Post
by SanDiegoJake » Wed Mar 09, 2011 8:26 pm
Hey Ruby,
I've been teaching LSAT courses for 15 years (Princeton Review) and have seen this situation many times before. Don't give up. With your performance in the other sections of the test, it would be a shame to abandon your law school aspirations over these silly puzzles.
What you need is a method of attacking these games that makes sense for you. While I'm admittedly completely unfamiliar with other approaches to the games section, a few of your comments struck me as techniques that will never work. (Of course, that doesn't mean that those techniques are useless. In my experience, some techniques work for people who self report as "good" at games, while different techniques work for people who self report as "bad" at games.)
Namely, for you, the technique of "memorizing the rules" will never work. Instead, you need to think of these games as visual / spatial-relational puzzles. That is to say that you want to work these games with your eyes and your pencil as well as your brain. Rather than attempt to memorize the rules, symbolize them according to what they look like visually. For instance, if a rule says that X always arrives directly before Y, draw a box with XY inside it. Do this for all the clues, and then check every symbol for every question.
Additionally, when you say that "your brain doesn't work that way", my response to that would be to stop trying to train your mind to work that way. Instead, use your eyes and your pencil. For instance, when a question says, "If X arrives second, which one of the following could be true?", draw it out in your chart (Um, if you're not using a chart to answer questions, then that's your whole problem right there.) When I say "draw it out", what I mean is that you want to chart the possibilities of what could be true. Usually, there is some rule that limits the number of possibilities to 3 or fewer. Write them out instead of trying to keep it all in your head.
I have lots of advice/experience/time to help, so let me know if you'd like to hear more. Also, you may be interested in something I'll be debuting in the next few weeks. It's called "Game of the Week", and I'll be doing a different LSAT game each week in my online classroom. Attendance will be free to anybody. More on that to come in its own dedicated thread once details are finalized.
You can do this Ruby. The problem is not with your mind, but with your approach to the section as a whole.