Kaplan LSAT Mastery Practice Book

The Kaplan LSAT Mastery Practice Book is one of several books that Kaplan provides only to students who take its courses. This book is not available in bookstores.

While I'm not a fan of Kaplan's retail books, the Mastery Practice book is pretty useful. Like Grouped by Game Type (review) and Grouped by Question Type (review), it takes hundreds of questions from several LSAT PrepTests and organizes them by question-type rather than by PrepTest number. Since I've just published reviews of the "Grouped" books, it makes sense to compare them to Mastery Practice, which has been around longer.

The following is a comparison of Mastery Practice with Grouped by Game Type and Grouped by Question Type.

PrepTests Used
Grouped by Game Type and Grouped by Question Type include every question from PrepTests 1-20 and only use those questions. This allows you to be comprehensive in your studying - you'll know exactly which questions you've done.

The Mastery Practice book is all over the place. It uses a seemingly random set of questions from most of the PrepTests from 5-41. This makes it difficult to keep track of which questions you've done. On the plus side, this means that you can use this book to complete some newer questions.

Grouped: 1
Mastery Practice: 0


Categorization of Logic Games Questions
Grouped by Game Type generally does a good job. See my review of it for more info.

Mastery Practice lumps together Pure Sequencing, Basic Linear, Advanced Linear, and a Circular Linearity game all under the same category of "Sequencing" with no differentiation. I like how it categorizes "Matching" games. However, it includes Selection/In-Out, Splitting, and some Matching games all under the category of "Grouping" games without any differentiation. It includes some Combination games along with Advanced Linear games under Hybrids.

Grouped: 1
Mastery Practice: 0


Categorization of Logical Reasoning Questions
Grouped by Question Type does an excellent job categorizing Logical Reasoning questions by type. See my review of it for more info.

Because Mastery Practice is produced by Kaplan, its categorization of LR questions is lacking, particularly with regard to "Assumption" questions and "Most Strongly Supported" questions.

Grouped: 1
Mastery Practice: 0


Ordering of Questions by Difficulty
Grouped by Game Type and Grouped by Question Type do not place questions in any order of difficulty within their chapters. Instead, they're placed in chronological order within each section.

Mastery Practice also places questions in chronological order within each section. However, it first breaks the questions down into 4 categories of progressive difficulty (1-star, 2-star, 3-star, and 4-star within each section). It's a great concept, and the difficulty ratings are generally pretty solid and useful. (However, keep in mind that certain questions that Kaplan/Kaplan students consider difficult may not be as difficult when you apply non-Kaplan techniques.)

Grouped: 0
Mastery Practice: 1


Explanations
Grouped by Game Type and Grouped by Question Type do not include any explanations.

Mastery Practice includes explanations for every question contained in this book. However, good explanations take a long time to write, and Kaplan doesn't generally invest the time to make their explanations very good. Sometimes they're helpful, sometimes they're not, and sometimes they say things that are just plain wrong. Other times, they just dismiss the wrong answer choices as being "out of scope."

Grouped: 0.5
(Explanations are often a crutch anyway. Try to figure things out on your own.)

Mastery Practice: 0.5
(Maybe an explanation will help every now and then, but you can just ignore the explanations if you don't want to use them.)


Price
Grouped by Game Type is $31.50 on Amazon, $35 retail
Grouped by Question Type is $49.50 on Amazon, $55 retail

Mastery Practice is only available through 3rd-party sellers (generally students who took the course), so there's no concrete retail price. Copies of Mastery Practice are currently $18 - $99 on Amazon.

Grouped: 0.75
(The books are reasonably-priced, considering the amount of time they save you.)

Mastery Practice: 1
(You can often find perfect-condition copies for less than the price of the Grouped books if you take a few minutes to look through various listings.)


Grouped vs. Mastery
Grouped by Game Type and Grouped by Question Type: 4.25/5
Mastery Practice: 2.5/5


Verdict:
Grouped books: Definitely worth ordering if you want to go through PrepTests 1-20.

Mastery Practice: Worth ordering if you want a book with some Logical Reasoning questions in PrepTests 21-41 organized by type. Just make sure you buy a copy with little-to-no writing.


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Number of pages in each book
Grouped by Game Type: 124 pages
Grouped by Question Type: 359 pages
Mastery Practice: 969 pages

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PS: All mentions of Mastery Practice are about the 2009 edition. Other editions of this book differ in size and content.

PPS: Mastery Practice also contains a few dozen Reading Comprehension passages broken into the following categories (and arranged in progressive order of difficulty), along with explanations:

Humanities
Law
Natural Science
Social Science