This video explains how to set up the diagram for the third logic game in the analytical reasoning section of the June 2007 LSAT exam.

The game deals with the voyages of cruise ship Freedom to Guadelupe, Jamaica, Martinique and Trinidad.

Here’s the text of the LSAT Logic game setup.

A cruise line is scheduling seven week-long voyages for the
ship Freedom. Each voyage will occur in exactly one of the
first seven weeks of the season: weeks 1 through 7. Each
voyage will be to exactly one of four destinations:
Guadeloupe, Jamaica, Martinique, or Trinidad. Each
destination will be scheduled for at least one of the weeks. The
following conditions apply to Freedom’s schedule:
Jamaica will not be its destination in week 4.
Trinidad will be its destination in week 7.
Freedom will make exactly two voyages to Martinique,
and at least one voyage to Guadeloupe will occur in some
week between those two voyages.
Guadeloupe will be its destination in the week preceding
any voyage it makes to Jamaica.
No destination will be scheduled for consecutive weeks.

The video analyzes how to set up this game using Alpha Score’s method for setting up any logic game.

Typically students continually try new logic games sections with just a cursory review before moving on to the next. This does little to improve your score or skills. With this drill you will repeat and review logic games sections until you fully understand them before moving on to the next. This ensures that when you encounter the next logic game similar to this one, you know exactly what to do.

If you’re looking for more lessons or logic games to implement this drill with, check out our online LSAT prep course.

Watch the video below for a full explanation of the drill technique:

Here’s the captions from the Video…

Introduction to LSAT Logic Games

What these first few lessons are designed to do is give you an overview of the LSAT Logic Games. We’re going to give you some strategies and start seeing some immediate improvement on your LSAT Logic Games Score. Now you are going to find much more detail and a lot more detailed strategies in subsequent lessons in our full LSAT Prep Course online, but this is enough to get you started and start seeing some immediate improvement now. So they way we are going to go about this is first we will take a look at LSAT Logic Games as a whole and how they fit into the LSAT and then we’ll look at some very specific strategies that you can use to apply to any LSAT Logic Game regardless of the category or type of LSAT Logic Game. And then we will take those and test them so you’ll get a chance to take some quizzes and see how you are doing with those particular skills and then finally we will go on and apply them to some actual LSAT logic games. So first of all let’s look at how the LSAT logic games fit into the test as a whole. So your LSAT is made up of four scored sections and the logic games are one of those for four scored sections, so that means they make up about twenty five percent of your LSAT score. Now for many students this is the hardest twenty five percent of the test but for many of you it will also be the easiest one that you can see some very quick improvement upon. So what is it that our LSAT logic games are testing? Well according to the makers of the LSAT they are testing your ability to understand complex structural relationships and that is supposed to mimic or simulate the complex relationships that you might see in a legal problem. So let’s take a look at one of our LSAT logic games and we can break it down into its parts.

Sample Logic Game

So looking at our actual LSAT logic game here (see video) you can see that at the top of the page you’ve got a set of instructions and this is going to tell you some information about how to answer these questions on the LSAT now we are going to look at this in more detail later and see what it means but for now let’s not worry about that, we’ll dive right in and take a look at the actual LSAT logic game. You can see that it is basically broken down into three areas. First you’ve got an introductory paragraph and this just gives you the basic structural format of this game. Then you’ve got a set of rules that tells you about the relationships of the entities and how things work in this game and combined with your introductory paragraph these rules are going to give you your diagram and help you set something up so you can go forward to answer the questions. And that is the last component of the game is the actual questions and they’re just asking questions about how these entities in this game relate to each other. Now you may be asking yourself what type of game that is? Or what category it fits into? Well it doesn’t ! Nowhere on the LSAT do they tell you what type of game this is and that’s a bit of a problem because a lot of LSAT courses and textbooks will focus on the specific categories and types of games and while that’s important to be aware of it’s not enough you need to have strategies that will approach all types of LSAT games no matter what type they are. And a place to start without knowing what type of game it is or what category it fits into. And that’s what we are going to give you here, we are going to give you a strategy that you can take in and approach a game no matter what type of LSAT game it is. Now later on we will look at those specific types and adjust our strategy accordingly and what that means is you can take this strategy move into any game and start working on it, putting some things on the paper developing your diagram and as you start to unlock what type of game it is or what category it fits into, then you can adjust your strategy and add some more elements in. So let’s go ahead look at our strategy that works with any LSAT Logic Game.

The Intro Paragraph – 3 Essentials

Whenever you look at the introductory paragraph for your LSAT logic game, which of course they all have, you want to get three things out of it. First you want to get out a list of entities, those are the characters or the actors, the people, the places or things that are going to be moving around in this game. You want to get a list of those entities. The second thing you want to get is the frequency at which those entities occur, so do you have to use them once? Do you have to use them twice? A minimum of twice? A maximum of five times each? Or can use them as many times each as you want. And then finally, the third thing you need to get out of every introductory paragraph for an LSAT logic game is placeholders and that is going to give you the basic structure of your game. It is just going to be a set of lines, blank lines that you are going to put your entities into. So again the three things are the Entities, the frequency at which they occur and the place holders in which to put them.

Entities

Your entities are the actors, or the character’s, or the people, the places, the things that are moving around in your logic game. So this could be a list of clowns that are going to be performing tricks and you’ve got names for them: Albert, Bob, Carrie, Doug and Egbert. And you’re going to represent them with the first letter of their name now sometimes you can use numbers if you just are simply given numbers to represent your entities as in you’ve got a code and you’re generating it from a series of numbers from zero to four. You are just going to put down the numbers zero to four. But if you’re given specific names for your entities you want to use the first letter from their name. So in the case with the clowns we might have are clowns named A B C D and E. If more your entities has two names, so we’ve got Donald Smith as one of your clowns. You only want to use one letter. It just gets confusing when you have two letters because suddenly you’re thinking Oh! is this DS going to be one entity or two entities and once you get into the speed of the game you can mistake it for two entities. So keep it simple, keep it consistent and just use one letter to represent your entities. So you’ve got your list of names for entities and then you are ready to go on and take a look at the frequency at which those entities occur.

Frequency

Now the frequency of occurrence for entities in an LSAT logic game is something that a lot of people miss when setting up their diagram because you don’t really need it but it is this extra piece of information they take you so much further and makes the game that much easier. So you really want to make sure the record this information. And that is: how many times can I use my entities? So in our previous example if I have clowns A B C D and E, how many times can I use them? Can I use each crown exactly once or a minimum of once or maybe I can use my clowns as many times as I want. You want to record that information. You can put it down right next to your entities so you know exactly how many times you can use them and then you’ll be ready to go on and develop your place holders to put those clowns or put those entities into.

Place Holders

The place holders in a game give you the overall structure of that game and they give you the places into which you are going to put those entities. So it is kind of like the board game that you are going to put your pieces on and the entities are the pieces. And you are going to lay out your place holders just as simple lines. Just a simple blank line, like you would in a game of Hang-man where you are going to put a letter or a number into it representing that entity. You are always going to use simple blank lines to represent your place holders. There are really three main ways you can setup your place holders you’re either going to have them in a simple order from left to right representing an order from first to last or Saturday to Thursday or from the left side to the right side of or first to sixth in a race. That’s your basic way of representing your place holders so that’s a basic order and you are going to put it from left to right with some simple lines to represent where you are going to put your entities. The second way you can represent your place holders is a little bit more of an advanced twist on that order. Let’s say you have a second element, let’s say you’ve got clowns performing their tracks but now we need to know exactly what type of trick each clown is performing. So they are performing tricks in order from first to fifth but they are also performing a certain type of trick. They are either dancing or juggling, well you need to make note of that underneath or above each clown. So right next to each clown, either underneath or above it, you want to have an extra line to represent what trick it is they are performing. You can do this anytime you’re given an additional level of information that corresponds directly to each of the entities that you’re putting in your order. This gives you a bit of an advanced quarter and is used in advanced ordering games where you’ve got two levels for your ordering. And this is your second way of laying out your place holders, now you can expand this if you need three levels. Let’s say we’ve got each clown from order from first to fifth and they are performing a certain type of trick that’s your second line and then they are wearing a different color of clothing, that can be your third line. So now we’re just adding a third element. Now typically in LSAT logic games you only get two lines here but you may get as many as three or more so you can be prepared for that by just adding an extra set of lines when or an extra set of place holders to record what’s going on in this order. Now the final way the that you can lay out your place holders for LSAT logic games is if we are putting them into groups. So we are separating our clowns into happy clowns clowns and sad clowns or we are separating them into clowns that can drive well, clowns that can drive poorly and clowns that don’t have their driver’s licence so in that case we are creating three groups. So you just want to do your lines now vertically for your first group, your second group, your third group or however many groups that you have. Now you’re just going to lay out your place holders as we did before but now instead of laying them out in order from left to right were laying them out vertically for our groups however many groups that there may be. Those are really the three main ways that you can lay out your place holders to develop the general structure of your LSAT logic game diagram. Now there are some subtle variations on these that we will get into later in the course but this is going to cover off the majority of your LSAT logic games.

Practice Questions

So now that you’ve seen the three main things that you want to get out of every introductory paragraph for your LSAT logic game, let’s go ahead and apply this knowledge to some practice questions. Go ahead and try the practice questions and remember for each LSAT introductory paragraph you want to pull out your entities, the frequency at which they occur, and put down some place holders to put them in. And don’t worry if you’re not totally comfortable with this yet, we are going to get a lot of practice doing this and once you’ve done the practice questions you can come back to the next video lesson and will show you exactly how we would have solved these problems.

More Lessons…

For the rest of the videos in this series including practice questions and solutions sign up for our trial LSAT course and check out the Analytical Reasoning Section.

Here we take a look at how since is used on the LSAT and how you can use it to better understand arguments in LSAT questions.

We often see “since” used in one of the following constructions. They are basically the same but reversed:

1. “Conclusion”, since “premise.”
2. Since, “premise”, “conclusion.”

So “since” is often part of a two part sentence. One part being your conclusion or sub-conclusion and the other part being a premise supporting that conclusion.

Let’s look at an actual LSAT question from the June 2007 LSAT exam:

Novel X and Novel Y are both semiautobiographical
novels and contain many very similar themes and
situations, which might lead one to suspect plagiarism
on the part of one of the authors. However, it is more
likely that the similarity of themes and situations in the
two novels is merely coincidental, since both authors are
from very similar backgrounds and have led similar
lives.
Which one of the following most accurately expresses
the conclusion drawn in the argument?

(full question and answers below)

You can see where since is used in the last sentence.

“However, it is more likely that the similarity of themes and situations in the two novels is merely coincidental, since both authors are from very similar backgrounds and have led similar lives.”

Here we have our conclusion as the first part of the sentence, followed by SINCE and then a premise which supports the conclusion directly.

Understanding this construction can help you break down the components of an argument faster.

BEWARE though, merely because we have found “a conclusion” does not necessarily mean it is “the main conclusion” of the argument.  In this case it is but in other questions this conclusion may go on to support a further conclusion. The key is to check whether this conclusion goes on to support some further part of the argument (making this a sub-conclusion) or if the rest of the argument supports this conclusion (making it the  main one).

More help with breaking down arguments in our LSAT Prep Course online.

The full questions and answers for the question above are here:

Novel X and Novel Y are both semiautobiographical
novels and contain many very similar themes and
situations, which might lead one to suspect plagiarism
on the part of one of the authors. However, it is more
likely that the similarity of themes and situations in the
two novels is merely coincidental, since both authors are
from very similar backgrounds and have led similar
lives.

Which one of the following most accurately expresses
the conclusion drawn in the argument?

(A) Novel X and Novel Y are both
semiautobiographical novels, and the two
novels contain many very similar themes and
situations.

(B) The fact that Novel X and Novel Y are both
semiautobiographical novels and contain many
very similar themes and situations might lead
one to suspect plagiarism on the part of one of
the authors.

(C) The author of Novel X and the author of
Novel Y are from very similar backgrounds
and have led very similar lives.

(D) It is less likely that one of the authors of
Novel X or Novel Y is guilty of plagiarism
than that the similarity of themes and
situations in the two novels is merely
coincidental.

(E) If the authors of Novel X and Novel Y are from
very similar backgrounds and have led similar
lives, suspicions that either of the authors
plagiarized are very likely to be unwarranted.

Correct answer: (D) This simply restates the conclusion expressed before “since” in our last sentence.

This video deals with a relatively simple logic game but the concepts taught here will help you on the more difficult games. We start by setting up the diagram and then look at some advanced techniques that will help make all your games easier.

It’s obviously different for everyone, some of us can ace the test with little or no preparation while others might take months of dedicated study to see significant improvements in their score.

We’ve put together an LSAT Study Schedule as a guideline for your LSAT studies. This is just a guide and you may require much more or less time than is laid out here. But it’s a great place to start.

Before you charge into the LSAT study schedule, there are a couple of quick things you should consider. Namely, Diagnostic Exams and Goals.

Diagnostic Exam – generally I recommend that students take a diagnostic LSAT to begin with, with two big warnings (we’ll get to those in a moment). Taking a diagnostic LSAT allows you to set a baseline score and to build your goals upon that. You can then track your progress from this base score. If you’re looking for an official LSAT to start with, there’s one in our trial LSAT course. Here’s the caveats on the diagnostic LSAT:

WARNING #1 – many successful students with high LSAT scores, did not score high on their diagnostic, there is lots to learn about the particulars of the LSAT, how they ask the questions and what methods you can use to get to the answers quickly. If you are the type of person who is demoralized easily with low test scores, skip the diagnostic and move into studying. When you’ve prepared a bit more then take an exam.

WARNING #2 – staring off with a full LSAT exam is often daunting and becomes a mental block to getting your LSAT studies started, if you find yourself more than a few days past your planned start date and you still haven’t written the diagnostic exam, skip it and just get started. You can start with a simple lesson on one topic and spend 20-30 minutes learning one thing. Much less intimidating than a 4 hour exam to start. You can always come back and do lots of practice exams later.

Set your Goals!

Essential for any study program, and especially for the LSAT. Set your goals early and review them often.

Goals should include:

• a final score (check what your hopeful law schools require for an idea of what you might require)
• hours per week – determine how much time you are willing to dedicate per week and stick to it
• that’s it. You can add in your school of choice but  too many goals and some start to slip. Stick to these two and you’ll stay focused.

You may also want to consider where you’ll be studying. It’s best to set a place, be consistent and visit it often.

Here’s a few good places:

• a school library or other library
• an office

And some bad places:

• home study or bedroom (maybe, see below)
• park bench – it may be sunny but you won’t get much work done

Studying at home – some people can, but most of us can’t. If you’re going to study at home make sure you eliminate all distractions and ensure that no one will be coming in to disturb you. Try this once or twice and if you find yourself taking a nap, watching TV or constantly being interrupted then you need to find somewhere else to study and stick to it.

Once you’ve got your place and goals set you’ll need a study plan. You can put your own together or use our suggestions here. This LSAT study guide will take you through all aspects of the LSAT in approximately 70 hours, plus a few more for extra practice and review. You can supplement it with official LSAT practice exams at any point in the study plan. We’d suggest you fit in at least 5 full length practice exams under timed conditions and include some time to review them after each exam. Total study time in this plan including 5 exams and review time is approximately 90-100 hours. At 10-12 hours per week that’s about 10 weeks, or at 20 hours per week it’s about 5 weeks. You can condense it down further by studying more often or by cutting down on some areas that you find easier. Often students will find a few topics that come easily to them and you can reduce your study time on these.

When you’re ready, get started with the LSAT Study Schedule here.

Since Miley Cyrus would never date a boy who did not believe in marriage, and anyone who truly understands romance believes in marriage, only a boy who truly understands romance would have any chance of dating Miley Cyrus.

The reasoning in the argument is flawed because the argument ignores the possibility that some people who

(A) have no chance of dating Miley Cyrus do not truly understand romance
(B) truly understand romance have no chance of dating Miley Cyrus
(C) truly understand romance do not believe in marriage
(D) believe in marriage have no chance of dating Miley Cyrus
(E) believe in marriage do not truly understand romance

Read on for the explanation and answer…
This is a great example of a flaw LSAT question with formal logic or conditional reasoning. You’re looking to identify what’s wrong with the argument but first you’ll need to breakdown the conditional reasoning. Let’s start by drawing out our basic if-then statements:

We start with a couple of premises:

“Since Miley Cyrus would never date a boy who did not believe in marriage…”
and
“anyone who truly understands romance believes in marriage”

With any LSAT question involving conditional reasoning you want to turn the statements into basic IF-THEN statements. Our premises then become:

IF a boy does not believe in marriage THEN he cannot date Miley Cyrus
and
IF you understand romance THEN you believe in marriage

You can represent these graphically as follows:

Usually you would use just the letters B and D or BM and DM to represent belief in marriage and dating Miley Cyrus but we’ve used the full words here for ease of explanation. When you do this yourself on the actual or practice LSAT exams you should use only a single letter, it will speed things up.

These two IF-THEN statements are our premises and are known to be true for sure. We then have our conclusion which is suspect as it makes a conclusion that cannot be drawn on the basis of the two premises provided.

Our conclusion is a bit tricky as it’s an “ONLY IF” statement. The easy trick for these statements is to remember that you reverse the order of the statement when you turn it into a basic IF-THEN statement. e.g. ONLY IF A THEN B becomes
IF B THEN A or IF B –> A

Our conclusion was “only a boy who truly understands romance would have any chance of dating Miley Cyrus” or in IF-THEN terms:

ONLY IF understand romance THEN date Miley Cyrus
and reversing that to a basic IF-THEN statement we get:

IF Dating Miley Cyrus THEN understand romance

We can represent this graphically as:

So now we have our premises and conclusion expressed as IF-THEN statements. You can answer the question from here or you can go on to add some additional information by taking the contra-positives of each IF-THEN statement. For a detailed explanation of how to set up the contra-positive and IF-THEN statements check out this article, or try our LSAT Prep Course Online.

So here’s our complete story including contra-positives:

Premise 1:


Premise 2:

Conclusion:

So what’s wrong with our conclusion?  Our conclusion starts with the information on the left side of the IF THEN statement. Which is either “If you are dating Miley Cyrus” or from the contra-positive “If you don’t understand romance”

Let’s start with the first one: “If you are dating Miley Cyrus” – what do we know about someone who is dating Miley Cyrus? The way to find out is to skim read down the left side of all your equations in the premises. The premises are our facts so what we have there is known to be true. We skim the left side for something about a person “dating Miley” and we can then follow it to the right to find out more information. So we find the statement:

So we can conclude that if you’re dating Miley Cyrus, you believe in marriage. But our conclusion takes this further and concludes that you also understand romance. Can we go this far?  You can find out by continuing to follow the chain of logic in your premises, we’ve gone from dating Miley, to believing in marriage – what next? Nothing comes next! We have no statement that starts with belief in marriage on the left side and so we can draw no conclusions on this basis. So our conclusion went to far. It should have stopped with “Anyone who dates Miley Cyrus must believe in marriage.”  and not gone on to conclude they also understand marriage. So the error here is that the argument assumes that if you believe in marriage you also understand romance, or in other words and in the words of our question stem, it ignores the possibility that some people who believe in marriage do not truly understand romance.

With the information in our premises it’s possible that we have someone who dates Miley, believes in marriage but does not truly understand romance. This possibility was overlooked or ignored and so (E) is our correct answer.

If you’re having trouble with the LSAT logic games, this method of studying often helps students break through into higher scores. The reason the repetition is effective is that there are only so many LSAT game constructions and this helps you become an expert at them. As you move on to other practice tests, and the real thing, the characters and story may change but the structure of the game will be very close to something you’ve done a dozen times and scored perfect on. Give it a shot and you might see a jump in your score on the games section.

For the games, try doing the same section over and over. It sounds strange but it works. You do the section in 35 minutes, score it. Review it. Really review it. Figure out exactly how to do the best diagram for the rules and game set up. Then make sure you know exactly why each answer is wrong and each right one is right. Also make sure you know how to answer each question. You should get to the point that when you see a “must be true” question with “additional information”, you know that you are going to plug the extra info into your diagram, apply all your rules, fill out the diagram as much as possible, then move on to the answer choices, for each answer choice plug them in somewhere other than where they say to go e.g. (A) Bob is 3rd. plug Bob in somewhere other than 3rd. If Bob only goes 3rd then the answer is correct, if Bob goes somewhere else and you can fill the diagram without violating any rules then you can cross this one off as wrong. You should be clear on this process (from the course) for each of the following:

- Must be true
- Must be false
- Could be True
- Could be false
- Cannot be True (same as must be false)
- Cannot be False (same as must be true)
- complete and accurate list questions
- additional information
- max/min questions

There are really two big hold ups on the games side that often hold students back.

1. Not being able to diagram properly, and
2. Not being clear on what the question is asking and how to get the right answer

Both these skills need to be so practiced to the point that you know exactly what to do immediately upon looking at the game setup or question. It will still take some time to go through the steps but at least you know you’re working towards the answer instead of wondering where to start.

The techniques mentioned here are all taught in Alpha-Score’s online LSAT prep course.

Due to copyright protection this is not an actual LSAT Game. (however, all the questions in our paid course are actual LSAT questions) The design of this question is identical to the games you will encounter on the LSAT. The principles for diagramming this game apply to your basic ordering games on the LSAT. Begin with listing your entities:

A B C D E G N

Then make your placeholders for each entity:

___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___

Then diagram each of the rules.
You’ll have to check out the video for the rest of the game.

A straw man argument is a fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent’s position. To “attack a straw man” is to create the illusion of having refuted a proposition by substituting a superficially similar proposition (the “straw man”), and refuting it, without ever having actually refuted the original position.

Or more simply: a straw man argument presents a weaker version of the opponents argument and attacks that weakened argument rather than the original argument. It often involves rephrasing the opposing argument in order to make it more vulnerable to attack.

E.g.
Person A: We should liberalize the laws on marijuana.
Person B: No, any society with unrestricted access to intoxicants loses its work ethic and goes only for immediate gratification.

The proposal was to relax laws on marijuana. Person B has exaggerated this to a position harder to defend, i.e., “unrestricted access to intoxicants”.

Straw Man arguments can be described on the LSAT as:

“portrays opponents views as more extreme than they actually are”
“rephrases the opposing viewpoint in order to make it more vulnerable to criticism”
“distorts the proposal made by the advocates”
“misstates the original position held by the politician in order to make it easier to refute”

These statements can be included either as a correct or incorrect answer. By understanding the straw man fallacy you will be faster at identifying these answer choices as correct or incorrect.

For free access to a complete “Flawed Reasoning Tutorial” email: freetutorial@alpha-score.com
The tutorial is online and interactive and includes 16 other common forms of flawed reasoning found on the LSAT.