pgiboney wrote:My situation is similar to Mac's. Regularly -3 and -2 on LR...that is until I jumped from PT 35 to PT52 a couple Friday's ago. -4 and -7. About had a heart attack. When I calmed down, like Mac, I thought it must have been a fluke. The I reviewed the test...not a fluke. Having already read the Bibles twice, I panicked. Fortunately your material was available for Kindle, downloaded immediately, and went back to work. I've now identified my weakness - all in what Manhatten classifies as the assumption family. I've made great strides here in a short period of time, and I have your company to thank for that...but still struggle on these types of questions, particularly the long winded formal logic, neccessary and sufficient assumption types. Formal logic is no problem for me on LG, but when it comes to LR, it's a real struggle to keep the argument sorted mentally. It doesn't help that I will only diagram as a last resort - it's a mental block and hard to overcome. I understand that the decision to diagram or not to diagram is pretty specific to the individual but I'm going to ask anyway...I usually finish LR with b/w a minute and 3 minutes to spare. In your experience, is it possible to diagram say, 4 or 5 questions, without taking a huge hit on time? Or is that totally dependent on the individual?
Thanks.
I think you're going to be OK. First off, you've just started absorbing the idea of the core -- you probably have some more room for growth in your ability to apply that thinking.
In terms of formal logic, one small suggestion is to play our LSAT Arcade, specifically "If..Then" - if you need to speed up in your ability to diagram, that can be of some help.
More broadly, I find that many people, esp. Bible-thumpers and former Bible-thumpers, over-do it on the diagramming and waste time doing that for questions that they don't need it for, and possibly getting turned around on those questions because they lose touch with the common sense logic issues at play. That said, there are definitely some questions that only some sort of LSAT freak could do without diagramming. I'm definitely not that freak (I'm a different flavor of freak) as I diagram about 3 questions per section (the occasional matching questions, and then some inference and sufficient assumption ones, like you).
I think the key for you is to know where to spend your time and mental energy. For example, if you're facing a sufficient assumption question, and there are a ton of statements, including one about "some" X are Y. You should know that that non-conditional statement is probably not relevant to the problem. What I'd do is gather together all the questions from previous PTs, look at the question stem--say to yourself what your job is (find something that must be true/find an answer that makes the argument air-tight) and look back over the stimulus with an eye towards what pieces you think will be "in play." Then diagram, evaluate answers, and see if you were right. I have a feeling you'll start to slim down your process to the essential "moves." (BTW, if you are one of our self-study course students, you'll find a set of advanced conditional logic LR questions in practice book 1 that would be perfect for this)
Tell me if you have more questions about that, otherwise tell me how that goes.
I couldn't believe it. I went over the answer sheet and I realized that in many of the questions I got wrong I changed the answer from correct to incorrect. For some reason I was second-guessing and sabotaging myself. 
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