Post
by The LSAT Trainer » Wed Nov 06, 2013 1:28 pm
Just wanted to mention that I think it's really useful to have specific goals and gauges as you drill -- by knowing what you want to get better at, and by being able to keep track of how you are doing relative to those goals, you can get a lot more out of your work.
There are three basic skills that I think every test taker needs in order to put himself/herself in the best position to succeed, regardless of whatever diagramming/prep methods he/she uses. All these skills are fairly basic and easily attainable, but I've found that even at the 170 level, students often make games harder than they need to be because they don't have these three things down -- so, all that is a long-winded way for me to say I think it's a good idea for you to remind yourself to firm up these three things during your prep:
1) You should be able to easily visualize the basic design of every game and every base.
All games are closely related to one another, and they all work off of a few basic templates, and by the time you go into the test no design should be surprising for you. The better you are at visualizing a game, the easier it is to play it.
Test: Go through old games you've played, just looking at the scenario and rules quickly. See if you can easily tell what type of game it is/what sort of base you should set up (though of course it's understandable you may not be able to decide whether to create frames/hypos and such unless you take a more careful look). Again, the key word here is "easily" -- if this step is difficult for you, it's a sign you may be making certain games more difficult on yourself than they need to be because you have trouble picturing them.
Again, there are not a lot of things that can happen with the design of a game; make sure you develop a big picture understanding of all the possibilities.
2) You should have automatic and intuitive notation systems for all common rules
In general, I am not a fan of football (violence punctuated by committee meetings), but I love to watch Peyton Manning play -- he's just an awesome physical representation of the human mind at work -- imagine how much worse he'd be at his job if he actually had to worry about remembering how plays work.
A lot of students feel "comfortable enough" with their notational systems, but ideally, in order to perform at your best, you want to get to a point where they are automatic -- when notating most rules feels as simple as spelling "cat." To me, this is critically important -- during the course of solving a tough q, you are going to have to build inference upon inference upon inference -- this is much much tougher to do if you have to worry about how you are notating things.
3) You should have specific and practiced processes for different types of questions
As I mention a lot in the trainer, one of my all time favorite things to do as a teacher was simply watch students solve questions and then ask them about their process. One of the most glaring and apparent things that I noticed, when I did this with students and logic games, is how much time students wasted because they approached a variety of different types of questions using the same strategies, or no strategies at all.
Question strategies will be slightly different based on whatever diagramming strategies you use, but the key is to develop consistency. One suggestion I have is to create notecards for each of the q types (conditional must be true, min/max, etc), with basic notes about how you want to approach that q type. Use these notecards as a reminder before doing practice sets and, when you notice something new to add, or when you notice you ought to change a strategy, edit the cards (make sure to include, in these strategies, the steps you ought to typically take when you get stuck on that type of problem/don't see the answer you expect, etc.).
Again, I think all of these are very attainable goals, and they are important regardless of whatever learning/diagramming systems you use. I think when you have these three things down, games become easier, and you put yourself in a much better position to play them well.
Sorry for the length -- got started writing and I couldn't stop -- hope you found it helpful -- mike
