How to Attack an LSAT Logical Reasoning Question: Analyze, Predict, Eliminate

Here is a pattern that will be familiar to anyone who has taken a few practice sections. You read the stimulus. It makes sense. You go to the answer choices. Two of them sound pretty good. You go back and forth, pick one, and move on feeling roughly fifty-fifty about it. Later you check the answer, read the explanation, and think: yes, obviously.

The frustrating part is that you understood the argument. You could have explained it to someone. So why did the question beat you?

Because you didn't lose the point on the answer choices. You lost it on the stimulus. You finished reading without forming a position, which meant that when you arrived at the choices, you had nothing to compare them against. And four of those five choices were written by someone whose entire job was to make a wrong answer sound reasonable to a person in exactly that state.

The fix is not reading more carefully. It is changing the order of operations.

The three steps

Every Logical Reasoning question, regardless of type, yields to the same sequence:

1. Analyze — find the conclusion, the evidence, and the gap between them.
2. Predict — say what a right answer must do, before you see any.
3. Eliminate — cut whatever misses your prediction.

The order is the whole point. Almost everyone does some version of step one. Almost nobody does step two. And step three is nearly impossible to do well without it, because "eliminate" turns into "pick whichever one still sounds okay after a third read."

Step 1: Analyze

Analyzing an argument means answering three questions in order, and the third one is the one that scores points.

What is the conclusion?

The conclusion is the claim that everything else in the stimulus exists to support. It is not always the last sentence, and it is often not the sentence that sounds most important.

The reliable test is to ask why. Take a candidate sentence and ask, "why should I believe that?" If the rest of the stimulus answers the question, you have the conclusion. If the rest of the stimulus doesn't answer it, you have a premise.

Two things to watch for. First, the LSAT frequently opens with a claim that the author is about to disagree with: someone else's position, quoted so it can be knocked down. Words like but, however, and yet usually mark the pivot from what someone else thinks to what the author thinks. Second, in dialogue-style stimuli with two speakers, be certain about whose conclusion the question is asking about.

What is the evidence?

The evidence is whatever the author offers in support. This step is usually quick. Just be precise about what the evidence literally says, because the gap almost always lives in the difference between what was shown and what was claimed.

Where is the gap?

This is the step that matters. LSAT arguments are built to look valid while containing a specific, nameable jump. Your job is to say that jump out loud in your own words: the author is treating X as though it were Y.

A handful of gaps account for an enormous share of the test. Evidence of a correlation used to support a claim of causation. A sample used to support a claim about a whole population, without any reason to think the sample is representative. Something true of the parts asserted about the whole. A condition that would be enough to produce an outcome treated as though it were required for it. A word that shifts meaning between the premises and the conclusion.

Step 2: Predict

Before you look at a single answer choice, say what a right answer has to do.

Notice that this is not a prediction of the answer's wording. You are almost never going to guess the sentence. You are writing a job description, and then hiring whichever choice fits it.

The question stem tells you what the job is. A Weaken question wants something that makes the gap worse. A Strengthen question wants something that helps close it. A Necessary Assumption question wants something the argument silently depends on. A Flaw question wants the gap named in the abstract. The gap you found in step one is the same gap in all four cases. The stem only changes what you're being asked to do to it. (If you want the full map of which stem asks for what, that's the question type breakdown.)

Prediction is what converts the answer choices from five judgment calls into one matching task. Instead of asking "does this sound good?" five times, a question with no defensible answer, you ask "does this do the job?" five times, which usually has an obvious answer four times out of five.

Step 3: Eliminate

Now, and only now, read the choices. You are not looking for the best-sounding one. You are looking for the one that does the job, and cutting the four that don't.

Wrong answers on this test are not random. They come in recurring shapes, and learning to recognize them is most of what separates a fast eliminator from a slow one:

• Right idea, wrong direction. The choice engages the exact issue you predicted, but does the opposite of what the stem asked. On a Weaken question, it strengthens.
• Too strong. The choice would do the job, but claims far more than it needs to: only, never, all, impossible. Common on Necessary Assumption questions, where the argument needs much less than the choice asserts.
• Out of scope. True, plausible, sensible, and about something the argument never claimed.
• Answers a different question. The most dangerous shape. The choice addresses a nearby claim that the author didn't actually make, such as whether something is worth doing rather than whether it works, for instance.

Cross choices off as you go, physically. And when you're down to two, resist the urge to read them against each other, because that comparison has no anchor. Go back and read the conclusion one more time instead. Nine times out of ten, one of the two finalists is about a subtly different claim than the one the author made.

The three steps on a real question

Here is a Weaken question at the middle of the difficulty range. Try it before you read on, and try it the long way, with the three steps, even though that will feel slow.

Analyze

Conclusion: adding professional landscaping to a house will increase the price it sells for. Apply the why test and it holds up, since the study is there to answer "why should I believe that?"

Evidence: in a study of recent sales, houses that had professional landscaping sold for about 10 percent more on average than houses that didn't.

The gap: the evidence establishes that two things went together. The conclusion claims that one of them produces the other. Stated without the stimulus's words: the author is assuming the two groups of houses were otherwise comparable, so that nothing except the landscaping could explain the price difference.

Predict

The stem asks me to weaken, so I want something that makes that assumption harder to believe. Concretely: give me another explanation for the price gap, some other way the landscaped houses already differed from the unlandscaped ones.

That is the entire prediction, and it took about eight seconds to form. Now the choices are a matching exercise.

Eliminate

1. The landscaped houses were generally in more desirable neighborhoods. This is the prediction almost verbatim: a second difference between the groups that could produce the 10 percent premium on its own. If that's true, the sale data no longer shows that landscaping is what raises the price. Keep.
2. Landscaped houses sold more quickly. Selling faster suggests buyers wanted them more, which points the same direction as the columnist's claim, not against it. Right idea, wrong direction. Cut.
3. Some homeowners landscape their back yards instead. Where people choose to landscape says nothing about whether front-yard landscaping raises a sale price. Out of scope. Cut.
4. Landscaping usually costs more than the price increase it produces. Cut, and this is the one worth slowing down for.
5. Buyers report noticing the front yard first. If anything this supports the columnist. Wrong direction. Cut.

The answer is A. But the interesting choice is D, because D is where most of the missed points on this question go.

"I don't have time for three steps"

This is the first objection everyone raises, and it's worth taking seriously. A Logical Reasoning section gives you 35 minutes for around 25 questions, which is about 85 seconds each. Three steps sounds like a luxury.

But look at where the time actually goes when you skip prediction. You read five choices. Nothing is clearly right, so you read them again. You narrow to two, then read those two four or five more times, alternating, waiting for one to feel better. That process routinely burns two minutes and ends in a coin flip.

Analyze and Predict, on the example above, took about twenty seconds. What they bought was a single clean pass through the choices with no second-guessing. The three steps aren't extra time. They move the thinking to the front, where it's cheap, instead of the back, where it's expensive and you're panicking.

They also compress with practice. At first, working a question this way takes three or four minutes and feels mechanical. After a few hundred questions, finding the conclusion is instant, the gap announces itself, and the prediction forms while you're still reading the last line of the stimulus. It stops feeling like three steps and starts feeling like just reading properly.

How to build the habit

Four things make the difference between knowing this method and actually using it under pressure:

• Practice untimed first. Speed on the LSAT is a byproduct of the method becoming automatic. It is not something you can add on top of a method you haven't internalized, and trying to do both at once usually means you get neither.
• Write the prediction down. For the first couple of weeks, physically write it before you look at the choices. Holding it in your head lets you quietly revise it once you see something attractive, which defeats the entire purpose.
• Cover the answers. With paper, with your hand, with a piece of card. If the choices are visible while you're analyzing, your eyes will drift and you will start evaluating before you have a position.
• When you miss one, find the step that failed. Did you misidentify the conclusion? Find the wrong gap? Form a good prediction and then get talked out of it? These are three completely different problems with three different fixes, and "I got it wrong" tells you nothing about which one you have. This is also why reviewing questions you got right but felt unsure about is worth the time.

That last point is the one that compounds. Over a few weeks, the pattern of which step keeps breaking becomes the most useful piece of information you have about your own prep, more useful than your practice test score, because it tells you what to actually do next.