Note: As of August 2024, the LSAT will no longer have a Logic Games Section. The June 2024 exam will be the final LSAT with Logic Games. Learn more about the change here.

With less than three weeks until the June LSAT, it’s time to buckle down on studying. This week we’re offering one important last-minute tip for each LSAT section. Yesterday we tackled Reading Comprehension; today we’re talking Logic Games.

We’ve previously discussed how to find deductions and scenarios for different Logic Games, and that’s probably the most important overall skill you’ll need in order to crush the Logic Games section. However, as we head into the final weeks before the June LSAT, there’s one relatively small tweak that could significantly help your speed and understanding of each game: Making sure that your set-up and rules are as neat, clear, and accurate as possible.

Now, you might be thinking, “Duh. I’ve been studying Logic Games for months – of course I can set one up by now.” However, I’ve observed this problem many times when working one-on-one with students who were struggling with the Logic Games section: The student typically would understand what an individual rule meant, but when it came to representing that rule, the result would be… well, let’s just say that it wasn’t pretty. In fact, the way the student wrote down the rules and/or set-up usually made it really freaking hard to understand what was going on without re-reading the introduction to the game.

Why is writing rules simply (and neatly) so important? Well, to a certain extent, you should represent the set-up and rules in whatever way makes the most sense to you. However, if your notes are either not totally correct or really confusing, those unclear representations can become a huge waste of time. After all, many of the questions on a particular Logic Game will ask you to incorporate a new piece of information into your set-up, which typically requires you to look back at the set-up and rules to see how they are affected by the new information. If you can’t instantly get a clear idea of that rule from your notes, you’re either going to make a mistake (whether by misunderstanding the rule or forgetting it altogether) or you’re going to waste a lot of time trying to figure out what the #%&$ you meant when you wrote that scribble.

So what’s the fix? After you complete a Logic Game (or whole section, depending on what type of practice you’re doing), you should go back and review how you handled the set-up and rules. If you have access to the Blueprint video explanations, you should also take a peek at the introductory portion to see how we did everything – in addition to being witty and extremely good-looking, our instructors know what’s up when it comes to Logic Games. If any of your representations were unclear or ended up confusing you, your task is to figure out how to better represent that set-up or rule the next time.

Ultimately, your goal for every single Logic Game on the LSAT is to have a representation that is as clear and visual as possible. A lot of students assume that as long as they understood the game, their set-up and rules must have been fine – but sometimes that’s not the case, and it can lead to increased mistakes and wasted time. So if you haven’t done so already, take a little time to make sure that you’re representing everything neatly, clearly, and correctly; you might be surprised to find what a difference it can make.