1. Use the order of difficulty to your advantage
The first 10 questions are the easiest, so don’t use valuable time double or triple checking your answers. For every minute you save on these easier questions that’s a minute you can spend working through the more difficult ones on the end.
2. Thoroughly read through the stimulus
Unlike Reading Comp, which uses terminology you might not necessarily need to know on the initial read, every word of Logical Reading questions is important. Way too many mistakes are made just by going too fast and missing important details.
3. The topic of the stimulus doesn’t matter
It’s easy to get confused when the subject matter is obtuse. Things like science-based topics can throw a lot of hard-to-understand vocabulary and concepts at you. They are there precisely to confuse you. When this happens, identify the only two things that really mater: the evidence and the conclusion. The rest of it is just distracting fluff.
4. Eliminate all words that are irrelevant to the argument
This piggy-backs off of my last point. If it’s not evidence and it’s not conclusion then you don’t need to worry about it. Once you identify the parts of the argument you need to focus on you can begin to move much quicker.
5. Study smarter
When you study, keep track of how confident you are on certain questions. This helps a ton when you go back and look at old tests because you’ll start to see patterns emerge for the types of questions you struggle with most.
One of my favorite techniques is mark the questions you answered where you weren’t 100% certain. If you have the answers narrowed down, use a “/“ to indicate which ones you were deciding between. For instance, were trying to decide between B and C, then write down “B/C” by the question. If you liked one answer better than the other, put that one first.
6. Don’t diagram Logical Reasoning questions too often
There are certainly times to diagram a Logical Reasoning question. Namely, when there are stimuli involving multiple conditional statements that can be linked in some way. You’ll see that in Sufficient Assumption questions, Must Be True Questions and Parallel Reasoning questions. Outside of these, save yourself the time and skip the diagram. Some of the above questions can even be answered reliably without a diagram with enough practice. This buys you time which, when taking the LSAT, is invaluable.
Did those help? Well guess what? There’s a whole lot more where that came from.
Because I am obsessed with helping you own the LSAT, I have compiled a huge list of LR articles for you to review. You can read them all right here.
And that wraps up this series on Logical Reasoning! I hope you learned, laughed and then learned some more. What’s coming next? Who knows! If you’re struggling with anything in particular, let me know and I’ll try and work it into the next series.
You’ve got this!
Steve “LSAT Black Belt” Schwartz
P.S. If you haven’t been to my site in a while, check it out again. I’ve complied all kinds of great resources over there: books, courses, and a whole lot of free advice. These articles are great because I bring the knowledge straight to you, but if you need some more study resources, those links have exactly what you need. Go check 'em out and let me know what you think!
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