Here's an excerpt from the interview:
What if you study over the summer, then realize that you're not ready? So you wait for another few months, and then decide to defer law school about a year or so. Do you start from the beginning again, or do you find wherever your bookmark was and continue from there?
If someone took a long time off from studying and is feeling kind of rusty, the way to get back into it would just be by doing actual LSAT problems from each of the three sections and figuring out where their weak areas are - not actually picking up right where they left off. They may need to backtrack a little bit. Overall, the issue with taking time off and getting back into it is just that you got so focused on other aspects of your life that you forget the LSAT-specific strategies that you need to do well.
However, if you’ve developed the mindset and habits, you’re not likely to lose them because the LSAT mindset is such a general framework for looking at the world. It becomes such a deeply ingrained habit that I’m not sure someone will lose that.
Could you tell us another one of the habits of high scorers?
I think that a degree of skepticism is really important. You’ll see if you’ve acquired the LSAT mindset if you start seeing in everyday life that you’re being more critical and skeptical, for example: when your friends, significant other, or family members are making general real-world arguments, and you start seeing flaws in their arguments. Of course, you don’t want to start pointing them out all the time - then people are going to get sick of you - but if you start noticing those things in your head, it’s a really good thing.
So, for example, a logical reasoning stimulus claims that one thing guarantees another. You may not necessarily have to predict what that specific alternative cause or explanation is, but it’s keeping an open mind that there are potential alternatives out there in the real world that exist. So, one of those alternatives could weaken their supposed explanation. I think people in the real world aren’t skeptical enough. That’s my opinion, but I think it’s a good habit to acquire, in general. I think it’s important.
Of course, then you have the opposite. You have conspiracy theorists that take everything that ever happened and say, “No. It didn’t happen,” but they don’t normally have adequate proof for that.
The amount of evidence is incredibly important and I think, in general, it’s about not being too certain. So, the conspiracy theorists might be convinced of their particular theory, but they’re just not sure about people who accept the status quo. There are people who, on the one hand, they’re too certain of conspiracy. Then there are people who are convinced of what the majority of people think as well.
Skepticism is not just about believing in your personal or conspiracy theory. It’s about recognizing the limited evidence that we have and just how restricted that evidence actually is. Does the evidence in front of us actually give us any explanation at all? Alternatively, maybe we don’t have enough evidence from which to draw a conclusion.
You can go back to Socrates and Shakespeare. Both said things regarding this. Translations are always difficult, but Socrates said something along the lines of, “I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance.” Shakespeare said, “The fool doths to think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”
So, basically, the smarter you get or the better your reasoning ability gets, the more you realize how little it is you actually know, or how little it is that you can actually conclude, based on the information that you see in the world or the evidence that’s presented to you.
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