minionsunite wrote:First and foremost, thanks so much Jeffort for your thorough, very helpful response.
When I first started reading what you wrote, my first thought was "oh crap" because I just signed up for Blueprint Online Course a few days ago. I guess having the extra material can't hurt..unless I start confusing TM/Blueprint/Manhattan terminologies and strategies, which I'll try to avoid.
I agree that reviewing mistakes/wrong answers is a good strategy, and my TM instructor taught my class to write why our answers were incorrect/what we did wrong/etc. But when I did that during my reviews, I tended to focus too specifically on that question and explain why specific answers to that question were wrong, not on the bigger picture of what logical reasoning errors I was making/skipping steps/etc. I'm going to try to review my mistakes asking myself some of the questions you posed in your response.
You suggested that I should see what difficulty level were the questions that I missed. Do you know if/where I can find that information for the June 2015 LSAT?
Also, would you recommend any material for drilling/practice? I finished all of my material for the TM...I've heard Cambridge LSAT by Type packets are good for drilling but I was wondering if it's worth purchasing/there's other drilling materials that are more helpful.
Thanks!
The bolded part above in your post is one of the main keys to getting your skills up to the higher 170's range level. You should strive to get yourself to being able to see the underlying logic of each LR question through the veneer of whatever subject matter is presented so that come test day you're like the character Neo from the old Matrix movie able to see the 'code' the lies underneath the superficial substance, such that on flawed argument based assumption family Qs (str, wkn, necc assumption, suff assumption, str or justify with principle, flaw, parallel flaw, evaluate arg, etc.) you're able to quickly see and identify which flawed method(s) of reasoning the argument is using and know what the unsupported assumption(s) is/are.
To figure out whether ones you missed were hard questions, first way to check is to re-do them blind (hopefully without knowing/remembering which answer is correct, which would be easier if you haven't looked at/reviewed them yet) and see how difficult they seem relative to solving other questions for you to go through and analyze step by step to get to the right answer with full logical clarity/understanding and certainty. Then review the questions in depth paying attention to any and all the different aspects that make it tricky. Also try and see if you remember anything about what went through your mind when you did them on test day, like if you were rushed, flustered, careless, skipped steps, had trouble interpreting any of the text properly, etc. since any insights about what specifically went wrong with them on test day would be valuable actionable information for re-take prepping. Some things that cause people to miss questions on test day just don't happen on timed PT's since real test day pressure is impossible to fully replicate in practice.
This including things like how hard it is to figure out the flaw(s) in arguments, how complex the stimulus is, how long it takes and how many steps it takes to put everything together to fully understand the stimulus and/or to analyze all the answer choices thoroughly, whether any of the language/grammar/phrasing/subject matter is difficult to process/easy to misunderstand, whether the CR is phrased in some sort of cryptic or otherwise way that makes it sound like 'this ain't it'/fly's below the radar on first superficial read, presence of really good tempting tricky trap answers, presence of numerous good sounding or hard to analyze answer choices, hard to definitively rule out three AC's pretty fast, total workhorse questions that take a ton of work to analyze and messing up just one step kills the whole thing, etc.
Since the test was only recently released and LSAC doesn't publish difficulty levels, the easier ways to figure out which questions are deemed difficult/highly missed under timed conditions by a large proportion of people aren't yet built up since the info comes from students experiences taking it as a timed PT and the data getting built up in the various free score tracker programs and/or people posting questions/complaints about certain questions on forums like here and the MLSAT forum.
I just got a copy the other day so I haven't reviewed the June test yet to see which questions are the harder ones, but if you post which Q#s by section you missed, I'll take a look and offer my view of the complexity and difficulty level of them.
For comparative reference about high difficulty hard/tricky questions, a few recent LR examples include:
PT73 26Q LR section, #22 (yogurt and milk sales resolve Q)
PT73 25Q LR section, #20 (chemical fertilizers necessary assumption Q), #19 (carved flint object weaken Q)
Not hard logic in the stimulus but great trap answer that grabs lots of people, PT73 25Q LR section #21
PT70 LR2 26Qs section #12 (water shortage weaken Q. Fairly easy question if you spot that it's just a whole to parts flaw argument before diving into the answers, very hard if you don't)
PT70 LR1 #23 (human rights bill, well functioning democracy strengthen with a principle Q. Complex use of conditional logic with nested conditionals and to fully see and understand the logic behind the CR, must do some big picture synthesis along with properly interpreting and putting together trickily phrased conditionals and applying contrapositive of a tricky conditional relationship in the CR with compound/multiple sufficient and necessary conditions on both sides of the arrow in a tricky deductive way using facts established in the premises)
PT71 LR2 Q21 (sulfur fumes weaken EXCEPT Q. Complex cause and effect logic, workhorse identifying and eliminating ACs that weaken, a couple of different CE weaken methods used in the ACs. Deviously designed to get people to heavy-handedly eliminate the CR right out of the gate thinking it weakens after quick superficial read that boxes themselves in and then get stuck in a frustrating mojo killing time trap debating between two incorrect answers that both weaken sometime right around the five minute warning)
Those are some of the nastiest ones from recent tests I can think of off the top of my head you can use for comparison in conjunction with your own judgment while reviewing the ones you got wrong to evaluate whether they are some of the really hard/hardest ones of the test or not. Another method for getting a good idea of the true difficulty level of Q's is how hard it is to fully explain the full logic of the question to somebody else/write out an explanation of the question, covering all the logic involved including why each wrong answer is wrong in detail, both substantively and from an abstract logical point of view.
For review, further drilling and practice, etc., put to use your knowledge of all the various commonly repeated flawed methods of reasoning as well as the less common ones included in that master list of all flaws that have appeared in LR questions list you had access to in the TM course.
Make sense?
For drilling high difficulty level questions to really master LR up to a Neo seeing through the Matrix level and getting yourself better trained to be able to quickly see and ID whatever underlying logic is going on in each question, the Cambridge LR by type and various other drilling packets are good since the questions are also organized by difficulty level. The cause and effect questions packets are really good for drilling and review too since high difficulty CE questions are some of the nastiest types that pop up and wreck people.
Focusing on the hard and hardest questions is useful for really challenging yourself to get your analysis skills up to peak shape so that you can fly easily through most of the other lower difficulty LR questions and have a bit of time luxury with the hardest ones and don't have to rush and make skipped steps/educated guesses (that frequently end up landing you on a trap answer) on any questions due to timing issues.
The main way I got my skills up to scoring 177 on test day and knowing with certainty I had nailed it the moment I finished section 5 was by focusing a lot of time on challenging myself with and thoroughly reviewing and dissecting every aspect of hard complex questions and tricky questions with super great sounding traps + cryptic hard to understand and recognize as correct CR's and other tricky Qs and/or workhorse Qs so that those were no longer super hard to me, which made all the other questions much easier in comparison so I was able to fly through those and have time to successfully navigate around the pitfalls and crack the nasty ones. It's when you're really pressed for time and feeling like you have to rush on some Qs due to not having time management really down pat that you get pick pocketed of just enough points here and there along the way to push your score just below or right at ~170 even if you otherwise have all the reading, logic and LSAT analysis skills for mid/high 170s.