In the land of LSAT students and law school applicants, the holidays can be a very busy time of year.

First, LSAT scores are coming. Soon. As always, LSAC has estimated that scores will be released sometime in mid-2012, but they will inevitably beat those time estimates. This year is a little hard to predict because Christmas falls on the day that scores would normally be released. As much as you may be convinced that the people at LSAC live in dark holes and do nothing but discuss various theories related to the extinction of the dinosaurs, they probably do have some version of a family and this will prevent them from unveiling scores on Christmas. (Also, sending scores out on Christmas would only add to the legends of the torture that LSAC inflicts on LSAT takers. I mean, can you imagine the terror of getting that email within hours of Santa dropping off the presents? Not cool.) My best guess is that scores will surface on Thursday or next Monday. If you are waiting for your score, this will clearly have a strong effect on your holiday spirit. A good score could be better than the puppy that you got when you were nine. A 132 might have you cursing Santa.

Second, application season is in full swing. Personal statements are being agonized over, letters of recommendation are being begged for, and excuses for that freshman year GPA are being invented. Between the holidays and applications, it’s easy for LSAT study to get lost in the shuffle. But now is not the time to lose focus.

A while back, I wrote a post about how to study over the Thanksgiving break.

Well, now it is winter break. And it clearly deserves some LSAT exercises of its own. So here are some quick drills that I came up with to keep your brain sharp in between the eggnog and mind-numbing carols.

1. Nothing Says Chrismakwanzukkah like… illegitimate children

Okay, this has very little to do with the holidays. One could actually argue that this is the antithesis of the holiday spirit. But it is kinda hilarious.

Check out this list. Shawn Kemp… sure, that is common knowledge. But Scott Skiles? Randy Johnson?

This list can make the basis for one hell of an Ordering game. Here are the constraints. Try to order these athletes according to their monthly paternity payments. But this is not as simple as it may seem. This must take into account not just number of illegitimate children fathered, but also be a measure of their current and past income. For instance, Dwight Howard might only have one illegitimate child but he is making big bucks these days, whereas the infamous Shawn Kemp (somewhere between 9 and 11 children from somewhere between 8 and 9 women) is most likely broke these days.

As you can quickly tell, this is way more complicated than any Logic Game. Good luck.

2. Anticipation is key

In Logical Reasoning (and other sections), anticipation is critical. Well, you can challenge yourself to use the same skills around gift opening time.

You know what your aunt got for your sister, or what your brother bought for your mom. So now it is time to use those keen skills of anticipation to predict the reactions of the giftees.

Older sister has a hideous sweater coming from grandma. Here is an educated guess as to her reactions, in order. Awkward smile. Show the sweater to the crowd. Stand and hug. Joke about really needing a new sweater. Uncomfortable laugh. Return to seat. Three heavy swigs of eggnog to dull the pain. If you can ace this, Strengthen questions are going to be a breeze.

On an actual note, make sure to get some studying in over the winter break. Don’t stress yourself out but some Logical Reasoning mixed in with that fruitcake will make for a really satisfying combo.

Oh, and…. Happy Holidays!

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.)

1. Blind Taste Test

If you get questions wrong and waste time in Reading Comp, that means that you did not read the passage correctly in the first place. But students normally have the crutch of being able to look back at the passage when answering the questions, so they never recognize these difficulties. This drill is designed to remove the crutch.

How to do it:

Read through a fascinating passage, preferably something about Native Americans being oppressed. Take your time and try to understand the passage as well as you can. When you feel like you have a good grasp on the details of the oppression, fold the passage back under the page so you can no longer see it. Then try to answer all of the questions without ever cheating and letting yourself look at the passage.

Why?

This should help you diagnose your real weaknesses. If you miss the Main Point and Primary Purpose questions, then you are focusing too much on the details and missing the big picture. If you get Author’s Attitude questions wrong, you are not tracking where the author stands. If you get the detail-oriented questions wrong, that is actually not the worst problem, but you might be able to improve the way you anticipate these questions.

2. Comprehension by Force

You know that moment when you are reading a passage and you can feel it slipping away? Normally it happens near the middle of the second paragraph. You are still reading the words, but you just know that you are not getting it. The normal student approach is to just keep charging forward and hope for easy questions. This would be like walking into a cage fight totally unprepared and hoping your opponent doesn’t really feel like fighting. Dangerous. This drill will teach you to never let this happen.

How to do it:

Read through the passage slowly. After each paragraph, actually take the time to write out a short paragraph summary of the information in the passage. This should include any presence of the author or other viewpoints and any pertinent details. Try to keep the summary to 20 words or less. Do this after each paragraph. When you have finished, go ahead and attempt the questions.

Why?

This drill is designed to force you to comprehend and summarize the information that is contained in these dense and difficult passages. Granted, you will not have time to do this on the actual test. But you should perform an analog of this procedure mentally when you approach any passage. Shockingly, you will probably find that your accuracy improves greatly when you actually force yourself to do the comprehension part of this section.

3. Wind Sprint

You never know what is going to happen on test day. You might get a real bitch about the childhood experiences that shaped the writing style of a feminist author (personal experience here), and that might eat up a lot of time, forcing you to rush through another passage. Also, students have a bad tendency to not trust themselves. Second-guessing and checking back unnecessarily burns valuable minutes. Enter the wind sprints.

How to do it:

This is Reading Comp in fast forward. Attempt to do an entire passage, but give yourself way less time than a sane person would require to complete this task. If a passage has five or six questions, try to finish it in 6 minutes. If it is a longer one with seven or eight questions, give yourself 7 minutes.

Why?

First, this will help teach you to trust yourself. Many times students will glance longingly back at the passage to verify answers that they already know are right. No bueno. This drill takes away that luxury. Also, this should be helpful in teaching you that you can rush through a passage and still get a good amount of questions right, thus avoiding an embarrassing breakdown on game day.

Also, you should sleep on a pile of Reading Comp passages every night so you can really soak up all of the knowledge that this section has to share. Feminism makes a great pillow.

Happy reading…

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).

My encounter with the unnamed student a few paragraphs ago got me thinking that we might sometimes overlook other similarities within the Logical Reasoning questions that can be just as important, if not more. Sure, the questions asked on the LSAT can be very similar (‘must be true’ versus ‘properly inferred’ versus ‘follows logically’ for example), but so are the arguments that they make. If a student, through practice, can recognize the types of arguments that the LSAT puts forth, they will have found a valuable way to pick up points.

Most notably, if you can understand why a particular conclusion need not follow from the set of premises designed to support it, you should then be able to strengthen that argument, weaken it, identify assumptions, describe the flaw, and on and on.

Here’s an example:

A recent psychological study was run on employees of several local businesses that were open 24 hours a day. It was found that employees who worked the “graveyard” shift, some range between the hours of 9 p.m. and 6 a.m., tended to score higher on several of the tests that tend to evince signs of depression. These results would tend to show that certain elements of working during these hours— irregular sleep patterns, limited personal interaction, lack of sunlight—tend to increase the chances that one will suffer from depression.

This was authored by yours truly but it could easily become the next great LSAT question. In this fake stimulus, you are presented with a very common form of argument on the LSAT (and also an argument to which we all fall prey in everyday life). This argument takes a correlation between working the “graveyard” shift and exhibiting signs of depression to show that working that shift causes depression. We all have friends that do this in everyday life. I have a friend who swears he has a “lucky” shirt because he has gotten laid a couple times while sporting the ugly thing. I continually remind him that all the “lucky” ladies are less likely a result of the shirt and more likely a result of cheap drinks at happy hour. Same deal here. Establishing a correlation on the LSAT is never a sound basis for concluding causation. The most common problem with this form of argument is that there could always be alternate causes (like the drunken factor for my friend).

However, the argument about the “graveyard” shift and depression has another pretty common issue. In this situation, the argument fails to rule out or even consider the possibility that people who are already depressed are more likely to work the “graveyard” shift. You know, because then they do not have to deal with that annoying sunlight or all those damn peppy people with their incessant talking. So here they have failed to exclude the possibility that the cause and the effect are reversed.

But here is my point. If you are able to spot the form of this argument and the problem with the argument (generally referred to as the fallacy), then you should be good to go. I don’t care what type of question they want to throw at you. All you have to do is frame your mindset a little bit differently based on the qualification for the correct answer. Below is a list of question types that could follow the stimulus and examples of what the correct answer choices would sound like:

Flaw: The argument fails to consider the possibility that people who are already depressed are more likely to volunteer to work the “graveyard” shift.

Strengthen: People who are depressed are no more likely than those who are not to accept positions that are generally worked during nighttime hours.

Weaken: In a subsequent study from a neighboring town, researchers found that people who showed symptoms of depression were disproportionately more likely to enjoy working during off hours.

Assumption: If given the choice, people who show signs of depression would be no more likely than those without to choose to work the “graveyard” shift.

Parallel Flaw: People who live in mansions tend to make more money at their jobs. Thus, there must be something about living in a mansion that causes people to advance to high-paying jobs.

So the big lesson is: Don’t just watch the question types. You can learn just as much from how you are understanding and evaluating arguments that are made and repeated in Logical Reasoning.