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BP1’s Behind the June 2013 LSAT

BPPshinners-lsat-blog-June2013analysis
I hope everyone enjoyed June-LSAT release day! The LSAC was nice this year – they released scores well enough in advance of July 4th so that you could go out and celebrate/lament, nurse your hangover, and be back in drinking shape by the time our nation’s birthday rolls around. Cheers to you, LSAC!

Also, while not always getting the topics in the right section, I feel my predictions were eerily accurate.

I had a chance to look over the test, and here are some thoughts:

1) Logical Reasoning
Make no mistake, there were a few brutal questions. We saw some uncommon question types (Agree; Crux), and the prompts for the common questions were verbose and convoluted. And the sections, overall, seemed very wordy to me.

However, overall, it didn’t seem too bad. Other than a few killer questions (which almost always show up), the rest of the section was mostly about deciphering the prompts. Once you had those down, it should have felt like two average LR sections.

2) Logic Games
Not a bad section at all if you spent the time to build scenarios. The last two games might have given you a bit of trouble, but if you stuck with what you knew, you should have found this to be a pretty straight-forward section.

The first game was an open-ended (i.e. not many deductions), but not terribly difficult, ordering game.

The second tried to throw you off by using numbers as the players for an overbooked ordering game, but if you set the game up using the shelves as a base, it should have been easy to get through. The key here was noticing that 6 showed up in two rules, leading to a couple bare-bones scenarios that should have guided you through the questions.

The third game might have taken a few seconds to set up, but it was just a tiered ordering game where the players repeated. That fourth rule was very strong, so you should have built scenarios around it (only a couple of the schools could fit into that rule).

The final game was of the unstable, grouping variety, but it featured three strong rules. Using the first one to set up scenarios led me to some quick deductions using the second one that allowed me to get through an otherwise-difficult set of questions.

3) Reading Comprehension
Ugh, that fourth passage. Otherwise, however, this section wasn’t that bad. I might be biased since I studied IP at law school, but that comparative passage seemed to be very straight-forward.

The first passage on small farms was just a list of recommendations. Tagging the subject matter of each one should have netted you a lot of early points.

The second passage, or “hipster photographer” passage as I like to call it, had a lot of different methods floating around, but if you followed along with the basic tone, it shouldn’t have been too bad.

The third passage on IP law, a topic that has previously resulted in ridiculously difficult passages, seemed pretty accessible to me. Passage B, especially, didn’t have much subtlety to it.

The fourth passage was definitely the most difficult, especially with all the name-dropping, but noticing the author hopping in throughout the last paragraph definitely helped unlock the passage.

4) Overall
Overall, this was a run-of-the-mill LSAT. 100 questions, -11 to get a 170. If it was a beer, it would be Bud Light: Nothing too heavy, but it still gets the job done.

Let us know your thoughts on the LSAT below!