December 2009 LSAT Section 1 Question 20

Ethicist: Every moral action is the keeping of an agreement, and keeping an agreement is nothing more than an act of...

Nativeguy on August 17, 2020

Question about parallel reasoning

On the actual LSAT are we recommended to diagram the passage? Because it seems like it would take to long to diagram the stimulus and the answers

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shunhe on August 19, 2020

Hi @Nativeguy,

Thanks for the question! It’s pretty tough for the parallel reasoning questions, because as you note, actually diagramming all the answer choices out as well as the stimulus would actually take a really long time. What I would suggest is that you definitely diagram the stimulus (and it’s often nice to “make it abstract” by replacing all the variables from the stimulus with letters like A, B, and C). Then, using that, I would look over the answer choices and pick some out that you think are more likely to be right, and diagram those first. Then, if you find one that you know matches, you won’t have to worry about diagraming the other answer choices as much. Or look for easy ways to eliminate other answer choices as well. For example, if one answer choice suddenly talks about probabilities (like probably, or usually), but the stimulus never did, it’s probably not it.

Hope this helps! Feel free to ask any other questions that you might have.