fun challenge for me. Despite the fact that i have a -3 PT average on RC, I've never had a perfect section, unlike LR and LG. Time to change that.

ETA: 22 days.

[coldshoulder]

RC review went pretty well. I remembered surprisingly little of the passages, and at no point did I recognize an answer as correct without actually thinking it through. So maybe this is improvement. (Or maybe I'm actually remembering things without being conscious of it.)

PT | Score in March | Score today

Code: Select all

1 | -6 | -0
3 | -5 | -2
18| -5 | -2
19| -6 | -1

I picked my ten favorite and ten least favorite RC passages. The former list was definitely harder to come up with.

Top ten favorite passages
1. Bettelheim's Freudian reading of fairy tales: probably the easiest passage ever. The other Bettelheim passage nearly made my LEAST favorite list.
2. Dutch tulip market
3. women doctors in the Middle Ages
4. embryo polarity
5. Chinese Talk-Story (haters gonna hate. I enjoy tough passages that I do well in because they make me feel good about myself)
6. strategic Thurgood Marshall
7. Hippocratic oath
8. birds' status signaling
9. okapis
10. Miles Davis (I love jazz passages, I used to play jazz)

Top ten least favorite passages
1. Puerto Rican code-switching! Worst passage EVER.
2. historical sociology. Fuck this shit.
3. Denise Meyerson vs. Critical Legal Studies. Totally turned me off Columbia Law School.
4. Lamarckian evolution
5. medieval canon lawyers
6. vasopressin
7. Bentham's nonexclusion principle
8. multicultural education
9. four theories of species diversity
10. faculty patenting (in the same section as code-switching!)

The RC with Code-switching/faculty patenting was truly a giant bitch.

[jim-green]

The RC with Code-switching/faculty patenting was truly a giant bitch.

Yep, I felt like telling the author, "Welcome to America. Now speak English!"

[tigerlaw7]

Hey guys! I've been studying for the June test since March or so, and I've seen my initial diagnostic of 161 improve quite considerably, but my raw scores have ranged from a highest of -8 to a recent -18 on PT 55 after I made dumb mistakes in LG and what I thought was overall just a tough test, and combined with the hard curve I scored a 163 and had an afternoon of some intense discouragement. Any suggestions for this home stretch or how to make sure these more recent tests don't bite me in the ass? I feel like I have the ability to break 170, if I can get consistent and not let other sections slide as I make improvements elsewhere, but I'm starting to get really nervous about the test date and if it's going to be a possibility (as I'm sure all of you are).

[theaether]

Hey guys! I've been studying for the June test since March or so, and I've seen my initial diagnostic of 161 improve quite considerably, but my raw scores have ranged from a highest of -8 to a recent -18 on PT 55 after I made dumb mistakes in LG and what I thought was overall just a tough test, and combined with the hard curve I scored a 163 and had an afternoon of some intense discouragement. Any suggestions for this home stretch or how to make sure these more recent tests don't bite me in the ass? I feel like I have the ability to break 170, if I can get consistent and not let other sections slide as I make improvements elsewhere, but I'm starting to get really nervous about the test date and if it's going to be a possibility (as I'm sure all of you are).

try to standardize the eating/sleeping habits you have so you're eating basically the same meals before and sleeping around the same amount before. then, once you reach testing day, just eat/sleep the same again

[OhOkay]

Please help, guys, would really appreciate it:

My review feels super incoherent. I review PTs and sections I take, but somehow, if you were to ask me to recall examples of questions I got wrong or tips I learned from my review, I am unable to do so. I have to take this test in June (will be in a developing country July on, no LSAT location and no prep time), and have only taken 11 PTs so far, so I am conflicted as to where I should spend my remaining time. The most thorough but also the most time-intensive method I can imagine is for me to go through every section I've already reviewed and try to categorize the mistakes I made/lessons learned, but this would certainly be at the expense of several PTs. I am also confused about how best to drill, given that RC has gotten harder in recent tests, but those are sections I'll use in PTs. Do you guys have suggestions?

Also, let's say my goal is high 170s... what should my PT average be? Several 180s (since there is "test-day drop") vs. consistently 175+? Or should I be looking at raw scores? (Which for me are all over the place, there is an 8 point range here, and not chronologically correlated.)

Trying not to feel scared...

[Eichörnchen]

Please help, guys, would really appreciate it:

My review feels super incoherent. I review PTs and sections I take, but somehow, if you were to ask me to recall examples of questions I got wrong or tips I learned from my review, I am unable to do so. I have to take this test in June (will be in a developing country July on, no LSAT location and no prep time), and have only taken 11 PTs so far, so I am conflicted as to where I should spend my remaining time. The most thorough but also the most time-intensive method I can imagine is for me to go through every section I've already reviewed and try to categorize the mistakes I made/lessons learned, but this would certainly be at the expense of several PTs. I am also confused about how best to drill, given that RC has gotten harder in recent tests, but those are sections I'll use in PTs. Do you guys have suggestions?

Also, let's say my goal is high 170s... what should my PT average be? Several 180s (since there is "test-day drop") vs. consistently 175+? Or should I be looking at raw scores? (Which for me are all over the place, there is an 8 point range here, and not chronologically correlated.)

Trying not to feel scared...

I feel totally confident that you can reach your goal- you have been doing so well on your PTs. Do you have any systematic approach when you review? For example, I write a word doc for each and catagorize correct answers (ie- #15. Correct. Parallel Flaw.) and for unsure/incorrect I do the same but write out why I was uncertain and why I should have seen the correct answer straight away, or why I chose the incorrect answer and why my approach failed.

[soj]

I think for LR, you should do what Eich suggested and do your review in writing. Take a screenshot, scan, or even type out the questions so you can review them between PTs.

For RC, go over your mistakes on the test, and if there are passages that really gave you problems (depending on where you are in RC--I recall you usually do pretty well in it, so maybe at least 2 wrong), mark them and return to them in a week or so. You'll remember some of it, but if you're like me, you won't remember so much that the entire exercise is a wasted effort.

In games, it should be a little easier to figure out where you've gone wrong--which inferences you missed, which words you misread, etc.

[OhOkay]

So far my review technique consisted of just marking up (in pen) notes/explanations for the questions I missed or found difficult directly on the PT. I don't own a scanner/printer, and typing up Q's is too much time at this point, so I think I will end up going through all the PTs I've done and try to type up succinct notes in a Word doc, even if this means no PTs for the next two days. This should at least help alleviate my anxiety about feeling like I've learned nothing and am carrying over no lessons from PT to PT. I'll redo RC sections as well, as you suggested soj.

Scoring-wise, my RC is not so much worse than LR, but RC is bad because, unlike LR, I have a really tough time understanding why one AC is better than another, even upon review. It all feels way more subjective than LR. LG is basically a time-management issue at this point. Somehow it is so hard to move on when I get to a question/game that is looking to be time-consuming, and as a result I end up leaving myself too little time for the remaining game(s).

Thank you guys for the advice and encouragement, it honestly helps so much when I'm second-guessing myself so hard at this point. You all rock.

[Strange]

About to take PT48, be back later!

[iphone7]

So I just finished pt 46 and I have developed a strategy for LGs that I have found to be very helpful. I can normally finish the LG section with about 5 minutes to go. What I have begun to do is when I realize that a question will require a lot of hypos, I skip it and mark it. Then I go back during my extra time (usually about 7-10 minutes when I skip these questions) and do each hypo. It has started working very well for me as I normally get -1/-0 on LGs, and I'm wondering if anyone else has had success doing something similar.

[soj]

Just got owned on the juggler game in PT22. Turns out, I had misinterpreted a rule. It's a wonder I got away with -1.

[Eichörnchen]

So far my review technique consisted of just marking up (in pen) notes/explanations for the questions I missed or found difficult directly on the PT. I don't own a scanner/printer, and typing up Q's is too much time at this point, so I think I will end up going through all the PTs I've done and try to type up succinct notes in a Word doc, even if this means no PTs for the next two days. This should at least help alleviate my anxiety about feeling like I've learned nothing and am carrying over no lessons from PT to PT. I'll redo RC sections as well, as you suggested soj.

Scoring-wise, my RC is not so much worse than LR, but RC is bad because, unlike LR, I have a really tough time understanding why one AC is better than another, even upon review. It all feels way more subjective than LR. LG is basically a time-management issue at this point. Somehow it is so hard to move on when I get to a question/game that is looking to be time-consuming, and as a result I end up leaving myself too little time for the remaining game(s).
I think doing the word doc is a good idea. It's what I've done and I never bothered to print them, or to add the text of the question. I'll give a little summary usually, but I always have the hard copy of the PT with me whenever I'm going over these documents so I haven't found it necessary. To be honest, after I'm done writing all that out, I've never reread the explanations. Now that I'm an Oct taker I might bother at some point, but it really seems that the process of writing it out itself is beneficial enough to make a big difference.
Thank you guys for the advice and encouragement, it honestly helps so much when I'm second-guessing myself so hard at this point. You all rock.

[soj]

PT53
LR1: -2
LG: -0
LGe (PT22 S3): -1
LR2: -0
RC: -0
Raw: -2
Scaled: 180

I'm shocked and ecstatic that I got -0 in LR2. I actually had to grade it twice just to make sure I hadn't misread the answer key. That was one of the toughest LR sections I've done, and that's despite the surprisingly large number of questions I'd seen before. The two Qs I got wrong in LR1 were unexpected (I felt unsure about 2 Qs in LR1, but not the ones I got wrong), so I guess it evens out. Pacing was bad in both LR sections. I wouldn't have gotten -0 in LR2 if it were real testing conditions and the proctor decided to call time even 30 seconds early.

RC felt good, but not great. I feel lucky to have pulled out a -0 (only the third time ever in 50 PTs), especially with that annoying second passage (English common law) in which I couldn't shake off the feeling that I wasn't getting the tone or some other critical element of the passage. I also nearly ran out of time because passages 2 and 4 took so long.

Game 4 in LGe was a disaster. I used up all of the extra time I had saved up from rushing through the first three games, and even that wasn't enough to overcome a big interpretation error that prevented me from finding the correct answer to Q23. (It was so frustrating--I kept eliminating every AC.) Thankfully it was a misinterpretation of a local rule, so it didn't hurt me in the other questions. I did eventually get it right 4 minutes past the allotted time.

[Strange]

Yikes, last question on the LG for PT48 tripped me up. On break right now, but I felt good about the first LR section.

[mickeyD]

PT53
LR1: -2
LG: -0
LGe (PT22 S3): -1
LR2: -0
RC: -0
Raw: -2
Scaled: 180

....

[soj]

It's my first 180 under test-like conditions (i.e. not drills or composites of experimental sections).

[xjykybl]

PT53
LR1: -2
LG: -0
LGe (PT22 S3): -1
LR2: -0
RC: -0
Raw: -2
Scaled: 180

wow, congrats!!

[theaether]

PT53
LR1: -2
LG: -0
LGe (PT22 S3): -1
LR2: -0
RC: -0
Raw: -2
Scaled: 180

I'm shocked and ecstatic that I got -0 in LR2. I actually had to grade it twice just to make sure I hadn't misread the answer key. That was one of the toughest LR sections I've done, and that's despite the surprisingly large number of questions I'd seen before. The two Qs I got wrong in LR1 were unexpected (I felt unsure about 2 Qs in LR1, but not the ones I got wrong), so I guess it evens out. Pacing was bad in both LR sections. I wouldn't have gotten -0 in LR2 if it were real testing conditions and the proctor decided to call time even 30 seconds early.

RC felt good, but not great. I feel lucky to have pulled out a -0 (only the third time ever in 50 PTs), especially with that annoying second passage (English common law) in which I couldn't shake off the feeling that I wasn't getting the tone or some other critical element of the passage. I also nearly ran out of time because passages 2 and 4 took so long.

Game 4 in LGe was a disaster. I used up all of the extra time I had saved up from rushing through the first three games, and even that wasn't enough to overcome a big interpretation error that prevented me from finding the correct answer to Q23. (It was so frustrating--I kept eliminating every AC.) Thankfully it was a misinterpretation of a local rule, so it didn't hurt me in the other questions. I did eventually get it right 4 minutes past the allotted time.

nice, i tanked that test just recently. nice nice nice

[jim-green]

It's my first 180 under test-like conditions (i.e. not drills or composites of experimental sections).

You badass! amazing. I took this on Friday and did a little better (169) than on PT52 4 days ago (166). Soj, you are amazing and an inspiration to me. How did u find game 2? did u have to make 4 diagrams?

[MarineLaw]

I noticed an interesting correlation between my PT scores and exercise routine.

If I lift weights hard enough to get substantially sore, I totally feel grogged out and my concentration and reading comprehension sucks the next day (even after a great night's sleep). However, I've found a moderate running routine to aid in concentration and clarity. I don't know if this holds for anyone else, but it makes me wonder about what physiological stuff is going on between these two to create a noticeable difference.

[Strange]

Another 168, this time on PT48. Totally felt fatigued and lost focus on the last section, which was LR, so I need to work on that. Otherwise, I felt good for the most part, and got -10 but another tough curve landed me with the same PT average I've had for the past month. The positive out of this is that I scored a -2 on the RC, which fits into the average score I've gotten on the timed RC's for the older sections I've been doing.