Tune in this week as Jelena and Branden tackle one of the few Logical Reasoning question types that don’t always have an argument. (If you think that means Jelena & Branden won’t be arguing with each other, you must be new to the pod, so welcome!)
These questions come in a few forms, and the approach for each, as well as the criteria for the right answer, is a little different.
Listen and learn . . .
- When to diagram and when to keep your diagramming powder dry
- How to separate what’s useful from what’s fluff in a stimulus that’s just a bunch of facts
- How to tell these apart from Strengthen and Strengthen with Sufficient Premise questions
- What to do on pesky MBT Principle questions
- How to make sure you don’t eat up too much time
Alexander Scourby:
Pilot said unto him, “What is truth?”
Branden:
It's a really difficult question. I mean, what must be true? Does anything really have to be true?
Jelena:
Uh-Oh, I sense that we're about to get unnecessarily philosophical about the LSAT.
Branden:
Hey, I'm trying to get the value out of my philosophy BA over here, so humor me. Now here was I? Oh yeah. I mean, does anything really have to be true? Our senses and our reasoning are fallible. I don't even know you exist, really.
Jelena:
Do I have to drive all the way over to your house to pinch you just to prove that I do exist?
Branden:
Well, I would have the sensation of pain, couple with whatever other information my senses would be providing about this senseless assault you're proposing. But how can I trust that my senses are delivering an accurate picture of the world? How do I even know there is any world? Maybe I'm just a metaphorical brain in a jar being fed input by an evil intelligence.
Jelena:
I bet you don't agonize over whether or not your paycheck is real when you cash it.
Branden:
Aha. But you fail to realize that I use direct deposit and therefore I don't cash my checks. Check mate, or check deposit, mate, you might say.
Jelena:
Oh, so you'll admit that direct deposit exists. Just not any other features of your experience.
Branden:
I'm not supposed to lose philosophical arguments to non-philosophy majors.
Jelena:
Well, lucky for you and far more so for our listeners, when the LSAT asks what must be true, they are not actually asking you to decide the great epistemological debates that have roused humanity ever since the first person looked up at the stars and asked why. Now they're just asking you to read a paragraph and decide what would have to all should be true, if all the statements in the paragraph were true.
Jelena:
Welcome to the Legal Level, a podcast from TestMax, the creators of LSATMax and BarMax. I'm Jelena.
Branden:
And I'm Brandon, we're your companions on the road to the legal field, whether you've just started thinking about law school or you've already passed the bar.
Max Fischer (Rushmore):
What are you a lawyer?
Jelena:
The Legal Level is available from Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and wherever you're listening to it right now.
Branden:
If you like today's episode, don't forget to subscribe and tell a friend
Jelena:
After you're done listening. If you still have questions about today's topic, you can talk about it with a 99th Percentile LSAT instructor by texting LSAT to 310-818-7743. Or if you'd like your question to be on the show, just email podcast@testmaxprep.com. And we might answer you on the air. On today's episode, we'll be giving you a rundown of Must Be True Questions. They come in a couple of different flavors and the method, or sometimes even the criteria for the correct answer is different between those forms. So you got to be on your game to solve them.
Branden:
Yeah. I struggled with these questions when I was studying for the exam. I think the reason for this is that the test prep I use treats them much the way most prep services use them, to teach conditional diagramming. Since that usually happens in the first few lessons, people like me assume they are easier questions, they're not. In fact, I think they're among the toughest questions.
Jelena:
Well, that is a good place to start. Why do you think that they're among the toughest questions, Brandon?
Branden:
I think the number one reason that they're difficult or at least the number one reason that I struggled with them is that they usually do not actually have a full argument in the stimulus. So it must be true question will give you a bunch of facts. Sometimes they'll give you an argument and I think we're going to jump into that in a little bit, but it can be really difficult to understand what is important, what to latch onto, what to hold onto as you're going to the answer choices and what is not. So for instance, when you're analyzing an argument, the vast majority of LSAT questions or the vast majority of logical reasoning questions have a full argument. So you've got your work cut out for you.
Branden:
If I'm doing a strengthen question, for instance. Well, I know that there's a conclusion I have to find. I know I have to find the support, separate that from the back around in order to strengthen an argument. As we've talked about many times before on this show, it's very helpful to find a flaw in the argument. And so these are all steps that I can move through and a checklist for me to work through. And then I have a structure in front of me that even if I can't ultimately end up just easily choosing the right answer, I at least understand what I'm looking at.
Branden:
With Must Be True Questions, sometimes it just feels like they're throwing spaghetti at the wall and you have to determine what should stick before you get to the answer choices. So that is the difficulty. What I found because the prep that I had and I prepped for the LSAT, there was no LSATMax. So this is not a knock on LSATMax. This was many years ago when there was basically just sticks and dirt and fire to study for the LSAT. But I didn't really get much information.
Jelena:
Wait wasn't that when the LSAT was still on paper? How did you study for it using fire? Were you burning your tests?
Branden:
No comment. Maybe I burned a few of them. I actually probably did burn my prep books after I finished taking the LSAT. I don't have a clear memory of this, but it's been long enough. And I was at the right age to do something stupid like that. So yes, I probably did. But what I was saying is that I had to kind of figure out what was important and I don't know did it so well when I was studying for the LSAT. I mean, I got by, but when I started teaching the LSAT and after years of teaching the LSAT I started to see a couple of things that they tend to get to or get at in the answer choice. And it makes it easier to analyze the stimulus if you know what those are just because it can help you separate the wheat from the chat.
Branden:
So what we teach our students and what I think many students end up figuring out on their own is that strong statements are more likely to support an answer choice. So if you have a very strong statement, that's going to support an answer choice. So I look for strong statements, but there are other things that they very often get to. Like they very often get to comparison. So sometimes they'll give you a direct comparison in the stimulus. They'll say something is bigger, then something else is smaller than something else. And then the right answer will also be comparative and will get at that comparison.
Branden:
But then sometimes, and these ones can be a little bit more difficult. They'll give you two comparable things, things that you could compare, but they don't actually give you the direct comparison between them. So instead, they'll say something like architect, I don't know, Jan Smith built a 10 story building in 1973, and then she built a 50 story building in 1982. Well, they didn't tell you, but what you can infer from that is that the 10 story building was not the tallest building that this person built, because there's a comparison that you can make between those two things. And so if you understand, they're giving you comparable items to compare, understand the similarities and differences between them because the right answer might get at that.
Branden:
The one other thing that I very often see leading to toward an answer is when a term or concept is repeated, the makers of the LSAT love to do synonyms instead of just giving you the same word over and over again. But if you can see that they're talking about someone's psychology in one sentence and about their mental state and another sentence or something like that, then they're probably talking about the same things. And when you see that there are terms that are related, you can often put those statements together because there will be two different statements sharing a similar term, and you can conclude things in a very similar way to when you combine conditional statements.
Branden:
You're not really doing that. And I know we'll get to conditional stimuli in a second, but I think it can be really helpful to just track where does that term show up and can I combine those statements? So that was the difficulty that I had with them. I know you scored 178 on your first try. So nothing on the LSAT was difficult for you, but to the extent that you found any difficulty in this, am I finding the right difficulties? Am I finding the right solutions?
Jelena:
I did, I will admit to getting a perfect score on logical reasoning on my LSAT. So I guess I didn't find anything on LR that hard. This would be a good moment for the, "What? Like it's hard?"
Elle Woods (Legally Blonde):
What? Like it's hard?
Jelena:
Which may already be overused to a significant degree in this podcast. But that aside, when I was studying, if I was going to miss a question on LR, it was actually usually a must be true because for whatever reason, they're very deceptive questions. I'm not even going to say like, they're very hard questions because it really depends on the individual question. Not so much on the type, if the question is hard or easy. But they're extremely . . . I don't know. They lure you in. They're like a little quick sand trap of the LSAT because it seems like . . . yeah, and I self studied, so I can't even blame Test Prep for this.
Jelena:
They just make me feel like, "Oh, this should be super easy. This should be what must be true. Well, I should be able to figure that out from these statements." And that's where if I'm going to make a sloppy mistake, it's usually on a must be true. One of the other things that I think can be tricky about Must Be True Questions is that they're kind of like the reading comp of logical reasoning in that they make it very tempting to argue with the test. Cause I was teaching a webinar the other day and there was an LR question that I'm demonstrating as the webinar. And the stimulus was about a study in rats. And then the correct answer choice was a broad statement about how a type of tissue develops. And even though I knew it was the correct answer choice because I could prove all four of the others were wrong. They were either too strong or too unreal related to the topic at hand.
Jelena:
I didn't like the correct answer choice because I wanted it to say in rats, because I don't know from the stimulus alone, that what is true of this type of tissue in rats is true of this type of tissue generally, it could be different in different species. But we'll get into the techniques to get around those kind of cognitive biases and blocks there in a moment. But what you have to do, I think when you get into that kind of position on any question where you're arguing with the test a little bit is remember that there is one correct answer and four incorrect answers. And therefore, if you have found four incorrect answers, you have also found one correct answer, regardless of if you like the way that it's written.
Jelena:
So I can push through it but when I was studying, yeah, sometimes I didn't push through it. Sometimes I'd be like, "There's something I so don't like about this correct answer that I'm not going to choose and I'm going go choose something else." And then I'd choose something that I hadn't even better reason to know was wrong. But I'd second guess myself. So yeah, suffice it to say that both of us in our own separate ways, understand how a student can struggle with a must be true question. Now must be true is kind of a broad descriptor, even though it is technically all like one and a half question types, it encompasses several things. So tell us about the subtypes of must be true question, Brandon, what is contained within there?
Branden:
Yeah. I actually was thinking about that as you were discussing that question with the rat, because there are two different ways they will ask you this question and they're ask actually asking different . . . No, they're asking the same question with different criteria for the right answer. So here's what I mean by that. Sometimes they will ask you things like, "What must be true? what can be logically inferred from the statements above? Which one of the following follows logically from the statements above?" All of those are saying, if the statements in the stimulus are true, they guarantee 100% that something else is true. This is what we think of generally, when we think of a must be true question.
Branden:
Then there are other questions that ask something like, "If the statement's above are true, which one of the following is most strongly supported by them?" And those questions. And we're going to talk about one more subdivision in a second, but that second type of question, most strongly supported is asking you to do something very similar, which is to take some statements, assume they're true and derive something from them. But the criteria for the right answer is different. Something that is the right answer to a most strongly supported question might not be the right answer to a must be true question, because they're not necessarily saying the following answer is guaranteed 100% by the stimulus. Instead, they're saying one answer is supported. And as you identified, four answer choices are not.
Branden:
So the example that I give my students to kind of give the distinction between these is this example. So you have this friend let's call him Carl. It's definitely a dude. He's probably a Carl. And Carl is the kind of guy who likes to drink. And every time he has a few drinks, he ends up getting into a fight. And so the hypothetical that I give my students is this. I say, "Okay, Carl calls you up." I know people don't call each other anymore, but whatever, stick with me. So Carl calls you up and says, "Oh man, my girl dumped me. I just got fired from my job. Let's go out and just get wasted tonight, man." And then I ask my students, I say, "What do you think is going to happen?"
Branden:
And remember I preface this was Carl. Every time he drinks, he gets into a fight. Well, if this were a most strongly supported question, then the right would be something like Carl is going to get into a fight tonight because the facts that you're given very strongly indicate that Carl is just going to do what Carl always does. And Carl even has a much bigger incentive tonight to do the thing that he always does than he did before. But if this story must be true question, it would be the wrong answer to say that Carl is going to get into a fight because it's not 100% guaranteed. It is very likely given the facts that we were given, but maybe Carl will feel liberated by not being tied down to a relationship that wasn't working, not having a job that he didn't like. And maybe instead of getting into a fight tonight, Carl is going to be the kind of fun guy that everybody finally wants to hang out.
Branden:
That is the distinction between those things. If you are being asked what is most strongly supported, then you have to back off a little bit in demanding that the answer must be 100% guaranteed by the stimulus. So the last thing I'll say about the distinction between these two, is that anything that would be the right answer for a must be true question, anything that's 100% guaranteed by the stimulus would also be the right answer for a most strongly supported question, because that answer is very strongly supported. It's guaranteed, but the reverse is not true. Something that would be the right answer for one of these most strongly supported questions might not make that very high bar as the right answer for a must be true question.
Branden:
The third variation are Must Be True Principle question. These are very, very different from other question types and they're even very different from other must be questions. In a Must Be True Principle question they will give you a principle in the stimulus. It's usually a conditional statement. And then they will ask you to find among five answer choices one that is a full argument that appropriately uses that principle. So for instance, if the principle and the stimulus was, all dogs have tails. And there was an answer, answer choice C says, buddy is a dog therefore buddy has a tail. That would be the correct answer because it would be correctly using that principle.
Branden:
Those are great because they're kind of mathematical, but they can also be very tricky. And I think we're going to get into them in a little bit more or detail a little bit later in the podcast, but that is the main breakdown of Must Be True Questions. And there are actually a pretty good amount of all of those. I know the prevalence of some has been shifting on the LSAT. So I think what's important and what I was talking about or one of the things that it's very important, what I was talking about at the beginning of this podcast is that some of these have conditional statements. Like I said, test prep companies very often use them in order to teach students conditional statements.
Branden:
I would point out that LSATMax, in addition to having Must Be True Questions that we use to help students de develop their conditional diagramming skills and their quantifier diagramming skills. We also have arguments completion drills, where the statements are already diagrammed for you and you put them together. So it's kind of a mini step between learning to diagram and actually diagramming on the exam. But one of the most important things is to figure out when should I diagram. These are commonly diagram questions, but diagramming takes time. You've got 35 minutes for the entire section. This is one of probably 25 questions. So Jelena, let me ask you, how do I know the stimulus is conditional? How do I know it's worth taking my time to diagram? And then what do I do?
Jelena:
How do you know it's worth taking your time to diagram? Well, that is you are again getting very philosophical. What even is worth. No on the LSTAT . . .yeah, in late stage capitalism, that is a question for the ages.
Branden:
NFTs are really worth something.
Jelena:
Yeah. You mean those Neo pads that don't do anything?
Branden:
Is that what an . . . An NFT is totally a Neo pad. Yes.
Jelena:
Yeah. They're Neo pads that you can't like feed or paint or do anything with you just own them. Yeah. Must Be True Questions, indeed. NFTs are valuable is not a much statement. That must be true. It is a statement that is very conditionally. And it's true depending upon speculative conditions. Diagramming, there's only really one type of diagrammable . . . Eh, maybe two types of diagrammable Must Be True Questions. One that comes up a lot and in fact is increasing. We talked about this on our 2021 LSAT trends episode, is the principle must be true. A diagrammable principle must be true is essentially a must be true question, where the stimulus is going to give you a rule or a principle, or you could even call it a law, if you want to remember how deeply connected to law school, all of the LSAT experiences. And you must choose among the answer choices, something that is a correct application of that principle or law.
Jelena:
So the law, it might be something like if someone is your immediate family member, then you are obliged to care for them in the event of illness. However, if they are only your family member by marriage, you are not obliged to care for them in the event of illness, which would be a terrible rule. Just because your blood relations doesn't mean that you're more obliged, but that could be the rule. And a correct answer choice might be Susan's brother, who is her blood relative is sick with the flu. So she is obliged to go over to his house and give him soup. And incorrect answer would be something like Susan's stepbrother, who is related to her only by marriage is sick with the flu. So she is obliged to go over to his house and give him soup. So that is a principle must be true.
Jelena:
Principle must be true are often diagrammable. However, whether or not to diagram them, anytime you have conditional like things like if they're your blood relative, et cetera, you can diagram. And if you are early in your study process and you are still learning to diagram, I say, take every opportunity to diagram during your untimed practice that you can. But if you are getting closer to actually taking your test, if you can remember like a one sentence principle without diagramming it and apply it to five answer choices without diagramming it . . . I usually do not diagram a be true principles anymore because they're usually one to two sentences with no transitive deduction in them. It's just a rule. So I rarely diagram those at this point. I just read them and apply them to the answer choices.
Jelena:
Where you do need to diagram is the must be truths that are really looking for you to make a transitive where sometimes a transitive and contrapositive deduction. And those are the ones where you've got two or more statements in the stimulus that are conditional. And of course, if you've been listening to the podcast, you know that something that's conditional is anything that can be rephrased as an if then statement such as, "All horses are fast." You can rephrase it as, "If you are a horse, then you are fast." Or, "If it is a horse, then it is a fast creature." Birds always have feathers, not true. I've see some featherless birds. There's some parrots that pluck all of their feathers out and they're very naked. But on the LSAT . . .
Branden:
Have you seen what a featherless owl looks like?
Jelena:
I have it's super freaky. It's super freaky. Ooh. Should we put a featherless owl in the show notes just to freak out our listeners?
Branden:
I think so. I thought they were cute animals and now I would not be in the same 1000 yard radius with one of them after seeing them naked.
Jelena:
Owls are a wild thing that evolution has rot. I feel like owls more than any other bird except maybe an ostrich are just like a really strong reminder that they used to be dinosaurs.
Branden:
Yes. Yes.
Jelena:
We'll put the naked owl in the show notes for listeners who are paying attention to this naked owl discussion. Go click and see. And when you're done screaming come back. But if birds always have feathers, if it's a bird, then it has feathers. Anything that can be rephrased as an if then statement is conditional. Unless it's an ostrich, this bird will be able to fly. Also, if it's not an ostrich, then this bird will be able to fly. If not ostrich, then what about penguins? Again, the LSAT not always rooted, in fact, only rooted in logic. And when you have at least two statements and it must be true stimulus that can be rephrased as if then statements, chances are what this quest is looking for you to do is just demonstrate that you know how to make a transitive, possibly a contrapositive. Very rarely a quantified deduction and choose the correct deduction from the answer choices.
Jelena:
So if there are two or more with shared terms, then you can assume that you are going to have some kind of deduction using them. And you can assume that you should probably diagram them. If there are two or more conditional statements that they don't have any shared terms. Check the prompt again, because that is probably actually a Must Be True Principle question that is giving you a two part principle in two sentences. You kind of have to have shared terms to be able to get a deduction from premises after diagramming them. So we're talking a lot about premises that are in the stimulus and we've not really, really talked about why it is so important that the must be true stimulus is pretty much just premises. It is almost always, almost invariably, just premises. Why is this category so different from all . . . almost everything else that we do on the LSAT is much more likely to be an argument than simply a set of facts. What are they doing with just giving us the facts?
Branden:
Yes. So there's one other question type that is basically always a set of facts or almost always a set of facts. And these are very different. They're very different than other questions, resolve and explain questions. The one that ask you to resolve a paradox, those often just have a set of facts. Those are weird, and I'm sure we will to them at some point in this podcast series, because that's a less prevalent question type. It'll probably be farther down the road, but Must Be True Questions I think are still actually testing you on argumentation. Whereas I don't think those results explain ones necessarily are, but they're doing what you indicated when you said that the stimulus is just full of premises.
Branden:
Well, the way that you can look at these is that the stimulus are all of the premises. And then the right answer choice is a conclusion that you could reasonably draw from those premises. So they are still testing you on argumentation, but they're breaking up premise and conclusion. And so you don't even know what the conclusion is until you find a conclusion that matches all of those premises. I think if you look at it like that, it can often make things much easier. So we're going to, I think get into it a little bit later, or maybe we should just talk about it right now. You can, if you have that understanding that this is an argument broken up into pieces, the premises are on top. I must find the correct conclusion. You can use what you know about argumentation, especially to rule out answers. So very often what you'll find is that if you were to put together the statements in the stimulus as premises, with an answer choice as its conclusion, you would end up with a flaw argument.
Branden:
So very often, like they'll have information in the stimulus about, I don't know, a percentage, and then they'll have an answer choice. That's talking to you about a number. Well, what they're trying to get you to do, that's going to be the wrong answer because they're trying to get you to commit the same kind of flaw that authors of arguments on the LSAT very often commit. So they often move from percent to amount. They often move . . . So for instance, in the stimulus, you'll have facts about the real world. And then an answer choice will be an answer choice about someone's mental state, but if they don't have any information in the stimulus about that person's mental state, you can't choose that answer because what you would be doing by choosing that answer is constructing an argument that suffers from the flaw of perception versus reality.
Branden:
People understand this with conditional stimuli, because you can see that you can't choose the conclusion. That would be incorrect reversal. You can't choose the answer that would be incorrect reversal. You can't choose the answer that would be incorrect negation. But you can use that even on non-diagrammable stimuli. So I think it's very difficult because you're not analyzing an argument. Instead, you're putting together an argument and trying to avoid the pitfalls that the speakers on the LSAT often create themselves. I did want to jump back because I have a little bit of that I want to offer our listeners on those Must Be True Principle questions, because there's a very common way that they get you on those questions, the right answer choice. And this is again, you can't do incorrect reversal. You can't do incorrect negation. Answer choices are very often getting it wrong, or getting the principle wrong. They're using it backwards or they're using it negated without reversing it.
Branden:
So for instance, they'll often give you something and you have to watch out for terms that introduce the necessary. So they'll give you a statement like this. They'll say something like, "An action is morally good only if it benefits another person." Well, when they say only if, the way that you would turn that into an if statement is not exactly how it looks. So the contrapositive of this is the way that the argument is going to work. Arguments on the LSAT and especially they do this a lot with these Must Be True Principle questions is that they get into these normative arguments of what is good and what is bad, what is morally just, and what is morally wrong. So in that statement, when I say an action is morally good only if it benefits another person.
Branden:
In order for me to line up that statement correctly in the way that it's going to be used. I would've to take the Contra positive, which looks something like this. If an action does not benefit another person, then it is not morally good. You can only conclude that are in the necessary condition of a conditional statement. So this is all a very long way of saying that conditional statement could only ever be used to conclude that something is not morally good. You could never use it to conclude that something is morally good because the only formulation where it has the term morally good without the slash is when morally good is in the sufficient condition. And so people very often get tripped up by that, but it actually provides you with a really quick way to get rid of answer choices.
Branden:
So you might have like two answers that conclude in a question like that, that something is morally good. If you can scan the answer and find those words morally good, you can just get rid of that answer because you can never use that print to conclude that something is morally good. You could only use it to conclude that something is not morally good. I know that's a little abstract for a podcast where we're not drawing these things out and diagramming them, but that I think can really differentiate between answers and speed you up on these things. Because these things take time. And as you were talking about you might already be putting time into diagram. So conditional versus nontraditional stimulus, I think we have definitely talked about. We often tell our students, Jelena, I'll ask you this. We often tell our students to look for weak answers. Why what's so great about weak answers. What's wrong with strong answers.
Jelena:
What is wrong with weak answers? Well, they're weak. They can't defend themselves. They get bullied. No. What is wrong with weak answers? What is wrong with strong answers? It's all about what can be supported. So if you have very strong premises, so, hmm, let's say, what are some strong premises? Let's say our premises are we've conducted a study that found a statistically significant correlation between eating grapefruit and living longer. In fact, our study was able to rule out all other dietary differences between grapefruit eaters and non-grapefruit eaters from affecting longevity. This is a very, very bad worded LSAT question that I'm using here, but . . .
Branden:
They usually type them out and then like read them back instead of just doing it on the air.
Jelena:
They do, yeah. They usually don't just make them up live on a podcast. No, I don't like that one. Let's go a different direction. What my mind is actually . . .
Branden:
This is real high wire act we've got going on here.
Jelena:
Yes. Well, you did not been the script that I would have to do this. So Brandon wrote this one everybody. I'm flying without net here.
Branden:
It's all my fault.
Jelena:
Let's see. What's on my mind right now is that I'm trying to buy a horse, but gas is really expensive. So I need to find a horse to buy locally because I can't afford to hire somebody to ship me a horse because gas is like $7 a gallon right now. So let's go with some strong statements about that. Let's say any horse worth purchasing will likely sell quickly. And any horse worth purchasing will sell for a high price. A local horse is advertised for a price and has not sold after being advertised for six months. Those are fairly strong statements. Now, those first two statements, however said likely, so fairly strong, not super, super strong. Any horse worth purchasing will likely sell quickly and will likely sell for a high price. That means like more likely than not 51% of the time.
Jelena:
So that is a stimulus where you are not going to want to choose an answer that is too strong. You don't have super weak premises, which are rare and Must Be True Questions. Because when you have super weak premises, there's almost nothing you can can include from them. But you also don't have super strong ones. So you would want to watch out for the traps that they usually throw at you with an overly strong conclusion are things like, "The horse that is for sale for a low price and has been advertised for six months without selling is almost certainly not worth buying." Almost certainly is too strong. That is as strong, if not stronger than the premises. That's a more than beyond, more than half. If it's, or is certainly not worth buying. Yeah, you definitely can't say that we only had a likely in the premises.
Jelena:
But what you could go for and what they're likely to give you on a must be true. There's another likely more than 51%. I can't actually support that. But what I frequently observe them giving you on Must Be True Questions is things like, "The local horse that is advertised at a low price and have hasn't sold in six months may not be worth buying." So when you've got something . . . a very kind of easy little hack for this, if you understand logical force, which is basically like some is weaker than most and most is weaker than all and none and all are the same, but for zero or a hundred percent, none at all are both strong. So everything is basically some most all or none. And if you understand which of those you have in the premises, then look for one step weaker in the answer choices or even two steps weaker. If you have all statements, if you have all statements in the premise space, then yeah, you can still . . . And all statement always substantiates to some statements.
Jelena:
So if we rewrote my stimulus to say . . . Now this would be diagramable and I'm not trying to do a diagramable one. But it becomes instantly diagram when I turn it into every statements because anything with any or every is diagramable. But if we said any horse worth buying we'll sell quickly and any horse worth buying will sell for a high price, then that answer choice that just articulated of this horse that has been for sale for a low price for over six months without selling may not be worth buying. That's still a valid answer choice because premises can support a conclusion of equal or lesser strength to themselves. Think of the premises as the foundation of the argument. You wouldn't build a 2,000 square foot foundation and then try to put a 8,000 square foot house on it.
Jelena:
Or you wouldn't, in Jenga, you wouldn't try to do like a four layer Jenga block at the bottom of the tower and then somehow widen it to six at the top of the tower. You can't have something supporting something bigger than itself. So however strong or weak your premises are, a valid conclusion can only be equal or weaker. Which is why for the most part in a must be true, that is not diagramable. The most important thing that you can do to find the correct answer choice is look for the weakest answer choices. Now when you get those weaker answer choices, however, some of them are not going to be correct. There may be two or three very weak answer choices. Or even on a difficult question there might be five answer choices that are weak enough to be considered weaker, equal to or weaker than the premises, but some of them are likely to be outside of the scope.
Jelena:
And this is a difficult concept. I am really reluctant when I talk to students to describe an answer choices outside of the scope. If I don't absolutely have to, because it becomes kind of a easy shorthand that gets used for things that aren't truly outside of the scope, it becomes too easy not to do the work of actually asking yourself, "Is this outside of the scope or is it just using different nouns to describe the same thing as the stimulus?" How do we navigate this out of scope? How do we tell if something is actually out of scope for the question and eliminate that?
Branden:
I actually treat it like . . . So I was talking a little bit before about treating the answer choice as a conclusion and determining whether or not you have a flawed argument by placing the answer choice, basically under stimulus as the conclusion to the premises that are in the stimulus. I treat it like equivocation and I'll ask my student, I'll say, "Okay, where do you think in the stimulus that this is supported?" And often they'll point to something that's like closely related, but it's a little bit of a different topic. And so when we talk about outside the scope, I think what we're saying is that this . . . Or usually what we're saying, as long as it's like an answer that's worth choosing is it's equivocating. It's close to a concept in the stimulus, but it's logically different.
Branden:
So the difficulty I think is what you have pointed out, which is like, well, "Yeah, I mean, sometimes they use synonyms." So when are they using a synonym and talking about the same thing? When are they talking about two different things, even though they seem very similar? I don't know that I can give a hard and fast rule to distinguish between those things. But then sometimes they're just answer choices that provide information that come out of left field. And so when I'm talking about outside the scope, I mean, I do think it's a way to describe an answer, but I also agree with you that it's a very easy shorthand and it's a very easy way to dismiss a student's concern. And so I've kind of tried to find out where in my student's thought process are they getting to this answer, what part of the stimulus do they like that they think refers to it. And then we can go from there.
Branden:
Another thing that you brought up when you were talking about logical force actually kind of reminded me of something. The way that we always write out arguments that everybody does this. And I think they've been doing it since Plato or Aristotle or Socrates. I think Socrates was the first one of those or whatever. But you put the conclusion on the bottom and you put the premises on the top. And to me, that kind of has a backward because the whole point of argumentation is, or at least what the outside is asking you is, are these premises really doing a very good job of supporting this conclusion? So the way I like to look at it is how heavy is the conclusion. And I always thought about, and I'll never do this because you call it conclusion, you don't start with it. But I always thought we should put the conclusion on the top and then ask ourselves, is this conclusion by its weight going to crush the premises that are just too weak to handle it.
Branden:
That's neither here nor there, but that is how I address that situation. We've talked about eliminating answer choices. I think what might be a good discussion to jump to would be identifying these questions. So we talked about it in our strengthened with sufficient prescription episode, a few episodes back. But must be true question and Must Be True Questions. And also there are related question types most strongly, so reported, both use similar language from strengthen with sufficient premise questions and strengthen questions, respectively. And here's what I mean by that. Must be true and strengthened with sufficient questions will very often use terms like follows logically, properly inferred, even though there are different question types, also most strongly supported questions and just regular strengthened questions use that word support. Both of them will talk about something providing strong support. But sometimes it's a most strongly supported question. And sometimes it's a strengthened question. So how do we distinguish between those different prompts?
Jelena:
Well, I'm going to go a little bit against the orthodoxy that I myself teach of, always read the prompt first and figure out the question type solely from the prompt. You should still read the prompt first, but if you're not sure from the prompt, which of the two it is, the really, really easy way. If you know how to different a conclusion from a premise when reading an argument is look at the stimulus. And does it have a conclusion? If it has a conclusion most often . . . Now there are a very, very few most strongly supported or Must Be True Questions that will have a conclusion in there. Really unlikely. Probably if it has a conclusion, it is not, it must be true or are most strongly supported because those are likely to be a set of facts.
Jelena:
Another tell to look for in the prompt that it might be a strength with sufficient premise or another strength in question rather than a most strongly supported is if there's an if or a concept of if, a hypothetical, anywhere in the prompt, because something if you're, if you are adding a sufficient premise, something has to happen before the argument is strongly supported or fully validated or properly inferred or whatever they're telling you it is. They're telling you that you have to add one of answer choices back into that argument as a premise in order for that to happen. So we're looking at something where you have to do something to it in order to make an argument complete, which is adding a premise. Whereas when you have a most strongly supported, you are finding a conclusion, you've got all the premises, but you've just got to choose between the answer choices. You don't have to take that answer choice and mentally insert it into the stimulus to complete the argument. You just have to choose the answer choice that could conclude that argument.
Jelena:
Another tell is like the properly inferred language that is almost always strengthened with sufficient premise. That is, would be properly inferred if which one of the following were true, a most strongly supported is not going to ask you if which one of the following were true. It's going to ask you, which one of following is most strongly supported if the fact above are true. So it's really kind of about what is true. Obviously, premises are always true and conclusions are either valid or invalid. They're valid if they're properly supported by premises. They're invalid if they're not properly supported by premises. So if we are not war worried about the validity or in validity of anything in the stimulus, then those have to be all premises. They're just facts. Wherever we're worried about validity or in validity is where the conclusion lives.
Jelena:
So if we're trying to make something in the stimulus valid or invalid, the stimulus has a conclusion. If we're asking which of the answer choices is valid or invalid, strongly supported or not strongly supported, then the answer choices are the conclusions because we never argue with premises. So wherever we're arguing, that is where the conclusion lies. So that is my, my long-winded explanation of figuring out if you're actually looking at a must be true question or not. We've talked about Must Be True Principle questions. What about . . . Let's I think wrap this episode up by talking briefly about the other kind of must be question. Very rare, they've they haven't occurred in the last several disclosed tests, but whenever you start saying something doesn't happen on the LSAT anymore, a little antenna goes up on somebody's head at LSAT headquarters and they put it in the next LSAT. So . . .
Branden:
Yes.
Jelena:
We can't say that these don't exist anymore. What do we know about must be false questions?
Branden:
Well, I think people want them to be the opposite because true is the opposite of false. But what I think people often miss is that two thirds of the words and each them are the same in other words must be. And when you focus on that similarity, you'll see that these question types are actually pretty similar in that the right answer choice is something that has to have support to the stimulus. But the way that it works is that instead of the right answer choice, having support in the stimulus for being true, there is support in the stimulus that ideas false, that may sound strange. But the reason that you should think about it that way is that if you were really just going with the opposite of must be true, the right answer would be something that could be false. And the right answer would be basically anything that was not discussed in the stimulus, because anything that is not discussed in the stimulus could be true, could be false. Whatever.
Branden:
When you think about something that must be false, what you're saying is that the right answer choice violates a statement or a deduction that you could make from the statements in the stimulus. And so you can actually use the same process looking for statements that you would want to diagram. The thing that you have to look for, which can be difficult is that you have to look for something that is, like I said, violating one of the statements in the stimulus. And if it's a conditional statement, it's important to understand what it means to violate a conditional statement. So if I say all dogs have tails, and I know our listeners are probably tired of that example. The negation of that statement is not, no dogs have tail. Although that would be something that would be violating of that. But if you were strictly speaking, negating that statement, all you would be saying is some dogs do not have tails.
Branden:
And so the right answer to a must be false question with a statement like all dogs have tails and the stimulus might look something like some dogs don't have tails or buddy is a dog and he doesn't have the tail. Any of those things would violate that statement in the stimulus. It is easier to violate strong statements than it is to violate weak statement. So when I say all dogs have tails, it's very easy for me to disprove that. All I have to do is to show one dog without a tail, and I've blown up that claim. But a weaker claim is much harder to violate. So if they have something in the stimulus that says some dogs have tails. Well, for me to disprove that, for me to disprove the idea that some dogs have tails, I would have to round up every dog, not just in the world, but every dog in the universe. If there is another planet that has dogs on it, I would have to find that planet, find all of the dogs and show that none of them have tails. That is a very, very difficult thing to do.
Branden:
So the process is very similar in that you're looking for strong statements. It's just, instead of looking for something that is derived from those statements, you're looking for something that is attacking those statements head on. But for the same reason answers that are out of the scope of the stimulus are also wrong for must be false questions. So I think it's important to recognize that 80% of what you are doing is the same. Really the analysis of the stimulus is the same. It's just that the criteria and for the answer choice is different. But if you look at it that way, then it makes them not difficult. Even if, as you point it out, the makers of the LSAT at are listening to this podcast and rubbing their hands together and cackling in an evil manner. Because now they're going to put a must be false question on the test.
Branden:
They're maybe going to put one on the test. They're not going to put any more than that. They were rare questions before they . . . I don't want to say took them off the test because they didn't. I'll just wrap up this discussion by saying there were many years when they were not doing any of those lost boys games. And I just told my students not to worry about them. And then they came back. And so I had to stop telling my students not to worry about them. So don't take my advice on that, but take our on everything else. And that is our prescription for Must Be True Questions. I know it may be a tough pill to swallow, but that's the LSAT.
Jelena:
Now, given that these questions come in a few different forms and each requires its own approach, we do suggest strongly that you get lots of practice with all of them.
Branden:
That definitely must be true.
Jelena:
Correct answer. Join us next week for more LSAT and admissions fun. And that's our show for today.
Branden:
Thanks for listening.
Jelena:
You can find all of our past episodes on Apple podcast, Spotify and wherever else you get your podcasts. You can also send us a question at podcast@testmaxprep.com or record a short voice message at 310-893-6303.
Branden:
You can also check out the show notes for links to further reading and resources from today's episode.
Jelena:
Until next week, stay hydrated, study hard and remember . . .
Branden & Jelena:
Plenty of heroes carry a briefcase!
