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Excerpt from the LSAT Logic Games Bible

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Excerpt from the LSAT Logic Games Bible

The following is a brief excerpt from the PowerScore LSAT Logic Games Bible. The commentary below is taken from the second chapter of the Bible, and is intended to give you a better understanding of how we explain relevant Logic Game points.

This discussion covers the diagramming of individual questions that add new information to the original rules of the game.

Diagramming Local Questions

For many Global questions, the work you do in creating your setup and making inferences will be sufficient to answer the question. Local questions, which supply you with a new piece of information specific to that question only, generally require additional work. You should do this work next to the question itself. This affords you with several benefits:

1. By doing the work next to the problem, you reduce the visual disconnection between your work and the question.

2. If you need to come back to a question, when you return you will be able to see the work you did up to that point.

3. Should you be able to reuse the work you did for the question, you will be able to see the conditions that created that work more easily.

There are two alternate theories to this approach that are widely propagated and we believe each is flawed. Let us take a moment to examine why:

Flawed Approach 1: Do the work for each question on the main diagram

This approach suggests that the work for each question should be done on the main diagram. In order to utilize this method, you must erase your previous work before beginning each question. Erasing your work has a number of negative effects: you could accidentally erase important information that applies to all questions, you could accidentally leave information that applies only to one question, and most importantly, every time you erase your work you lose some of the knowledge that you created about the game. This method also destroys your ability to reuse your work, an approach discussed below. As a rule, do not erase any work you have done unless you have made a mistake.

Flawed Approach 2: Create a "grid" and do the work for each question in rows within the grid

This approach requires that you create a grid near the main setup. The work for each question is then done within rows of the grid, as follows:

Although this method is superior to using the first flawed approach above, it too has several negative effects:

1. Drawing the grid and a main setup requires a large amount of space, space that the test makers do not always provide. In contrast, doing the work next to the question is space-efficient.

2. Using the grid creates a three-step visual disconnect: your eye must travel between the question, the main setup, and the grid. This takes time and can cause confusion. In contrast, doing the work next to the question requires only a two-step visual disconnect: your eye travels between the question and the corresponding work to the main setup. This saves time and eliminates confusion.

3. Using the grid tends to train students to use horizontal setups that do not contain a vertical component. As will be discussed in the Advanced Linear games section, this is particularly troublesome because the most complex Linear games have both vertical and horizontal components. For example, consider the second game of the June 1997 LSAT. In this game four medical training sessions, three nurses, and three psychologists were each assigned to one of four consecutive days. This produces a setup akin to the following:

Trying to reproduce a similar diagram within a grid is a nightmare as each question requires three rows, something the grid is ill-equipped to handle. Any technique you utilize should work equally well for the hard questions as for the easy questions. This is not the case for the grid.

4. As Linear games become more complex, the grid tends to work less and less efficiently. In contrast, working next to the question is always efficient since it allows you to draw the most appropriate diagram for the conditions.

By the way, it seems that many proponents of the grid also utilize notations such as "X," "O,", and "." This type of notation is relatively useless and the variables are always better represented by directly placing them on the diagram, etc.

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