The LSAT, The Contrapositive, And A Test-Prep Rock Star

I was poking around on the Internet the other day and I came across this:

 http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/102/test-prince.html

It’s an article about Robin Singh, the founder of TestMasters, which is one of the more fanatical test prep companies on the national scene (think 80-hour classes, materials delivered by courier, and over 5,000 sample LSAT questions to work with).

According to the article, Singh seemed pretty jazzed about the idea of applying formal logic to the LSAT.  If you’re looking around online for LSAT help, you’ve probably noticed that the language of formal logic is all over the place.  People talk about the contrapositive, necessity, and sufficiency as though they were the key to scoring 180.  In the article above, Singh claims credit for that.

I wasn’t teaching the LSAT before Singh came around, so I can’t say for sure whether training in formal logic was the norm before him.  But if Singh really is responsible for that change, it’s too bad for him.  Training in formal logic isn’t necessary for the LSAT—all it does is complicate a very easy test by making you pay conscious attention to something you used to do without thinking about it.

The beautiful thing about formal logic is that it doesn’t need to be taught.  By definition, formal logic is a set of rules that are unbreakable and self-evident.  (See propositions 5.473, 5.4731, 5.551, and 5.552 of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logic-Philosophicus, if you’re into that sort of thing.)

So formal logic isn’t some new tool for unraveling the LSAT.  It’s something you already know, even if you don’t know the name for it.

And we can see from the example given in the Fast Times article that, far from elucidating some obscure mystery of the LSAT, Singh’s diagramming approach takes something that can be done without a pencil in 10 seconds and turns it into something that many students couldn’t recreate with a pencil in 10 minutes.

The sample prompt uses this sentence:

Only an expert in some branch of psychology could understand why Patrick is behaving irrationally. But no expert is certain of being able to solve someone else’s problem.

The article then takes us through a four-step diagramming process just to understand what the prompt is saying, gleefully noting that “this is before you even get to the five possible answers, which often require diagramming themselves.”

The answer to the question turns out to be this:

If Charles is certain of being able to solve Patrick’s behavioral problem, then Charles does not understand why Patrick is behaving this way.

Using Singh’s version of formal logic as it’s described in the article, we find the correct answer because

C→E/→U/

from the prompt is the same thing as

C→U/

in the answer choice.

But a much easier way to solve the problem is to note that the correct answer choice almost always restates the prompt.  This one basic rule can then be supplemented with a knowledge of the test’s wrong answer patterns.  The result is a more efficient way to score higher in less time.  You don’t need to spend 80 hours in a classroom or look at 5,000 LSAT questions categorized into arbitrary sub-divisions.  All you need to is sit down and take a look at the actual language of the test.

This is exactly the approach I take in my own book, The Complete LSAT Strategy Guide.  The Guide shows you all the rules and patterns that let you see through the LSAT without diagramming every single sentence you come across.  But you don’t need my guide.  If you look at real LSAT questions long enough, you’ll probably work out some shortcuts on your own.

Of course, if you’d like to save yourself a lot of time and frustration, you can use my LSAT method and the unlimited expert LSAT help that comes with it—all for less than 4% of what it costs to spend 80 hours learning to diagram 5,000 questions.  Click the link at the left to go to our LSAT Guide order form.