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5 Quick Tips to Supercharge Your Logical Reasoning Performance

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During my time writing for this blog, I’ve repeatedly vented about my hatred for logic games. Fortunately for everyone, I won’t be talking about logic games this week; instead, I get to talk about a section that is near and dear to my heart — logical reasoning — and the dead horse that is my vendetta against logic games will get at least a weeklong reprieve. Without further adieu, here are my five quick tips for upping your logical reasoning score.

1.) Identify the Question Types

Your first step for any logical reasoning question is to read the prompt and identify the question type. Identifying the question type will inform your strategy as you work through the stimulus. By knowing it up front, you’ll strengthen your ability to comprehend the most relevant aspects of the stimulus for answering the question. If you ever find yourself moving directly into the stimulus, stop immediately and question your life choices.

2.) Diagram, Diagram, Diagram

Diagramming is one of the most important skills to master if you want to succeed on the logical reasoning section. If you’re familiar with logical reasoning questions at all, you know that many of the different question types involve conditional language. By becoming familiar with diagramming, you’ll be able to mentally compartmentalize the different parts of these prompts more quickly and work through the questions more efficiently. This is especially the case for parallel reasoning and parallel flaw questions — if you’re not comfortable diagramming, these questions can eat up valuable minutes of your time and become extraordinarily difficult to answer.

3.) Know the Flaws

In addition to conditional language and diagramming, I think flaws in reasoning are the most common aspect of logical reasoning questions. Consequently, you should be able to identify any of the most often tested flaws at a moment’s notice. This will not only help you with the identification questions, but also with parallel flaw questions and the like. You should have them committed to memory by the time test day rolls around.

4.) Manage Your Time

Logical reasoning sections follow a predictable trend in terms of question difficulty. The questions at the end of each section are more difficult and time consuming than the questions at the beginning. As a result, you know exactly how to apportion your time so that you can budget more for the harder questions.

5.) Anticipate Answer Choices

Last but not least, you should always try to anticipate the correct answer choice before you move from the stimulus to the answer choice. If you’ve done a thorough job analyzing the stimulus, you will be able to — in most cases — predict the correct answer before you go through the options. By doing so, you’ll be able to eliminate the incorrect answers quickly and choose the correct answer with more assuredness.

Logical reasoning, by virtue of taking up two of the four scored sections sections, is one of the most important parts of the LSAT to master. These five tips should help you improve your score and move closer to your target for the test overall.

Have your own tips that helped you supercharge your LR score? Leave a comment below.