Another week has come and gone and I’ve learned a couple new things: one, there is no good way out of San Francisco by car during the evening rush hour, and two, I actually enjoy solving logic games.
I haven’t seen any flying pigs lately and Hell certainly isn’t going to be a stop on this winter’s ski circuit, but that which seemed impossible has happened. I’m not saying that I’m some logic game solving wunderkind, and to date we’ve only done one-to-one ordering games and overbooked/underbooked games. I just find them enjoyable. The methods that I’ve learned in class really give me a feeling of control over the situation. The rules are right in front of me, concrete statements that I can reduce to mere letters and lines (sometimes). If I can build my scenarios accurately, I should be able to arrive at the right answer without too much drama. Even the new “playing the numbers” trick we learned on Tuesday, which I truly expected to drive me up the wall, made sense and proved invaluable.
Maybe the next time my flight is oversold, I can apply a little LSAT logic games magic and convince the gate agent that even though the flight is overbooked, all of us can still have seats. Honestly, that horrid little kid who’s going to be screaming for the whole damn flight can totally take an overhead bin. Just be careful when opening those overhead bins though; small children may have shifted during take-off and landing.
Despite my new found love for logic games, I’m still struggling with the “Must Be False” questions in logical reasoning. I don’t understand why this is a problem for me. I get “Must Be True” questions, and these ones are just like “Must Be True” questions on opposite day. I think I get bogged down in the English. Nothing boosts your ego quite like a nice long string of wrong answers.
But I’m not going to wallow too much in self pity because all of those mistakes led me to finally use the online resources available at MyBlueprint. The available problems are well explained, but the best ones go over each and every answer choice. Learning isn’t just about seeing why the right answer is right, it’s about seeing why the wrong answer is wrong and how to avoid screwing up in the future. Using the resources at MyBlueprint may mean that I go through my homework a little more slowly now, but it also means that I can gain a much deeper understanding of each question.
This past week in LSAT-land also saw our introduction to reading comprehension! Cue up Mouret’s “Rondeau” (aka, that music from Masterpiece Theatre) and settle in for what essentially amounts to logical reasoning passages on steroids. I would say that writers of the LSAT are sadistic, evil bastards who want nothing more than to watch helpless little students choke on disgustingly dense and dry verbiage, but that would be false. The writers of the LSAT are indeed sadistic and evil and the reading passages are for the most part dense and dry, but you, fellow students, are far from helpless. As long as you’re going about it the right way, those questions are easy to answer.
Not going to lie, when I saw the amount of marking up that went into the method we learned, I almost snorted derisively. Almost, thank god, because marking up those passages is possibly one of the best things you can do. I’d never really bothered to mark up passages on any of the standardized tests I’ve taken in my years as a student, and that’s pretty sad because it makes the questions infinitely easier. As with most things in life, don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.
