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Lesson 3: Analytical Reasoning – Articles

Study plan for analytical reasoning | Getting more than 10 right

I’m currently getting fewer than 10 questions correct in Analytical Reasoning—help!

You might feel like you have absolutely no idea how Analytical Reasoning works and that you’re largely guessing, or you might actually enjoy and understand Analytical Reasoning but consistently run out of time before you can finish more than 2 of the 4 setups. Either way, don’t get discouraged—you’re not alone!

It’s not hopeless! Your score right now isn’t a prognosis—it’s simply a snapshot of how you’re doing right now. There have been students who started out getting fewer than 5 questions right in an entire 35-minute AR section and ended up getting fewer than 5 wrong after proper training and practice! Those students also wondered early on if it was hopeless, but realized that AR is a skill—and like any other skill, it’s learnable.

Your LSAT growth mindset

It’s important not to worry right this second about where you want to end up score-wise. A successful LSAT journey usually consists of a series of many small steps. Before you can get 20 questions right, you’ll need to be able to consistently get 10 questions right, then 15, and so on.

Don't worry about your scaled score (120-180) right now. If you let yourself become preoccupied with your score early on in your studies, it may hinder your progress. When people learn a new language, they don’t begin by reading difficult science textbooks in that language—they start out with the basics and work their way up! That’s what we recommend for your Analytical Reasoning study plan.

There are many different reasons why a student might be getting fewer than 10 questions correct in Analytical Reasoning, so we’ll walk through some of the most common scenarios. If you find that a section doesn’t apply to you, feel free to move on to the next one!

Top strategies to take your score to the next level

Prioritize quality over quantity: It’s OK and normal to feel slow now. Let’s look at how two students might approach their Analytical Reasoning studies differently:

Student A: Joy

Takes 30 minutes to work through just one setup and gets the majority of questions wrong
Reviews the questions she missed
Reads every hint and explanation
Reads relevant help articles
Watches worked example videos
Tries to implement new strategies on the next setup

Student B: Chet

Takes 10 minutes to work through a setup and gets the majority of questions wrong
Does another setup and gets the majority of questions wrong
Does another setup and gets the majority of questions wrong
Doesn't take the time to review because he just wants to do exercises until his score goes up.

Which student do you think is more likely to show improvement after a few days like this?

Joy’s approach is much more likely to get results than Chet’s. Reviewing your work is more important than doing the work itself.

Top tip: Nip bad habits in the bud instead of letting them become ingrained over multiple exercises.

Prioritize basic ordering and grouping setups over mixed setups: Mixed setups are typically a combination of ordering and grouping, so it’s best to work only on the foundations of ordering and grouping setups and leave the mixed setups for a little bit later.

Prioritize untimed practice over timed practice: Just because you have about 8.5 minutes to complete a setup and its questions on Test Day doesn’t mean that you should be holding yourself to that standard quite yet.

Try this:

✓ Set a timer for 4 minutes to work through a single scenario and its rules in the Skill Practice section of the system, but not the questions themselves

✓ Make a diagram and write down rules and deductions

✓ When the 4-minute timer is up (or earlier, if you finish earlier), review our setup explanations and diagramming before you try the questions

✓ Keep asking yourself “What should I have done that I didn’t do?” and “What did I do that I shouldn’t have done?”

✓ Proceed to the questions

✓ Read through hints and explanations as you go along

✓ Work through the game again, from beginning to end, reviewing and solidifying the useful thought processes you’ve uncovered

✓ Repeat with a new setup

I have no idea what I’m doing or looking at

You’re not alone! Students often feel exasperated with Analytical Reasoning, saying things like: “Clowns getting out of a car in a certain order, children getting different toys for their birthday, computer viruses being transmitted by different computers to different computers…how am I supposed to do this and what’s the point?”

The truth is that the skills tested by the Analytical Reasoning are the same skills as those tested in the Logical Reasoning and some of the Reading Comprehension sections! You’re tested on the ability to consider various statements together and determine what else must be true or must be false, for example. It’s simply the context that the skills are tested in that makes Analytical Reasoning seem so foreign sometimes. It may provide some comfort to you that Analytical Reasoning tends to feel very foreign to LSAT test takers in general—not just you!

Recommended articles:

Getting started with the Analytical Reasoning section
How to approach ordering setups
How to approach grouping setups

Again, skip mixed setups for now until you master ordering/grouping individually.

After completing this work and before moving to the next level, you should be able to:

✓ Recognize ordering setups accurately

✓ Recognize grouping setups accurately

✓ Consistently create a workable diagram for basic ordering setups

✓ Consistently create a workable diagram for basic grouping setups

I don’t understand these “if-then” statements that I sometimes see in the rules

This is a common concern students express when they’re just starting out.

Example: If Phuong is interviewed on Wednesday, then Marco is interviewed on Monday.

It’s much easier to work with a rule that gives you concrete information (such as, “Phuong is interviewed on Wednesday”). Did you know that under the conditional rule above, Marco could be interviewed on Monday even if Phuong is not interviewed on Wednesday? Or did you know that if Marco isn’t interviewed on Monday, then we know for sure that Phuong isn’t interviewed on Wednesday?

You’ll want to be fluent with conditional reasoning like this on Test Day, so your first step is to improve your understanding of basic conditional statements. Later, as your score climbs, we’ll help you grasp more difficult concepts in conditional reasoning.

Recommended articles:

If X, then Y | Sufficiency and necessity

Conditional reasoning and logical equivalence

After completing this work and before moving to the next level, you should be able to:

✓ Recognize conditional statements quickly

✓ Create an accurate logically equivalent rule (sometimes called the contrapositive) for any given conditional statement

I feel like I know what I’m doing, but then I get a lot of the questions wrong that I thought I got right

Many students in this situation discover that they’re moving too quickly and not committing the attention that each question requires. For example, they read, “Each of the following could be true EXCEPT” and they accidentally pick the choice that could be true (instead of the choice that must be false, which would be correct). Or a question may ask, “If Maria skis after Hector” but the student notes the rule as “Maria before Hector”—that changes everything!

Recommended articles:

Getting started with the Analytical Reasoning section

How to approach ordering setups

How to approach grouping setups

After completing this work and before moving to the next level, you should be able to:

✓ Quickly and accurately identify the "truth status" in AR questions, not only identifying what the answer will be (something that must be/could be/cannot be true) but also the "truth status" of the wrong choices.

I think I know what I’m doing, but I can’t even make it past the second of the 4 setups in 35 minutes!

Time is a huge factor on Test Day. If we had five hours to complete an AR section, the approaches we recommend to you might be very different! But the significant time constraint means that we have to focus on more than just accuracy—we have to focus on efficiency as well.

Do you find that most of your time is spent “testing out” choices by hand? Some students default to this method because it feels comfortable, but it’s extremely time-consuming. You often end up making the same deductions over and over in each question without realizing it. You’ll save a ton of time if you make as many deductions as possible before heading to the questions.

Recommended articles:

Deductions in Analytical Reasoning

After completing this work and before moving to the next level, you should be able to:

✓ Make basic deductions

Skipping questions

Believe it or not, expert test takers frequently skip questions. They recognize difficult, time-consuming “quicksand” questions when they see them, and they steer clear and proceed to the next question. They may come back to these toughest questions later (if they have time), but they might just determine that certain questions aren’t worth attempting at all.

Top tip: Do the easiest questions, passages and setups first. Every question is worth the same to your final score. You don’t get more credit for harder questions.

Many students are initially resistant to the idea of skipping, since it feels counterintuitive to the goal of getting as many questions right as possible. Consider the potential outcomes of tackling a high-difficulty question early on:

Best case scenario: You get it right! But it took you five minutes, and you didn’t even have a chance to attempt several other questions—questions that were easier. Overall, you've lost points.
Worst case scenario: You get it wrong, and the five minutes you spent were not only a waste of time, but you also lost possible points that you could have earned if you had been able to attempt the easier questions later in the section before running out of time.

The best-case scenario is still a bad outcome. Remember: at the moment, you’re getting fewer than 10 questions right in AR, and we want to increase that number. If you got only 3 questions correct per setup, that would already put you at 12 correct answers in AR!

So, one solid approach is to understand how to pick up the easiest points first, and then proceed from there.

Rule substitution questions are among the most commonly skipped questions on Test Day. They’re the only questions in which you aren’t assured of the integrity of the original setup rules; in other words, your task is to replace a setup rule with a totally new rule and make brand new deductions that often conflict with your initial deductions. An example would be:

Which one of the following, if substituted for the constraint that if Jaramillo is assigned to one of the ambassadorships, then so is Kanye, would have the same effect in determining the assignment of the ambassadors?

Completely determines questions can be a mixed bag. Some students love them and other students love to skip them:

The assignment of parking spaces to each of the new employees is fully and uniquely determined if which one of the following is true?

These questions tend to require a quick re-sketch of each choice until you arrive at the choice that determines exactly where each of the players go. They’re fairly straightforward: they really only require you to draw a new rule and see if that new rule leads to every entity being established. But they can be time-consuming: you often can’t use your deductions to determine anything; you just have to start testing.

Other questions that act like “quicksand” are really up to you to decide! If any or several of the following are happening, then you can feel comfortable to skip:

You have been staring at the question for more than 20 seconds and still have no idea where to start.
It looks like you’ll need to test every choice because the answer isn’t clear from your initial diagram. For example, the question asks, “Which of the following must be true?” without giving new information, but your initial diagram doesn’t show anything that must be true.
You don’t understand what the question is asking you to do.

Accuracy, then speed

If you are able to work slowly and methodically to get most of the questions right in just two of the setups, and guess on everything in the other two setups, you will consistently be getting more than 10 right. The more you practice specific approaches to specific setup and question types, the more fluent and efficient you will become. Speed will follow!

Good luck!

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