December 2005 LSAT Section 1 Question 23

Statistical analysis is a common tool for explanation in the physical sciences. It can only be used, however, to expl...

Andrew on April 21 at 02:16AM

getting faster at the complicated parallel reasoning

This question is a great way to eat up 5+ minutes. I went through all the AC's per my strategy in Qs 14-26 which ate so much time. And then trying to decide between A and E took even more. I knew what I was looking for when I went in to the answer choices but A did not immediately jump out to me as wrong-- just not quite right. Thankfully I had E to validate my understanding of the stimulus. Any tips on a strategy to make these late parallel reasoning questions go more quickly/less painless.

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Emil on April 22 at 03:29PM

My only real tip here is to look for conclusions. Depending on the initial argument, if the conclusion is clear and ideally somewhat complex (e.g. Thus, since bob is old, bon cannot be on the team, or So, all cats are jerks) we can eliminate any conclusion that is different in kind. That is, in the cats example, we need the conclusion to be of the structure "if x then y" and we can safely eliminate anything that is a most x are Y, or anything that doesn't quite fit the mold of the original conclusion.

I've found that using the conclusion alone probably helps me to quickly knock out 2 answers on average, cutting the number of of arguments I would have to actually give serious though to from 5 to 3.

I would also not that whenever there's a part of an answer choice that comes wildly out of left field you can probably safely discard it as it has no parallel in the original argument.