Laura is a former Blueprint LSAT Prep student who we could never quite get rid of. After scoring a 178 on the October 2011 LSAT, she taught and tutored Blueprint's students in Boston for three years (while developing a healthy appreciation for Dunks and lobster rolls). She now writes financial reports by day and LSAT blog posts by night.
Laura's favorite section of the LSAT is Logical Reasoning because each question is like a mini-puzzle (if you're taking a very charitable view). When writing for the blog, though, she particularly enjoys demystifying the Reading Comprehension section -- contrary to popular belief, it is learnable and there is a strategic way to approach it! Laura's favorite part of teaching and tutoring has been meeting a broad range of really cool people. (Plus she got some funny-embarrassing stories out of teaching all those classes, so that's a perk too.)
When she's not reading MSS, Laura browses a strange assortment of blogs, including Ask a Manager and Captain Awkward (whose matter-of-fact and direct style she hopes to attain). She also has the New York Times as her browser's homepage, and sometimes even reads the articles she sees on it.
You’ve spent months slaving over Flaw and Sufficient Assumption questions. You’re having dreams about diagramming and taking the contrapositive of conditional statements. You’ve pilgrimaged to the top of the tallest mountain and communed with the wise man to find out when to use scenarios in Logic Games. Now you’re in the home stretch of your studying, and you’re wondering how to proceed.
Everyone says “New Year, New Me,” but we don’t hear too many people saying “New Year, New LSAT Score.” Frankly, we’re mystified by why more people aren’t thinking about the LSAT at the moment the clock strikes 12:01 am on New Year’s Eve, and every moment thereafter. Who can explain this phenomenon? No one. No one at all, so don’t even try.
Recent administrations of the LSAT have seen an uptick in a certain type of Logic Game that we at Blueprint like to call unstable grouping games. If that phrase seems like a string of gibberish to you, here’s an example of the type of game we’re referring to:
Reading Comprehension passages, like the rest of the LSAT, is prone to repeating certain structures over and over. After all, there are only so many ways to set up or argue about a short passage. In fact, noticing certain often-used passage structures (which Blueprint LSAT students may recognize as what we call the “secondary structures” of a passage) can vastly improve your overall understanding of a passage. But if you’re fortunate enough to notice a secondary structure, how does that knowledge actually help you?
A few weeks ago, we gave you an outline of what you should focus on during the first stage of your LSAT studies. Today we’re going to give you a low down on what to focus on during the second stage.
Santa’s made his list and checked it twice, and students in Blueprint LSAT’s Winter classes are getting a special gift this holiday season — the gift of starting a new family of Logical Reasoning questions! (The verdict is still out on whether this means they’ve been naughty or nice.)
When we talk about Reading Comprehension passages on the LSAT, we talk a lot about the author — is the author present or absent? And if present, what is the author’s attitude?
Of course, that can seem like an odd question — doesn’t every passage have an author, since someone had to actually write the darn thing? But of course, as with many other things on the LSAT, the definition we’re using is ever-so-slightly different from the definition you might be used to seeing.
One of the keys to unlocking the LSAT Logic Games section is to represent the rules as visually and completely as possible. Most of the time, doing so is relatively straightforward, but there are some rules that are trickier to understand and visualize. Today, we’ll talk about some tricky rules you might see in Ordering logic games and how to approach them to squeeze every last bit of information out of them.
Thanksgiving is behind us, and December is just around the corner. That means that our next round of LSAT classes are also just around the corner — we’ve got Winter 2018 LSAT classes across the country starting up this week.
Happy Black Friday, Blueprint fam! We hope you gorged yourself on turkey/tofurkey/turducken/your holiday fowl of choice yesterday, and successfully trampled other bystanders to get the best deals this morning. And either way, you’re in luck today, because our holiday sale kicked off in the wee hours of the day! (At midnight, to be exact.)
Comparative Reading Comprehension passages are the baby of the LSAT, having been added to the test in 2007 (practically a blink of an eye for an organization that takes a month to score a Scantron). As the name would suggest, the questions focus on comparing the two passages: Which of these is supported by one passage but not the other? Which is something that both authors have in common? And so on.