LSAT

Check out this offer from our friends at Atlas LSAT:

Did the last LSAT throw leave you dizzy? On July 7th [tomorrow!], Atlas LSAT will be hosting a free live online workshop to review the June 2010 LSAT. Dan Gonzalez and Mike Kim, the authors of the Atlas LSAT books and curriculum, will review some of the games and logical reasoning questions to explore some themes on the LSAT. They'll also discuss how to decide whether to re-take and what to do to avoid repeating past mistakes if you do re-take. If you'd like to review the test with them, sign up and see what you can learn from this last LSAT.

Congratulations to the June LSAT test takers among our readers! How does it feel? Do you think you nailed it? Are you happy to have it behind you? Or are you feeling queasy and agonizing about whether to cancel your score and retake it in October? Or maybe you want to see how you did on this test and then decide whether to retake it? Just having the option of canceling causes applicants a lot of anguish, so I'll post some thoughts on the cancellation analysis, and also on the leave-my-score-and-retake-it analysis.

Canceling Your LSAT Score

Before you walk out of your LSAT test, and (as of this writing) for six calendar days afterward, you have the option of canceling your score. Here is the cancellation form for 2010. While that score won't be reported to law schools, admissions officers will get to see that you took the test and canceled your score. Does that look bad? It depends.

Admissions officers understand that bad days can and do happen, and they generally won't look askance at a single score cancellation. Most of them remain agnostic in that situation.

However, if you cancel it a second or a third time, at best you start looking like a flake. At worst, you look like someone who can't handle the pressure of a half-day test, and they will rightly wonder how you're going to survive law school (you won't get to cancel and retake that six-hour take-home Property Law exam), let alone the bar exam (which lasted three days each in the two states in which I took it), let alone legal practice (think law firm partners are going to give you lots of chances for do-overs? None that I know of).  So if you do need to cancel, treat the cancellation as a one-time free pass.

However, don't treat the first test as something you can waltz into on the assumption that you can always cancel and retake it. First of all, admissions officers expect you to do better each additional time you take it, because it's less scary and more familiar when you've taken the real thing before. They think that taking the test and then canceling the score gives you an advantage over someone who doesn't have the benefit of having taken the test before. You should feel well prepared walking into that test, and use the cancellation option for a worst-case scenario.

So when should you cancel your score? If you've been prepping smartly for the test, you'll have a decent sense before the test if you're scoring where you want to be, and you'll have a sense during the test, too, whether things are going as planned. If you know, as you walk out of the test, that you didn't finish a section that you normally finish, or that you bubbled in the wrong lines, or that your stomach staged a rebellion, those are good reasons to cancel. If your next test goes better, no harm done -- that's a happy scenario -- and you're better off showing admissions officers your one great score rather than taking it over and over again on a reported basis.

If, instead, you can't pinpoint anything that went wrong, but you're just feeling a bit nauseated by the anxiety of having studied so hard and so long for this test and now you've finally taken it and you have to wait for a score that determines where you go to the law school that will determine the rest of your life and OH MY GOD NOW YOU'RE FREAKING OUT... well, that's called spiraling, and that's not a good enough reason to cancel. You might have done just fine, in which case, wouldn't it be nice to put the LSAT behind you and NEVER, EVER have to take it again? And when the score comes, if you learn that you didn't do just fine, you can take it again with the benefit of of your score report and being able to analyze which kinds of questions caused you the most trouble.

You won't get to see your score before you cancel, so you'll have to make the cancellation decision with imperfect information: you'll have to assess your performance against the benchmark of your practice exams. The more realistically you've been simulating real test taking conditions during your practice tests, the better you'll be able to gauge how did on the real thing.

And finally, before you get too trigger-happy with the cancellation option, keep in mind the LSAC rule that limits you to taking the LSAT up to three times in two years (including scores you cancel). 

Receiving Your Score and Retaking the LSAT

Schools will see results from all tests -- up to 12 -- for which you registered in the previous five years, including absences and cancellations. Some law schools say that they average multiple scores, but bear in mind that the ABA requires law school to report the high score, and it's the ABA data that US News & Word Report relies on for its rankings. For that reason, schools have an incentive to focus on the high score, regardless of what they tell you publicly.

What does that mean for you? If you walk out of the test feeling strongly that you can squeeze some more points out of the LSAT, and the LSAT/GPA calculator tells you that a few more points would make a difference for the schools you're interested in, you should retake it. Treat the next test as a clean slate. Many applicants tell me that they worry how it will look if there's a really big jump, to which I reply: If there's a big jump, pop the champagne. That can only be good news.

Second, don't assume that your score will necessarily go up -- it can go down, too. Even though admissions officers have an incentive to focus on the high score, they are still subject to the laws of human psychology (and consumer psychology), and you'll look better applying with one really strong score that stands on its own in shining glory than applying with multiple attempts that show incremental improvements (admissions officer: "hmmm....I wonder which test is the outlier here: the high score or the low score?"), not to mention a score drop. Nobody walks into a second or third LSAT exam thinking "my score will drop today," but it does happen. Score drops just don't look good when -- as admissions officers know -- most people's scores go up slightly with each successive test. It's better to take the test once, when you're feeling in peak form, with the understanding that you can always take it again if you have a bad day. And if you do take it again, you should feel quite confident that your score will go up, and walk into the test knowing that you did something different this time: you studied harder/better/smarter, or that you took the test more calmly/more smartly/more strategically.

If an application asks you to explain a change (whether an increase or a decrease) in your LSAT scores, see my previous blog posting on that question here.

So, June test-takers: how do you feel? Are you inclined to cancel, or wait and see how you did? Please share!

 

TOEFL test prep guru Jon Hodge over at Strictly English sent me this question recently:

I'm writing to ask you if you can verify this claim I found on an online bulletin board:

A lot of law schools, especially the "top" ones, don't require the TOEFL even for the international students (from Europe, Asia etc.) I think they consider the LSAT score a good enough measurement for the applicant's English abilities as well. 

For instance, [Columbia Law School] says

"Q: Is the TOEFL exam required?

A: No. Applicants to the J.D. program are not required to take the TOEFL examination."

The most sure thing would probably be to contact the schools directly, if the schools you're applying to are unclear about this on their website. Each school will probably have a different policy, so it'll be hard for someone to give you a clear "yes or no" answer.

Thoughts? 

Thanks for the question, Jon. Note that top LLM programs for international students do require the TOEFL, but I assume you're asking about JD programs.

It is indeed unusual for top JD programs to require the TOEFL. For example, the JD admissions pages for Harvard, Stanford, and Northwestern mention only the LSAT in their list of required tests, so by implication they do not require any additional tests like the TOEFL.

As noted in the excerpt above from the discussion board, Columbia says expressly that it does not require the TOEFL, and that is true for NYU and Penn as well.

But there are exceptions. Chicago, for example, does require a TOEFL score from international JD applicants (scroll to the bottom of the link -- TOEFL or IELTS is required, with some exceptions).

So the norm does seem to be that no TOEFL is required for JD applications, but since there are exceptions, international applicants need to read the instructions for each school carefully. There isn't one rule that governs for all schools.

I received this great question today from an Ivey Files reader:

I know you've addressed this in your book and in the blog, but I had another question regarding the multiple lsat addendum. I took the test twice and experienced a 7 point jump the second time. I have no fancy explanation...the score increase was simply the result of altering my test preparation (I actually scaled back the amount of studying and took a slower, more methodical approach....much more effective for my brain). I am more than content to let the higher score speak for itself, as you suggest, but the language put out by some schools I'd like to apply to makes me think twice about it. For example:

Penn : "If there is a significant difference between an applicant's highest and lowest LSAT score (more than 4 or 5 points) the applicant should address this discrepancy in an addendum to his or her application.”

Michigan : "If you have a significant disparity between scores (six or more points), it would be very helpful to address any explanation for the difference in an optional essay or addendum.”

Virginia: "We encourage applicants with a significant difference in LSAT scores to include with their application any information that may be relevant to the interpretation of test results."

The language suggests they expect you to give them some explanation for two significantly different test scores. Does this mean that I should just write something short and simple that attempts to explain what I believe accounted for my score increase? If I ignore these statements and refuse to submit an explanation, will admissions be more inclined to take my average score?

You are asking all the right questions. I would argue that you don't actually know why your score jumped seven points, because if you look at your LSAT reports for the two test, you'll probably see a pretty wide score band in each for score accuracy. So yes, maybe your score jumped seven points because you studied better/harder/smarter (fill in the blank), but when you're within the margin of error (as reflected by the score bands), or even if you've moved outside the score band, you don't actually know what's behind the difference.

What's a score band? If you look at your LSAT report, LSAC tells admissions officers to view your "real" score as falling within a range of scores. Most LSAT reports that I've seen show a band that's plus or minus 3 of your scaled score, so that's a band of 7 scaled points. Pretty huge, right? Your "real" score is anywhere in that band, and even then the score band captures the "real" score only 68% of the time.*  That leaves a whopping 32% of the time when the score band -- which is already pretty big -- doesn't even include someone's "actual proficiency." (For statistics junkies out there: am I missing something? Am I being unduly harsh? Please post if you have an opinion.)

Given what LSAC itself is saying about the accuracy of its own scores and score bands, can most applicants say something meaningful or even accurate about a movement in scores? I would say no. You are not omniscient. Sometimes you have a good day, sometimes you have a bad day. Sometimes it's just the margin of error. You'll never really know. And you're not the one writing the test questions, or grading the exam, or calibrating it against other exam administrations and other test-taker pools, or determining what the statistically appropriate score band is for a given test or a given score. LSAC employs an army of statisticians for that, and the score bands are the best they can do, with an accuracy rate that leaves a lot of room for error. And somehow you're supposed to know more about your scores than they do? Go figure. But over the years, more schools have added language to that effect, asking about score differences as small as four points. So I advise the following:

If a school expressly asks or encourages you to comment on an X-point score difference, you should say something about it, even if realistically you can't be expected to justify or explain the score difference.

If they ask and you stay silent, I don't think they are necessarily going to average your scores, since they have to report the high score to the ABA, and that creates powerful incentives for the school to focus on the high score. However, staying silent after they expressly ask about it would suggest to them that you're not following instructions, and that's not a good outcome, even if the instructions themselves are silly. You should say something, anything, even if it's just: I studied differently/had a better day. In your case, tell them about your different approach to the test.

What if an applicant has to explain a decline in scores? That's a tougher situation, obviously, since most people do better with each successive test. (LSAC says: "Data show that scores for repeat test takers often rise slightly.") The things that can go wrong on a test day are wide and varied, and in a perfect universe, if you were having a bad test day, you should have canceled the score. But if you haven't canceled the score, explain what happened, and try not to give an impression that will undermine anyone's confidence in you as a future law student and lawyer. For example, it doesn't reflect well on an applicant to say that he panics in high-stakes testing situations. (How is he going to survive the much longer, more grueling bar exam? Or even law school exams? Or oral argument in front of a judge?)

I'd love for readers to post their own thoughts. Why do you think your score went up or down? How are you answering application questions about score differences?

_________________

* Here's what LSAC says on page 24 of its Information Book for 2009-10: "Score bands for the LSAT are designed to include your actual proficiency level approximately 68 percent of the time."

Two great new postings from Steve Schwartz at LSAT Blog, one on the shift in test dates this coming season (and why that matters), and the June vs. October debate. Well worth reading.

• LSAT Test Dates in 2010 and 2011 | Change From Previous Years

• Deciding to Take June vs October LSAT | Pros and Cons

 

I received an email recently about my advice in the column “Marshmallows, Delayed Gratification, and Test Prep.”  In it, the writer asked a very important question:  “How does one truly study one’s wrong answers?” He elaborates:

My problem is that I choose a wrong answer and then I look at an explanation and I don’t really take much away from it…. I am having trouble taking the next step and making progress to improve from the point where I am. I read the explanation and it makes sense for that question but don’t know where to go from there and apply it to the rest of the questions.

This question strikes at the heart of standardized test prep everywhere, and is actually a great way of describing a distinction I made in another column I wrote, “The Fiction that the SAT Isn’t Coachable.”

In that column, I made an attempt to distinguish good test preparation from bad test preparation.  To rephrase what I said in that article, bad test prep is bad because it makes you think you’re learning how to take the test, but in reality you’re just learning a bunch of things about the test.  Another fundamental way that bad test prep is bad is that there is no framework, or there is only a faulty framework, behind the different explanations.

Take for example the LSAT SuperPrep book, which contains three practice LSAT’s “with explanations.”  The Official GMAT Study Guide works the same way.  These two prep books provide an abundance of explanations, but like the letter above clearly articulated, there’s no real takeaway from one question to the next.  In the LSAT book, there is no advice given besides general information on study skills and setting up a practice regimen.  In the GMAT book, there is a review of general math principles, but little that explains how to solve hard GMAT questions besides one-off explanations.

To truly learn from your own mistakes is actually much more straightforward than it seems.  To learn from your mistakes, you need to build a framework around them.  Since that answer begs the question, “how do I build a framework?” I would respond in a sort of semi-humorous way: “patiently.”  In all seriousness, building a framework for your wrong answers requires peace of mind.  If you’re worrying about your score and your grad school acceptance while you’re trying to study for the test, you might as well stop right there for the day because you’re not going to make any progress.

First, you need to look at your mistakes dispassionately.  Don’t see them as errors; see them as opportunities to learn.  I know that sounds unbelievably corny and silly, but that doesn’t make it less true.  You have to appreciate the logical process of figuring out the answer just as much as you value a high score.

Second, you need to find the common elements among your mistakes.  Do they all deal with a certain topic?  A certain way of thinking?  I know, for example, that I am weakest on the formal logic questions in the LSAT, and that I impatiently try to diagram them too quickly and often make my diagrams too complex.  More to the point, I also know that I am really good at the non-formal questions, and so I spend too much time and energy trying to solve formal questions non-formally.  What categories do your mistakes fit into?  Most importantly, if your mistakes don’t fit into some abstract category that some test prep company has created, make your own category system.  That step takes time and more patience, but it’s the best way to learn.

Third, you need to experiment in grouping your errors.  For the LSAT, does classifying them as formal or informal help?  (I am classifying my mistakes as dealing with formal logic for the time being; I actually have some reservations about that classification system.)  What about by topic?  For example, do you have some latent dislike of some topic where you always think the argument is more complicated than it is?  What about by position in the exam?  For example, do you always seem to make a bunch of mistakes between questions 17 and 21 on the arguments section?  Do you fail in the games when they reach a certain level of complexity?  If so, start trying to understand that complexity.  Answers to individual questions are less important at this point than understanding the complexity of the thought process required to find the answer.  That’s what you’re after, and that’s the purpose of this exercise.

Finally, once you have come up with some sort of grouping for your mistakes, you need to take the most important step:  explain them to yourself.  Again, that might sound silly, but the biggest problem that students have is that they go into the test prep process thinking as passive students, not active learners.  They think that as long as they memorize whatever message the test prep company gives them, they can depend on getting a better score.  With each answer, pretend it’s your responsibility to explain them to someone with no knowledge of the test.  Find a friend who’s studying for the test and practice explaining questions to him/her.  The point is not to know the answer, but to verbalize the answer.  Taking that step forces your brain to organize your thoughts much more logically, and makes a framework easier to discover.

I often tell my students, “I can show you all the methods of problem solving in the world, but this process doesn’t work unless the ultimate responsibility of solving the problem falls on you.”  In other words, it’s my responsibility to explain a problem, but it’s a student’s responsibility to challenge him/herself to apply that explanation to a similar scenario.  I try to do this by explaining a framework where there are connections between each and every problem.  However, if the student doesn’t take the step of actively trying to absorb that framework, and to transfer that framework into new situations, then he or she will never “learn” anything.  Once students train themselves to ignore the scattered shortcuts and focus on building a sustainable, integrated problem solving framework, the test is nowhere near as scary as it once may have seemed.

For the past eight years, Charles Williamson hasn’t met a standardized test he didn’t like, helping hundreds of students in everything from the SAT and ACT to the SSAT to the GMAT to AP Calculus. A longtime student of the thought process that defines performance on standardized tests, Charles got off to a good start, receiving a perfect score on his SATs in high school. He then graduated from Brown University, earning bachelor's degrees in computer science and history.  He has long been fascinated by the intersection of education and technology, and when not writing about standardized tests and educational policy, he will be happy to speculate rampantly about how the Internet will affect the ways that we learn.  Charles blogs for the Ivey Files about test preparation.

 

Part of the value of the process of blogging my way through the LSAT's is to make myself more aware of which explanation strategies are working for me and which ones aren't.  I am midway through my explanations for LSAT 25, the second test I am attempting, and I am finding myself running into two mutually exclusive ideas about how to deal with the argument questions that I keep getting wrong.  So, to resolve the conflict between these two ideas, I thought I'd post a little bit of an aside column about the LSAT's "Argument" section design and some differing ways of approaching that design.  One approach is covered in this column, and the other will be covered in the next column.

To start off, I think the best way to understand something is to first define it.  In this case, if I were asked the question, "What is the LSAT Arguments section about?" I would be tempted to make some sort of pithy but ultimately worthless statement about "reasoning" or "logic" or "deduction."  However, any definition along this front would only invite questions about defining any of those three words, which would take lots of time and would probably rely on more vague words that would need to be similarly defined.  So to escape this morass of empty definitions, I would instead say:  The LSAT Argument section is concerned with arbitrary categories and the connections and distinctions between them.  Of course, it is the reasoning process that allows us to make those connections and distinctions, but now the focus is on the categories themselves, which allows us to anchor our discussion of reasoning.

In a typical question, the speaker introduces some arbitrary set of categories.  These categories either group themselves into some sort of complete argument, a partial argument, or just a semi-related collection of statements.  This argument can either be correct or incorrect as presented in the question stem (the block of text before the actual question is asked.)

All the information in the previous paragraph might tell you about the question, but it certainly doesn't really tell you anything about how to digest what you have read.  This is where the two different opinions on how to approach the test crop up.  The first approach is something I call the deductive approach.  It is the approach that seems to be advocated by many of the major test prep books I have read (The PowerScore Arguments Bible, as well as the Kaplan and Princeton Review books), and it generally consists of categorizing each argument into one of several categories, which is usually done by question type.  If you've ever thought about dividing the arguments section into categories like "strengthen" questions, "weaken" questions, and "parallel-the-flaw" questions, then you are implicitly thinking along these lines.

The deductive approach assumes that every question type has a certain analytical framework for figuring out the answer.  That is, that every single "parallel-the-flaw" question gets solved a similar way.  The tutorial approach using the deductive method is to train someone to recognize the categories, then practice a lot of problems within those categories.  When a test taker sees a question, he or she has to "deduce" which category the question is in, and then apply whatever framework is suggested by that category.  By the time the test taker has completed a bunch of those types of problems, the reasoning goes, he or she should be ready to encounter it on the actual test.

This approach has a lot to recommend it.  It is simple, straightforward, and everyone appears to be recommending some sort of variation on it.

Nevertheless, I still can't get it out of my head that this approach might be wrong.

When I first began tutoring the SAT's 8 years ago, I would have classified myself as a deductive approach guy.  Show a student some circle problems, some triangle problems, some systems of equations problems, and soon enough, boom, you've got the SAT math covered.  A similar process existed for the verbal section, and when it was added, the writing section.

The more time I spent tutoring, the more I realized two disturbing trends:  one, there were all of these problems that didn't fit cleanly into one category, and two, that simply providing a category of a question's content doesn't provide any sort of way to separate an easy problem from a hard problem.  If the whole point of tutoring is to help someone figure out tough problems, then a category system that doesn't distinguish easy from hard is pretty useless.

These two realizations started me down a long path of thinking about standardized tests outside of their content.  It also urged me to start constructing my own approach to standardized testing, which I'll outline in the next column.

Thoughts? Please share.

 

For the past eight years, Charles Williamson hasn’t met a standardized test he didn’t like, helping hundreds of students in everything from the SAT and ACT to the SSAT to the GMAT to AP Calculus. A longtime student of the thought process that defines performance on standardized tests, Charles got off to a good start, receiving a perfect score on his SATs in high school. He then graduated from Brown University, earning bachelor's degrees in computer science and history.  He has long been fascinated by the intersection of education and technology, and when not writing about standardized tests and educational policy, he will be happy to speculate rampantly about how the Internet will affect the ways that we learn.  Charles blogs for the Ivey Files about test preparation.  

In my last post, I wrote about my plan to work my way through LSAT problems and try to discern best practices to solve them.

For this post, I tackled LSAT test number 24. The test went surprisingly well for me; much better than I would have expected.  I completed it while I was in sort of a strange mood.  I did parts of it on the subway, parts of it in a quiet office, and parts of it on a commuter rail train.  I didn't care about time.  I didn't make any mistakes on the games, but I would not have finished the section if it were timed.  (I'll tackle the games at a later point, and might circle back around and address some of them here.)

Of the four questions I got wrong overall, three were in the Logical Reasoning (arguments) section, and two of them involved formal logic.  By the way, this number wrong is abnormally low.  I usually get about 10 wrong or so.

One last note:  I'm actually not approaching this test completely cold; I have read some LSAT prep books and taken one course.  Thus, it may seem like some of my early answers assume a prior knowledge that I do not explicitly show.  Once I get a critical mass of questions, my plan is to start using the evidence to help determine whether the method I'm using is appropriate or not.

If you'd like to purchase a copy of the exam, you can do so here. 

Question 21, Section 2:

I found this one to be a tricky question, because it seemed to start out with a rather informal set of information, then the question proved to involve a significant amount of formal logic with lots of negation.  I was able to isolate the following items:  that "the laws are impossible to enforce" is an argument that leads to the main argument.  So we know that if there is a law against gambling, then it is impossible to enforce.  "When a law fails to be effective, I should not be a law" is an argument, and the conclusion is that there should be no laws against gambling.  So it's pretty clear that we need some sort of connective from the word "enforce" to the word "effective."  This means that answers A and B are particularly attractive.  When I see the similar wording of the answers, especially with the amount of ‘not's' around (as well as words like ‘All' and ‘No'), I start going back to formalize the relationships.

I symbolized the first statement as LaG → ¬Enforce.
I symbolized the second statement as ¬Effective → ¬Law.

(The ¬ symbolizes the phrase "not", so you would read the last statement as "not-Effective implies not-Law")

Since we know that we're trying to get to ¬LaG, then we know we have to get from Effective to Enforce, because by the contrapositive of the first statement, we know that Enforce → ¬LaG.
Answer choice A requires some manipulation, but if we take the answer and literally convert it, we get ‘No Effective is ¬Enforce.'  Formal logic says that statements of the form "No A is B" become "A → ¬B".  Our statement then becomes Effective → ‘Not' ¬Enforce, which taking the double negation becomes Effective → Enforce.  This is exactly what we're looking for, so it's the correct answer.

I originally picked B, which converts to Enforce → Effective.  Since this is the converse of what we're looking for, it isn't necessarily true.  I should have known this.  Actually, I felt pressed for time and didn't want to go through the hassle of converting A, and this seemed ‘good enough' to get to what I was looking for.  Blech.

STATUS:  RESOLVED VIA FORMAL LOGIC.

Question 19, Section 3:

We see from the words "every" and "some" that we are again in formal logic territory.  Because of the similarity of the wording of the answers, it again feels to me like I need to use some sort of symbolic notation to keep track of exactly what we should be doing here.  The first statement, "Every student who walks to school goes home for lunch" becomes Walk → Home.  The second sentence becomes Part-time → ¬Walk.  I know that the question makes specific use of the words "every" and "some," but I'm going to stay away from that kind of logic for now.

Now, in order to answer this question, we need to make an assumption that binds the two implications together.  Since one deals with Walk and the other deals with ¬Walk, we might need to take the contrapositive of one of the statements.  (Again, I'm assuming a level of knowledge that some of you might not have.  I'm sorry for this; I just didn't want to get bogged down with too much introductory stuff.  I'll cover it later.)  If we take the contrapositive of the first statement, we get ¬Home → ¬Walk.  If we can get ¬Home to Part-time, then we are set.  Is there such an answer?  Yes, it's D.  I had originally picked A, which translates to ¬Part-time → Home.  If I had taken the contrapositive of the second, I would have gotten Walk → ¬Part-time, which when joined with my answer would have given me Walk → Home as well.  Hmm...It looks like the categorical logic does come into play here.

It's pretty clear that in order to do at least some of these questions on the test, we would be aided by formal logic as well as categorical logic (i.e. logic dealing with all, some, etc.)  So let's put a callout here.

Need (1):  Some sort of understanding of formal logic.
Need (2):  Some sort of understanding of categorical logic.

As always, I'd love to get a critical mass of questions that I could go back and reanalyze them after having learned about some formal logic.

STATUS:  UNRESOLVED PENDING CATEGORICAL LOGIC.

Question 18, Section 2:

From the first sentence of this question stem, we can already discern an issue here.  Government funding for the preservation of wetlands has increased by a lot, but the area of wetlands needing protection has only increased by a little.  The next sentence rules out one source of an explanation, which is inflation, and then concludes that the level of funding is still short of what's necessary.

This seems like a great time to bring up mental models.  Whenever I read questions like this, I keep a mental model in my head of what's going on, and I adjust it as each new piece of data comes in.  In fact, I am going to discuss a lot of these answers using mental models.  Here's what I mean:

Let's call this the funding model.  The funding model is very simple:  You have something that you're trying to do, and it costs a certain amount of money to help you do it.  The more money you have, the more you can do; the less money you have, the less you can do.  Sounds pretty straightforward, right?  Well, in this case the funding model seems out of kilter:  We have lots more money, but we've only got a little bit more of stuff to do.  Why do we still need more money?  Well, they rule out the possibility that the cost of doing the same thing has gone up because of inflation, so that knocks out one thing.  They remind us that the amount of stuff to be done was already large, so that knocks out the possibility of us making a claim about the original level of preservation.  So we've got to find an answer that reconciles these two areas.

Here's where my SAT bias kicks in.  Most of the SAT questions can be predicted by being an active reader and thinking actively about the question before one encounters the specific answers.  There are some theories out there about entering the answers with a blank mind and so not being biased, but I have been helped out by my active thinking more often than I've been hurt by it.

So it's time for a hypothesis.  Hypothesis (1):  active thinking, i.e. trying to predict where the question is heading, is bound to help find the right answer in the long run.  It is not guaranteed to find the right answer, and in some cases might lead you astray, but nevertheless is a good thing.  Mental models provide a good way to aid active thinking.

Hypothesis(2):  The funding model is an appropriate way to describe questions when there involves a logical relation between an activity and the money it costs to fund that activity.

Going along with that hypothesis, my first instinct is to come up with an explanation for the issue, no matter how off base, to get my mind working in the right direction.

So my first guess is to say that the reason that funding is inadequate was that there was hardly any funding to begin with.  If there was originally, let's say, 1 unit of funding available for the project but the project needed 100 units of funding, then clearly the recent increase wouldn't be enough.  Now that I'm armed with a reasonable answer, let's see how it plays out:

Answer A could be an answer, although it does not paint things in a very nice light.  When I read it, I was tempted to leave it in until I reread the conclusion of the argument:  "the funding is inadequate and should be augmented."  If the money was there but was just mismanaged, then the level of funding was, in fact, adequate.  At the very least, it raises more issues than it answers, so it cannot be the correct answer.

Answer B was originally the answer I picked.  I think I was desperate for an answer, and picked one that sounded reasonable rather than thinking it through.  This answer says, essentially, that costs of doing the work have gone up.  However, in retrospect, I didn't pay close enough attention to the wording in the problem about inflation.  If the problem says that the increase in funding was at least three times what it was, even factoring in inflation, it makes it pretty hard to justify the necessity of more funding solely on the fact that scientist's salaries have risen.  They would need to have risen by a factor of 3, and more to the point would need to keep rising in order to require more funding.  This is unlikely, or at least allows for an ambiguous outcome (i.e. the salaries might have risen, but not by so much as to explain the entire reason for the funding increase.)

Answer C was another choice I was down to.  In retrospect, the distinction between "wetlands in need of preservation" and "wetlands at serious risk of destruction," was never made explicit in the passage.  Since the government's mission is only the "preservation of wetlands," which is pretty vaguely worded, both of these areas could fall under that description, but they also could not.  This is the danger of thinking too far outside the construct of the prompt and the weird little world the test makers create.

Answer D makes no sense.  There is no distinction made in the passage between scientists and non-scientists.

Answer E is exactly what I was looking for.  Why didn't I see this?  I feel silly.  A possible explanation is the misdirection play contained in this question.  I think this might be important, so I'll put it up for later.

Definition(1):  Misdirection:  The LSAT's process of putting a straightforward answer after several more intricate and complicated answers.  The reason this answer is harder to spot has little to do with the actual validity of the answer itself, but more because the test-taker is still harboring thoughts about the previous complicated answers and therefore doesn't read the straightforward answer correctly.

This provides one vote in favor of my mental-modeling, but I'll have to explain how one goes about formulating mental models later.  

STATUS:  RESOLVED VIA HYPOTHESIS(2){mental model, funding}.

Have a question you'd like to see explained? Have any feedback on what you've read? Please post a comment and let me know.

 

For the past eight years, Charles Williamson hasn’t met a standardized test he didn’t like, helping hundreds of students in everything from the SAT and ACT to the SSAT to the GMAT to AP Calculus. A longtime student of the thought process that defines performance on standardized tests, Charles got off to a good start, receiving a perfect score on his SATs in high school. He then graduated from Brown University, earning bachelor's degrees in computer science and history.  He has long been fascinated by the intersection of education and technology, and when not writing about standardized tests and educational policy, he will be happy to speculate rampantly about how the Internet will affect the ways that we learn.  Charles blogs for the Ivey Files about test preparation. 

As in many facets of life, sometimes the simplest question can have the toughest answer.  I’ve been kicking around such a question for the past few weeks, and I’d like to share it with you.

Is there a ‘best’ way to study for the LSAT?

For those of you who haven’t read a column by me yet, I consider myself a reasonably smart guy who has a somewhat curious fascination with standardized tests. This has gotten me interested in the field of problem solving in general, and I have discovered something disturbing:  there hasn’t really been that much written about problem solving.  Even in the field of mathematics where problem solving is at a premium, I can only really find one person who’s concerned with problem solving as a distinct issue.  (George Polya, for those interested.)  Most guidelines for solving problems are patchwork at best and rely excessively on heuristics and one-time-only tricks, leading the student to attempt to solve problems without understanding exactly why the solution works.  Sounds sort of like the LSAT prep world, right?

None of what I’ve found so far satisfies me.  I think there’s a better way to study for the LSAT.  I think there are some general principles of preparing for a standardized test, and if those general principles could be found, then they would drastically simplify the amount of work that one has to do to prepare.  These principles would also lift the veil of fear and confusion that much of the test prep industry (including the test makers themselves) inflicts on the students who line up to take the exams every year.  So I have a modest proposal:

Starting now, beginning at the rate of about a test a week (depending on my schedule), I’m going to take every single released LSAT, and I’m going to write about the experience.  I’m going to air my thoughts on why I made the mistakes that I did, and the methods I used to get the answers I did.  I’m going to reference the general problem solving approach, although little of the particular language, of as many test prep books and methods I can get my hands on to find out if there’s any consensus.  I’ve also purchased a couple of books on basic logic and reasoning, as well as some books on mathematical problem solving (to see if there are any insights that would be applicable.)  I’m going to try to find out what works and what doesn’t, and construct a framework that isn’t a self-serving marketing ploy.

Why?  My motives are many, but for right now suffice it to say that I think it a genuinely interesting problem, and one to which I am well suited.  As someone who doesn’t want to become a lawyer and hence only wants to take the LSATs for fun, I think I have the necessary objectivity and perspective that I won’t get too wrapped up in my own scoring to lose sight of the bigger picture.  As someone who’s been around the test prep world for a while, I feel that I am able to separate truth from hype when it comes to test taking strategies.

More specifically, here’s how this is going to work.  I’m going to start by just picking a random test and beginning.  I’m not going to post the questions or do anything more than reference specific words or snippets of language in the questions, so you will have to have the LSAT’s with you while you read these postings.  Since many of you are studying for the LSAT’s and have copies of these exams, this should not be too much of a stretch.  Otherwise, LSAT’s can be purchased either online or at many bookstores. 

As this progresses, I encourage you to comment and share any hints, arguments, suggestions, or requests for future tests or questions.  I’d really like to find some people out there who can supply some perspective on the process, and even collaborate.  At the very least, I’d love to hear from everyone out there about which test prep methods have worked for you, and which haven’t.

First LSAT question, coming soon...

 

For the past eight years, Charles Williamson hasn’t met a standardized test he didn’t like, helping hundreds of students in everything from the SAT and ACT to the SSAT to the GMAT to AP Calculus. A longtime student of the thought process that defines performance on standardized tests, Charles got off to a good start, receiving a perfect score on his SATs in high school. He then graduated from Brown University, earning bachelor's degrees in computer science and history.  He has long been fascinated by the intersection of education and technology, and when not writing about standardized tests and educational policy, he will be happy to speculate rampantly about how the Internet will affect the ways that we learn.  Charles blogs for the Ivey Files about test preparation.

I just read this fascinating article in the New Yorker.  It describes a professor's research into mechanisms by which people learn to delay instant gratification.  Specifically, it describes an experiment where a marshmallow is placed in front of a young child, and the child is told that he or she can eat the marshmallow at that moment, or wait 15 minutes and get 2 marshmallows.  Surprisingly, only 30 percent of children can wait the 15 minutes, but those that do have a much higher rate of success in life, both academically and emotionally.

I am struck by the parallels between this article and the work that I do in standardized testing.  Most of the students I work with feel a need, a compulsion even, to solve the problem as quickly as possible.  Now, this initially might not sound like a bad trait, but when I say as quickly as possible, I mean that they show no work, have no idea whether their answer is correct or not, and become slightly agitated if I dwell on the problem for too long.

In a previous posting, I talked about how few students really study their wrong answers and attempt to learn from them.  I referenced how I thought there were deep-seated psychological reasons for this behavior, and this article provides at least a clue in that direction.  I suspect that many students are intimidated by abstract thought [we're not wired for abstract thought, apparently - Anna], especially in a topic in which they do not have innate confidence.  Very few students have innate confidence in standardized tests, and so like any unpleasant subject, they try to do things as quickly as possible and avoid thinking about the problem solving process itself.

The metaphor to the article above works as follows:  instead of placing a marshmallow in front of students, you place a standardized test problem in front of them.  The rewards to solving the problem correctly are not as tangible as the marshmallow, but for students primed to get into a competitive university or graduate school, the benefits are certainly obvious.  Now, the answer to the problem is not obvious at first glance, but with a little persistence and patience, the student could certainly work out a solution in a relatively short amount of time.

I would concur with the article that students are by nature impatient [and maybe also distractable - Anna].  They want the quick fix, the one formula or principle that will tell them the answer.  I emphasized the phrase ‘tell them,' because often these formulas and principles are a substitute for thought, not a vehicle for it.  

So much of what I do is to show these students how to be patient, to attack a problem in a piecewise manner so that the problem unfolds before their eyes.  There are some students who have the greatest difficulty in making this adjustment.  For the ones who do, the higher scores that initially seemed so remote turn out to be not that remote after all.

Thoughts? Comments? Please share.