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Happy Hanukkah. Merry Christmas. Good Kwanzaa. Despite the various salutations that are necessary to remain culturally sensitive these days, I refuse to be one of the non-committal pansies that resort to Happy Holidays.

In the land of LSAT students and law school applicants, the holidays can be a very busy time of year.
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I’m not an avid fan of horseracing. In fact, the first (and only) time I went to the Santa Anita track the population consisted almost entirely of old men with beer guts sitting amidst the litter of discarded betting sheets. Also, Berlin was playing in the infield to approximately 50 people and it was so depressing I almost didn’t eat my $5 hot dog. Luckily, a swill of $7 Budweiser saved the moment.

But this past weekend was the Breeder’s Cup Classic, known for being the largest prize purse in the sports world ($5 million distributed for roughly 2 minutes of racing). I happened to catch it on ESPN and if you didn’t, you need to watch because it’s a really good race. Spoiler alert! Watch the race now because results will be revealed in the full article. (more…)

As my class for the December LSAT progresses, I am running into a common enemy: Reading Comprehension.

You see, for some reason I will never understand, students do not always enjoy practicing their Reading Comprehension skills. Even when I explain to them that a good score in this section will inevitably lead to a deep understanding of the hidden mysteries of the universe and a better-looking spouse in the future, I just do not see the determination in their eyes.

All joking aside, acing the Reading Comp on the LSAT is very important, and very possible with a little good practice. In fact, we have a page devoted to how to study for Reading Comp, as well as the other sections of the LSAT. But too many students stumble along and don’t really improve because of a lack of good practice in this area.

I very often find that students are bad at diagnosing their own problems. I am a slow reader and I just don’t get it are the most common complaints that I hear. However, this would be akin to claiming that the problems in your dating life are due to the fact that you’re wearing the wrong pants. No woman cares that you have on Wrangler instead of Diesel jeans. The real problem is that you don’t have enough money.

In an effort to remediate some of these difficulties, I have developed a couple drills that you can try during your romantic evenings with your LSAT preparation books. These drills should help mix up your practice so that it becomes less boring. In addition, they will help you really diagnose your weaknesses and eventually improve your performance. (No promises on that hottie spouse, but this can’t hurt there, either.) (more…)

A student came up to me the other day with a perplexing problem. He had improved to a point where he was reasonably adept at Logical Reasoning problems, but he felt that he could not improve past a certain plateau. He had followed all of my advice and could recite the methods that we teach backward and forward. And when he got a question wrong, he could understand why he got it wrong and why the correct answer was correct, but he did not feel he was learning anything from his mistakes.

So then I asked him to show me an example of a question that he got wrong. When he did so, I wanted to beat him senseless. So I did. Well, not really—at least not physically. The question was a form of argument that we had covered extensively in class, but it had surfaced in a type of question that didn’t normally contain that kind of argument.

And then it hit me. Everyone teaches question types in Logical Reasoning. Students are able to improve dramatically on the test by noticing patterns within the different question types. The LSAT can be very daunting when you first stumble upon it in a drunken haze because it appears that it is asking you to do a ton of different things. And then in come LSAT companies who show you that that is not really the case. Every LSAT company in existence teaches students that there are a small number of question types that occur frequently in each Logical Reasoning section. And each company claims to have discovered the ultimate approach to chopping up the section into these categories (Blueprint’s is best, by the way).

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We’re so first.

Watch the brand new video of Matt Riley slaying (har har) the Mauve Dinosaur from the just-released June 2009 LSAT. Click on the video on the right to see the definitive set-up. There are three parts to the video so make sure you check them out! Also, if you’d like to see a written explanation of the game, Matt has it up here

Dino Video: Part 1

Dino Video: Part 2

Dino Video: Part 3

You can also access the rest of the videos through our Video page or YouTube channel. Let us know what you think!