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Post LR Bible Reading... Review and Evaluation

Posted: Fri Jul 01, 2011 12:59 am
by locthebloke
Hi all, October test taker here. So I've finished working through the LR Bible for the first time (it took me a little longer than I would have liked :( --but in these final three months I REALLY plan on going full throttle with my study).

I've gained a lot of fantastic insights going through it, but the sheer volume of information is still daunting. I'm going to go back and review and was looking for the best advice on how to go about it. I plan on writing up summary in my own words of every chapter, and then reading those summaries again and again.

What seemed to stick out at me as the most crucial (and I know it's all crucial) was really having down Conditional Reasoning; Causality; Strengthen, Justify and Assumption methods (like the mechanistic approach); and the Chapter on Parallel Reasoning (such a good chapter! Those questions are a lot less frightening to me! :? )

Would you add anything to that list?? (there's probably something I'm already forgetting about..) A lot of the LR Bible was just recognizing conclusions, qualifying words, knowing exactly what the author means and avoiding the usual suspect wrong answers (shell game, etc.) which seems like it will come with practice and drilling..

Any general advice for drilling LR? I'm going to take some advice I was given for LG--making 3 photocopies of the games in all my PTs and cycling through them. Anyone have a good LR drilling method?

Thanks for reading this novel.. And thank you very much for any help/insights in advance!

Re: Post LR Bible Reading... Review and Evaluation

Posted: Fri Jul 01, 2011 7:51 am
by GoldenGloves
locthebloke wrote:I plan on writing up summary in my own words of every chapter, and then reading those summaries again and again.
This is the way to do it. Put it in your own words. Read your notes before bed every night. Develop the ability to teach it to others.
locthebloke wrote: Any general advice for drilling LR? I'm going to take some advice I was given for LG--making 3 photocopies of the games in all my PTs and cycling through them. Anyone have a good LR drilling method?
Ideally, you'd have drilled each question type after completing its respective LR bible chapter. The best way now is to pick up the Cambridge LR types for at least the types that give you difficulty (if not all of them) & drill them once you've completed the review & note-making process for each chapter. I also recommend typing up missed/uncertain LR questions in a Word document when reviewing after your drills. I use this retyping process to really analyze each question's structure & tricks. I then print these questions & hand write explanations for each right & wrong answer, collecting all this in a folder for even more review later on.

Re: Post LR Bible Reading... Review and Evaluation

Posted: Fri Jul 01, 2011 8:29 am
by Eugenie Danglars
I highly recommend making a summary/cheat sheet of the LR bible. I did this and reviewed it before every PT, and I eventually had it more or less memorized/internalized without trying. I saw a big jump in LR scores after that.

Also, if you don't want to buy an LR by type book, you can just use the lsatblog spreadsheet to find and drill questions by type.

Re: Post LR Bible Reading... Review and Evaluation

Posted: Fri Jul 01, 2011 7:36 pm
by Jeffort
I like the study plan, especially the re-writing things out yourself as you learn and review them. Putting ideas, concepts and techniques into your own words and actually writing them out by hand has enormous learning benefits that have been proven by many studies.

It helps really get the stuff into your brain in a way that it sticks. By putting the ideas into your own words, it forces your brain to really think about and understand whatever idea/concept it is for you to be able to paraphrase it in your own words and in a way that might be easier for you to remember and think about.

For drilling LR question types, a few years ago I built a free logical reasoning question type finder online tool.
--LinkRemoved--

It currently covers PT#'s 19-45. I made the question type names and classifications compatible with the LRB when I classified all the questions to make the utility.

Just select a test # and a question type and it gives you a list of the question #'s of that type in the that test so you can find them fast and work a bunch of the same type in a row. You just need to have the '10 books' or otherwise have the tests in full test form to look them up in. Or you could spend some $$ and buy an expensive book that organized and printed them by question type.