Logic Game Tip
Posted: Wed Feb 06, 2019 3:59 pm
One of the less obvious sources of deductions for Logic Games has been on my mind lately so I figured I would highlight it and give others a chance to share their favorite tips.
Mine is: look for patterns in the answer choices as a group and use them to your advantage.
The more LG questions where you can avoid methodically eliminating answer choices one-by-one the better, right?
If the question provides you additional information like a new rule or other hypothetical it can be easy, especially if you already have a solid diagram and have made a few broad deductions about how the rules interact.
But what about the more general questions that just ask you what could be true/must be true/must be false? Sure, you can just go through and find out which answers break rules or don't depending on what was asked, but that takes time.
One shortcut can be to look at the answer choices as a group.
Take, for example, a game that involves several groupings. Say you have already deduced that Group B must have either two or three members. Further, you've determined that if it is two members it must include Timmy, but if it is three members it can't include Lars. Then you get a question that asks what could be a complete and accurate list of the people in Group B.
This is a pretty basic example so you could probably get through it by process of elimination pretty easily, but the LSAT is about saving seconds. If you look at the answers as a group and notice that three of them have three people and two of them have two people you can use that.
Look at the two answers that have two people in them. Do they both have Timmy? Lets say neither of them do so neither could be our answer. Then look at the answers with three people. Do any of them contain Lars? Lets say two of them do, so we can eliminated those two and the remaining answer must be correct.
Questions will rarely actually require you to methodically go answer by answer. There is almost always a way to look at the ways the rules interact and get to the answer faster than by process of elimination. Group-distributions are only one example. If you look for it you will find that the LSAT groups answer choices together all the time and sometimes patters in the answer choices are the only clue to what deduction the question is getting at.
Andrew McDonald, Blueprint LSAT Instructor.
Mine is: look for patterns in the answer choices as a group and use them to your advantage.
The more LG questions where you can avoid methodically eliminating answer choices one-by-one the better, right?
If the question provides you additional information like a new rule or other hypothetical it can be easy, especially if you already have a solid diagram and have made a few broad deductions about how the rules interact.
But what about the more general questions that just ask you what could be true/must be true/must be false? Sure, you can just go through and find out which answers break rules or don't depending on what was asked, but that takes time.
One shortcut can be to look at the answer choices as a group.
Take, for example, a game that involves several groupings. Say you have already deduced that Group B must have either two or three members. Further, you've determined that if it is two members it must include Timmy, but if it is three members it can't include Lars. Then you get a question that asks what could be a complete and accurate list of the people in Group B.
This is a pretty basic example so you could probably get through it by process of elimination pretty easily, but the LSAT is about saving seconds. If you look at the answers as a group and notice that three of them have three people and two of them have two people you can use that.
Look at the two answers that have two people in them. Do they both have Timmy? Lets say neither of them do so neither could be our answer. Then look at the answers with three people. Do any of them contain Lars? Lets say two of them do, so we can eliminated those two and the remaining answer must be correct.
Questions will rarely actually require you to methodically go answer by answer. There is almost always a way to look at the ways the rules interact and get to the answer faster than by process of elimination. Group-distributions are only one example. If you look for it you will find that the LSAT groups answer choices together all the time and sometimes patters in the answer choices are the only clue to what deduction the question is getting at.
Andrew McDonald, Blueprint LSAT Instructor.
